Chapter 2
There was nothing above us now but a churning darkness.
Ash drifted down in slow, swirling flakes, settling over our bodies like strange, silent snow.
It reminded me of my father, burned with the rest of the Infected outside Midland.
There had been ash in my mouth then too, when the Plague-Hunters strapped me to the wagon to deliver me to the Veil.
I’d wondered if some of those flakes had been him.
I wondered who was falling on me now. Whose remnants sifted down from the sky. Which faces I might have passed on the streets of Solmire, now nothing more than dust on my skin. I groaned, the vibration slicing across my charred vocal cords like a blade.
Aedric carried me with a desperate, stumbling determination, as if sheer will alone could hold my soul inside my ruined body. His arms were strong around me, but I could feel him trembling. He was breaking, crumbling from the inside out. I wished I could take his grief with me when I left.
He spoke to me.
I watched his mouth moving, felt the vibration of his voice in his chest, heard the rhythm of his words. But their meaning slipped away from me, scattered and shapeless. My mind couldn’t hold them anymore. My brain was shutting down. Piece by piece, I was disappearing.
My gaze clung to him, his face the last fragile tether that kept me from letting go and slipping away completely.
The fiery blue of his eyes, the hard line of his jaw, the sharp planes of his cheekbones—these were the images I would hold onto. When I crossed over, it was his face that would carry me to the afterlife.
I wasn’t sad about dying. I wasn’t thinking about living. Living wasn’t possible, and I knew that. The burns had reached too deep, the pain gnawing up my left side from thigh to temple. I could feel the char of my organs inside my body. They were half-cooked, and were failing.
My heart beat sluggishly, each pulse weaker than the last.
The magic in my core flickered, as frail as the vessel that held it. Still, it writhed beneath my skin, desperate to mend what could no longer be saved. It felt thin now, stretched to breaking—no longer the swell of power I’d once known.
It did nothing for the pain.
And I would have given anything to feel nothing.
Oblivion beckoned, soft and vast and merciful. A black horizon opening its arms. An end to the agony. An end to everything.
I wasn’t frightened. I was relieved.
Around us, the forest slipped past in a blur, the brittle trunks rising like jutting spines from the earth, their flaking bark streaked with crimson sap that looked like dried blood. Night was falling slowly, unevenly, the half-light dappled and strange.
I finally tore my eyes from Aedric and looked upward, taking in my last sunset.
The light was wrong. It reached us only in fractured remnants, the sky glowing with an eerie palette of rust-red and bruised purple where drifting particulates hung thick in the air.
Streaks of orange and gold fought their way through the haze, turning the cloud edges into molten ribbons.
Ahead of us, the horizon between the trees darkened toward indigo, yet a faint copper tint clung to everything, a stain the eruption had smeared across the world.
Aedric walked on through the thin forest, each step marked by his uneven breath.
At some point the wind shifted, carrying a sharp sulfuric sting threaded with a metallic tang. Gray flakes drifted thickly from the sky now, falling in slow, uneven spirals.
My eyes filled with tears. “Thistra,” I croaked.
His gaze darted down to me, ash settling across his broad shoulders, powdering his hair. He forced a weak smile that never reached his eyes. “Yes, El,” he whispered. “It looks just like Thistra, after I burned that tree down.”
Ash clung to him, collected in the hollows of the pale trunks, and blanketed the forest floor. Each step sent faint puffs of dust rising around his boots. He turned his head into his shoulder to cough, sparing me the worst of it, then continued forward.
“Remember how angry Hyperia was?” he asked.
“Kill… you…” I rasped.
A low, broken chuckle shook him. “Yes,” he murmured.
“I thought she’d kill me too.” His mouth tightened as he glanced down at me again.
His eyes swept over my injuries, lingering on the side of my face burned beyond recognition.
A choked sound escaped him before he straightened, shoulders locking into a desperate resolve.
“I snuck into your room afterward. You were barely dressed, furious… the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.” He swallowed hard.
“I was filthy from the fire… You told me to find a hose. No one had ever spoken to me like that.” His voice broke, but he pushed through it.
“I think that was the moment I realized that bond or no bond… I was going to love you.”
I love you I love you I love you.
I opened my cracked lips to speak, but instead a horrible wet gurgle rose from my throat, drowning out the words.
