Chapter 41
Iwould die out here.
Out in the middle of nowhere, trapped within a hellscape as beautiful as it was deadly.
I’d never hated a place more. I preferred the dying mortal realm to this miserable wasteland. At least there the danger was obvious. At least there the rot showed its teeth.
The Mirrorlands hid its cruelty beneath beauty so breathtaking it felt almost holy. Yet for all its wonder, there was nothing here but water, salt, and misery.
The sameness was the worst of it. Everywhere I looked, the world remained unchanged, stretching on in every direction in a featureless expanse that frayed my nerves more with each passing hour.
The biting cold had seeped so deeply into my bones that I could no longer remember what it felt like to be warm.
Everything was wet. My boots were wet. My clothes were wet.
My hair clung damply to my skin. And it never stopped raining.
Seeing the stars the night before must have been some rare act of mercy from the gods, because the clouds had returned with a vengeance, as though determined to make up for lost time.
The rain fell and fell and fell. Sometimes it descended as a fine mist that coated everything in moisture.
More often it came in heavy sheets that obscured the horizon entirely and pounded against us with cruel persistence.
The hunger that had gnawed at me earlier had long since given way to thirst. The waterskin was nearly empty now, only a few carefully rationed mouthfuls remaining.
I hadn't failed to notice that Rìan had stopped taking his share, passing me the skin whenever we paused and silently expecting me to drink both portions.
At first I'd objected, weakly insisting he needed it as much as I did, but he'd remained infuriatingly unmoved, nearly threatening to hold me down and force it between my lips if necessary. I hadn't argued again.
Now I accepted the skin whenever he thrust it into my hands, taking the smallest sips I could manage while fighting the temptation to tip my head back and drain every last drop.
The thirst was its own special kind of torment.
Perhaps it was the salt surrounding us on all sides, but the more I drank, the thirstier I became.
At times, I was so desperate that I tilted my face toward the sky and caught raindrops on my tongue, savoring each one despite knowing it would never be enough.
More often than not, Rìan did the same.
We no longer stopped to relieve ourselves. There was simply nothing left to spare.
Yet we stopped more frequently than ever because of the weather.
The rain came down so hard at times that we were forced to brace ourselves against it, standing motionless while water swirled around our ankles and the wind howled across the flats.
There was no point continuing when we couldn't see where we were going.
I suspected we'd already become turned around more than once.
Rìan never said as much, and I never asked.
But I noticed the signs. The tension that settled deeper into his jaw with each passing hour.
The frustration etched between his brows.
The moments when he would stop suddenly and sweep his gaze across the barren expanse surrounding us, searching for some landmark that didn't exist before lifting his eyes toward the clouds and attempting to judge the sun's position through the shifting murk above.
I couldn't bring myself to ask. Because if he confirmed my suspicions, I feared something inside me would finally break.
I would sink to my knees in the shallows and simply refuse to rise again.
I would surrender to the Mirrorlands and accept whatever fate it wished to grant me, curling up in the cold and the wet and allowing the eternal gray to swallow me whole.
Eventually I stopped searching the horizon altogether. Stopped trying to peer through the rain. Stopped hoping to see something different.
There was nothing to see. Nothing changed.
With every struggling step forward, the certainty ate away at me that no matter how far we walked, the Mirrorlands would look exactly the same tomorrow as they did today, and that there was no end to it.
We stopped to sleep on another rocky outcropping, and I didn't even have the strength to object when Rìan lay down beside me. The stars didn’t appear that night.
Shrouded in darkness and battered by rain, we made no attempt to continue onward.
Instead, we huddled together and waited for the bleak light of morning.
I took the final sip from the waterskin before we set out again on the third day. It did nothing more than wet my lips.
We marched on. On and on, stranded in this desert of water with nothing to drink.
When I finally collapsed to my knees, my body refusing to carry me any farther, I barely registered Rìan shrugging off his cloak. Then his shirt.
The soaked fabric peeled away from his skin before he gathered it in both hands and knelt before me.
"Open your mouth." The order was sharp enough to cut through the haze clouding my thoughts.
I obeyed. His hand closed around the back of my head, fingers tangling in the wet strands of my hair before he tilted my face upward and squeezed the fabric. Water streamed onto my tongue.
I made a broken sound that was almost a sob. The rainwater was tinged with salt and the metallic trace of old blood, but it might as well have been the finest wine ever poured. I drank greedily, clutching at the fabric as though afraid he might take it away.
When he could wring no more moisture from the cloth, I stripped off my own shirt with trembling fingers and twisted it between my hands. Water gushed into my mouth. Not enough—never enough. But it was something.
I thrust it toward him. He hesitated, making to pull away, but I grabbed his wrist. “If you die, I die,” I croaked.
His eyes locked with mine as we knelt together in the hell we'd become trapped within.
“If you die, I die,” he rasped. His wet, pruning fingers closed over mine, his hand every bit as cold as my own. He took my shirt and drank from a single measured press of the cloth.
Rain streamed down his temples and dripped from the tip of his nose as he handed it back to me and gave a small nod of thanks. Then he pulled his cloak over his bare shoulders once more and started walking. He made no move to take his shirt back.
I forced myself upright and followed.
As we trudged onward through the rain, I kept the sodden shirts clenched in my hands, sucking whatever moisture I could from them whenever thirst became unbearable.
I'd deal with the embarrassment later.
If there was a later.
I'd become so consumed by the miserable task of putting one foot in front of the other that I didn't even realize Rìan had stopped until he caught my arm.
He looked as exhausted as I felt. Rain streamed down his face, his features drawn tight with strain, the past three days etched into every part of him. Yet as he stared into the downpour, something shifted. A spark kindled inside him.
My gaze followed his, and I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of the two hooded figures standing ahead of us in the rain.
People. Out here.
My fingers closed around Rìan's forearm, my nails biting into his slick skin.
The person standing before me did the same.
I froze. The figure remained motionless, a hand wrapped around the arm of its companion in precisely the same way mine gripped Rìan's.
Slowly, blinking water from my eyes, I stared harder.
Something wasn't right. The rainfall itself seemed strange. Droplets slid downward between us in shimmering trails, gathering together and running in rivulets that clung to something invisible. Not air—a surface. A surface so impossibly clear that I hadn't seen it at all.
Understanding slammed into me.
The figures weren't standing before us.
We were standing before them.
A mirror.
My gaze lifted. And kept lifting.
A colossal wall rose above us, its polished surface reflecting the salt flats and storm-dark sky with such perfect clarity that it appeared to vanish entirely.
Beside me, Rìan released a long, shaking breath. When I turned to him his eyes were shining—not with magic. With relief.
"Illyra."