2. Chapter 2
AMARIA
The world had no sound.
I knew that wasn't true—knew Serenya was saying something, her mouth moving in shapes that should have been words. Knew Maxx was pulling at my arm. Knew the distant rumble I felt through my knees meant something was still happening out there, beyond the grey.
But all I could hear was the absence.
The hum was gone. That constant, low-level vibration of the Veil—the song I'd heard in my blood since the day my Marks appeared—had been cut like a throat. I kept reaching for it, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Eryndor was heavy in my lap. His blood had soaked through my leathers, warm and then cooling, tacky against my thighs. The black veins had stopped their ascent. I didn't know if that was good or bad. I didn't know if he was breathing.
"—aria. Amaria!"
Serenya's hand cracked across my cheek.
The sound rushed back in like water breaking a dam.
Maxx cursing somewhere to my left. Serenya calling my name, her voice sharp with fear.
The groan of ash settling. And beneath it all, a subsonic tremor that vibrated up through the dead earth and into my bones.
"He's alive." Serenya's face swam into focus—terrified, but here. Her fingers found the pulse in Eryndor’s neck. "Barely. We need to move him."
"Move him where?" My voice came out scraped raw. "There's nothing—"
"Away from here." She cut me off, sharp in a way Serenya never was. "That tremor is getting stronger. Can you feel it?"
I could. Now that she'd named it, I couldn't stop feeling it. A rhythmic pulse beneath the ash, like the heartbeat of some vast, hungry thing, getting closer with every thump.
I looked around—really looked—for the first time since the color drained out. The basin where we'd fought was a crater now, the edges crumbling inward like a mouth slowly closing. The ancient pines that had ringed the site were ash sculptures, frozen mid-collapse. And the bodies—
I looked away.
"We need a litter." Maxx was already moving, his usual languid grace replaced by a jagged, desperate tension. He kicked through debris, searching. "A way to carry him. He's too heavy for—"
“Here.” Serenya ripped fabric from one of the fallen tents, two lengths of wood pried from what had been a supply cart. Her hands worked with calm, deliberate precision, practiced in dressing wounds and preparing the dead. She loaded the materials into Maxx’s arms.
I watched them work. My hands should have been helping. My hands were shaking too hard to hold anything.
Serenya noticed. Of course she did. She nudged her shoulder against mine—warm, solid, real—and said nothing. Just let me feel that she was still here. That I hadn't drained her too.
Yet.
The tremor came again, stronger. Closer. Ash resettled in low, concentric scars, each pulse rewriting the ground.
"Done." Maxx tested the litter's weight, then jerked his chin toward Eryndor. "Help me lift him, Flameheart."
Moving him was worse than holding him. His head lolled.
His arm slipped free and dragged through the ash, fingers trailing like he was trying to hold onto something that wasn't there anymore.
The makeshift bandage Serenya had fastened to his chest was already soaked through, black-red against the grey.
He didn't stir. Didn't flinch when the litter jerked. Didn't make a sound when ash settled into the open wound.
I kept waiting for his eyes to open. Kept waiting for that flicker of awareness, that impossible stubbornness that had dragged him back from the edge before.
Nothing.
Just the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Just the black veins crawling up his throat like ink through water. Just the weight of him—heavier somehow in stillness than he'd ever been in motion.
My fault.
The magic. The silence. The dark lines branching under his skin because I'd emptied the world and left him nothing to heal with.
And Brannick—no. I shoved him down. Locked the door. Brannick was a traitor. Brannick had made his choice. I didn't owe him grief.
The door didn't hold.
Little flame. His voice. The way he'd said it right at the end—not like a weapon, not like a lie, but the way he'd always said it.
Like the nickname still belonged to the version of us that existed before everything went wrong.
And my blade had gone through him anyway.
I'd felt the resistance of muscle and the moment it gave way and his eyes hadn't even been surprised.
Like he'd known I'd have to. Like he'd been waiting for me to.
Ash settled against my cheek as the litter handle bit into the blister rising on my palm. I shifted my grip, but the wood dragged against the raw skin.
My hands killed Brannick. My magic was killing Eryndor. Both of them bleeding out because of me—one on the altar, one on this litter—and the grief wouldn't stay in its separate rooms. It bled through the walls. Brannick's face on Eryndor's body. Eryndor's rattling breath in Brannick's silence.
We won, Eryndor had said. Like I hadn't already killed everything I touched.
"Amaria." Serenya’s voice was quiet, careful. "Stay here."
I realized I'd stopped walking. Realized my breath was coming too fast, my grip on the litter white-knuckled.
I swallowed. Nodded. Didn't trust my voice.
We kept moving.
I felt salt stinging at the small cuts on my face. I squeezed my eyes shut and swiped the tears away with a bloodied hand and probably made it worse.
"Which direction?" I asked.
Serenya pointed toward the northern ridge. "The ground's steadier that way. Easier to carry him."
I nodded and grabbed the front of the litter, Maxx taking the back, and we started walking.
The grey was absolute.