“Shh,” he whispered, trying to soften the panic in his voice. “Hold on, El. We’re almost there.”
But I could see the lie in his eyes, the wild, desperate gleam that betrayed him. I could feel it in the way he pushed forward, driving his exhausted body beyond its limits.
I didn’t know how long we’d been walking. Minutes? Hours? Time no longer held shape. I existed somewhere in between.
“You’re so strong, El. So strong,” he murmured.
It was in the next breath that my body betrayed me.
A strange pressure bloomed behind my eyes, like something inside my skull had clenched its fists. My mind clouded. A low humming filled my ears, growing louder, vibrating through my bones. My vision wavered, blurring at the edges as if the world were being pulled away from me.
It hit me in a single violent jolt.
My muscles locked tight, every limb stiffening at once. My spine arched against Aedric’s arms, and a strangled sound—half-gasp, half-cry—forced its way out of me.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t blink.
I couldn’t move.
I was trapped inside myself.
Bursts of light exploded like stars behind my eyelids. My fingers curled in on themselves, cramped and rigid. My legs jerked in uncontrolled spasms that sent bolts of agony through my burned flesh.
My thoughts scattered.
Words dissolved.
My body convulsed violently in Aedric’s arms as he fought to keep his grip on me.
I could hear him shouting but the sounds were muffled, distant, as if submerged underwater.
My muscles jerked again, hard enough my teeth clacked together. I tasted blood. A wave of heat pulsed up my spine, clashing with the cold creeping numbness in my fingers. I tried to reach for him, to anchor myself, but my hands no longer belonged to me.
Nothing belonged to me anymore.
Not my breath.
Not my voice.
Not my body.
Somewhere far away, Aedric cried out my name.
El!
El!
Look at me!
I did.
My eyes were the only part of me left that could respond.
He lay me down on the ground, cupped the back of my head, ash swirling around us like smoke.
Eidra.
His lips didn’t move, yet the word filled my head, startlingly clear and steady, echoing through the ringing in my ears.
Where are you?
I couldn’t understand the question. I couldn’t answer it.
I’m coming.
I was locked inside a body thrashing on its own, a puppet of failing nerves and burned flesh. The world around me dimmed into shadows and muted shapes. My vision tunneled—shrinking, narrowing, collapsing inward—
—and then everything went still.
My limbs fell slack.
The humming faded.
But beneath that sudden silence was something else—a lingering echo, a ripple of cold along the inside of my skull. It brushed the edges of my thoughts like a shadow moving just out of sight. Foreign, yet achingly familiar.
And then it vanished.
I gasped, the breath tearing into my lungs as the world swam back in blurry, broken patches. Wetness slid into my hairline.
Tears. Aedric’s, and my own. He bent over me, terror in his eyes, as he pushed sweaty strands back from my forehead.
The searing pain was still there, but blunted now, no longer all-encompassing.
My body felt hollow, drained, wrung dry.
Every muscle trembled, not seizing anymore but shivering from the aftershock.
My magic lay quiet, barely a whisper in the dark.
I was exhausted to the marrow.
I moaned and tried to lift my head, but Aedric pressed a gentle, steady hand to my shoulder. “Please. Stay still.”
His gaze darted wildly around the forest, as if he expected help to appear from between the trees.
You’re dying.
The words ricocheted through my mind like a stone thrown into a deep cavern.
“I know,” I croaked.
Aedric’s head snapped toward me, a frown cutting across his face. “Know what?”
Hadn’t he just spoken? The thoughts wavered, muddled.
“Dying...”
“Don’t say that.” He said sharply. “I forbid you to say that.”
He looked up toward the sky, now almost fully veiled in gloom. The clouds above had thickened, smothering the coming night.
Shivers tore through me, despite the residual heat still devouring my body.
I wheezed, each breath smaller than the last, sounding like air squeezed from a failing bellows.
And yet I felt calm now—strangely, impossibly calm.
Minutes. That was all I had. I knew it. And Aedric, though he fought it, had begun to know it too.
There was so much I wanted to say. That was my only regret.
All the words I’d tried to speak earlier–words that mattered—were trapped now, heavy and useless in my throat.
He would never hear them. I just hoped that somehow, deep down, he already knew.
Knew what he meant to me. Knew that my heart had kept beating for him long after my body had given up.
Knew that I had held on through this agony for his sake.