Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Adelasia
Thick and unnatural silence, like the world is holding its breath, is all I notice when I sit up.
My eyes flutter open to a sky no longer red with blood, weeping with the tears of stars, or crackling with violence.
It’s still. Too still.
I’m on the little island in the center of the Well, where Eternity’s statue sits broken in a heap of black tendrils and ash. Charred earth still smokes under me, and my chest aches as if I’m breathing in broken glass.
My limbs tremble, my head throbs, but the only thing I truly care about is the absence.
Rowan is not beside me. Kaius is not holding onto me. The Priestesses have left no trace that I fear I might have hallucinated them entirety.
Everyone is gone.
I stand, my clothes ripped apart and my feet bare. My feet stumble over stone and ash. The wind stirs, disturbing the trees across the lake, but there is no sound.
“Kaius?” Nothing. “Rowan?” Nothing.
The Well buzzed faintly as if taking shallow breaths itself. It pulses once, and my body shivers in response, pain shooting down my spine.
A glimmer of something catches my eye in the heap of Eternity’s statue–one of Rowan’s iridescent feathers. The only thing left after they ripped his wings from his body.
I pick it up, hands shaking, and hold it to my chest. Tears burn in my eyes as I stumble to the liquid of the Well and look down. I have no reflection, only a strange, endless golden light where I should be, like a wound in the water itself.
And then I hear Eternity’s dark, twisted laugh in my head.
At last, you are mine.
“No!” I wail as I hit my knees, the magic within my stirring in answer to her. It knows I’m alone. It knows Eternity has won.
“Kaius,” I whisper again, more broken now. “Rowan.”
Still nothing.
Only the low hum of the Well. Only that feather in my hand.
Only the terrible, unbearable silence, because I’ve lost everything all over again.