It coated the inside of my nose, tasted like old iron on my tongue. We had been walking for what felt like hours, and the Dead Zone hadn't offered a single variation in the landscape. Just ash, silence, and the guilt dragging behind me like a corpse I couldn't bury.
No one spoke.
That was wrong too. The Maxx I knew would have filled the silence with a joke, a complaint, anything at all to keep the mood from curdling.
But he walked with his jaw locked, his eyes fixed straight ahead, and something about the set of his mouth told me he'd already tried.
Tried to do that thing he did where illusions softened the horror.
And the air had given him nothing back.
The tremors came and went. Sometimes just a shiver in the ash. Sometimes strong enough to make us stumble, strong enough to send Serenya's hand flying to her mirrored token as if she could ward it off with memory alone.
Nothing worked. Nothing would work. I had broken the engine that made things work.
Then I saw it.
I stopped so suddenly that Maxx nearly walked the litter into my back.
"What—"
"Quiet."
It was pathetic, really. A tiny, twisted thing pushing up through a crack in the scorched earth. It wasn't green—nothing here was green anymore—but it was upright. The petals were the grey of old bone, the stem thin and blanched as sinew.
But it was trying.
I set down my end of the litter. My boots crunched in the silence as I stepped closer.
Behind me, Serenya drew a breath. I heard the hope in it—the desperate, dangerous hope that if something could live here, maybe the damage wasn't absolute. Maybe I hadn't killed everything. Maybe—
False hope.
The flower was shivering. I could practically feel its suffocation. It was fighting so hard for a life that didn't exist anymore. It was waiting for rain that wasn't coming.
It was waiting for me to fix the air I broke.
Kill it before it kills you.
"Amaria." Serenya's voice, measured. "Don't."
I didn't look at her.
"It's already dead," I said.
I lifted my boot and brought it down.
There was no sound, really. Just a soft shift of ash. When I pulled my foot back, the struggle was over. Flat. Gone. Merged back into the grey where it belonged.
The ash taste was thickening in my mouth and I couldn't tell if I was about to vomit or sob and both options were unacceptable.
The flower was still there—flat under my boot print, grey petals mashed into grey ash—and I didn't know why I'd done it.
I'd told myself mercy but my hands were shaking and mercy didn't make your hands shake.
Part of me had looked at that flower still fighting and wanted to kneel beside it and wait with it and I couldn't. I couldn't stop.
I couldn't be the girl who kneels. Not with Eryndor on a litter and three people who needed me to keep walking.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding and turned around.
They were all watching me. Serenya, her eyes filled with sorrow, Maxx with his smirk finally, completely gone.
And Eryndor.
His eyes were open again. Dark and glassy with fever, but seeing. He had watched me crush the only living thing we'd found in miles. He probably thought I did it out of spite. Probably thought the girl who'd drained the world was just finishing the job.
Good.
I let my face harden into something cold and sharp. Something that didn't shake. Something that didn't feel.
Let him think I'm the monster. Monsters don't need to be saved. Monsters don't deserve the way he's looking at me like I'm something worth dying for.
I picked up my end of the litter.
"Keep moving," I said. "There's nothing here worth saving."
The landscape repeated itself. Ash. Stone. Grey. Time lost its structure, dissolving into the rhythm of boots dragging through grit.
The horizon stayed fixed. Minutes stretched into hours, or hours collapsed into seconds; the slate sky offered no sun to mark the difference.
I felt a flare of terror rise in my throat, but it died for lack of oxygen. The understanding that the void swallowed time as well, echoed distantly in my thoughts, thoughts that were also dissolving into the void.
I readjusted my grip on the litter. The wood was slick with sweat.
The air was thin. It entered my lungs empty, and left my blood wanting. I took a step and the soot shifted, suctioning to my boots, dragging the leather down into the vacuum where earth used to be.
I forced my leg forward. The Void ate the effort before my muscles could use it. The movement cost too much. My lower back seized, the vertebrae grinding together without the cushion of the Veil to hold them up.
Maxx stumbled. The litter jerked. The handle tore the blister on my palm, and the skin slid off wet and raw.
We stopped.
Maxx dropped his handles. The wood hit the ground with a dead thud. He bent double, hands on his knees, his chest heaving in a rhythm that was too fast, too shallow. He dry-heaved—a violent, full-body convulsion that brought up nothing but a string of clear saliva.
I stared at his boots. The leather was cracking. The soles were wearing thin already. The gravity here pulled harder, like it was trying to drag us into the void.
I looked at Eryndor. The grey dust had settled in the hollows of his eyes. It coated his lashes. He looked like a statue eroding in a wind that didn't blow.
Serenya reached out. She wiped a layer of soot from his forehead. The skin beneath was grey.
I uncapped the waterskin. The liquid inside moved sluggishly, thick as oil. I tipped it back. It hit my tongue warm and flat. It coated my throat, sliding down heavy, slow, settling in my stomach like a swallowed stone.
I handed the skin to Maxx. He drank. He gagged, the water spilling down his chin, grey and stagnant.
Maxx wiped his mouth, bent down, and picked up his end of the litter. I picked up mine.
The drifting debris filled our footprints behind us like they'd never been there at all.