Chapter 7
The moment Sydney’s Converse shoes hit the ground, everything felt fundamentally wrong. She didn’t look back to see if Carrick was following. She couldn’t. Her senses were instantly overwhelmed by the sheer, oppressive weight of The Abyss.
There was no sky. It wasn’t exactly darkness.
It was more of a suffocating absence of anything above them.
The air was so thick and stagnant it felt like breathing through wet cloth.
Beneath her feet, the dead black stone bled a freezing, numbing cold right through the sole of her sneakers.
A heavy gray mist clung to her skin, carrying the distant, roaring echo of primordial water and the unsettling vibration of something unimaginably massive moving far below.
A second later, the air fractured, and Carrick barreled through the threshold behind her. His pure White Dragon Magic flared, ready to strike.
“Sydney Kavanaugh,” he roared, his bloodshot eyes flashing with absolute fury as he grabbed her arm. “If we survive this, I am going to…”
“Ground me?” Sydney interrupted softly, not taking her eyes off the expanse ahead.
The brief, familiar bickering cracked the terrifying tension for a split second before a harsh tearing sound made them both spin around. The door was already trying to slam shut.
The vertical tear in reality was rapidly shrinking, the jagged edges snapping together like teeth. Then, just before it sealed completely, a brilliant ribbon of bright purple light flared through the narrowing gap.
Ginnie’s anchor held. The thread was painfully thin, but it locked the threshold open.
Carrick let out a rough breath. “There’s our way home.”
Sydney turned back toward the dead expanse, her heart shattering as a wave of agonizing familiarity crashed over her. “Then we’d better make sure we still have something to bring home.”
Garrett was there. It wasn't a vague pulse anymore. He was close. He was suffering, and every instinct she had screamed at her to run to him.
Sydney didn't know the layout of this nightmare landscape. She didn’t need to.
Thump-thump
The Mating Bond pulsed against her ribs, acting like a spiritual sonar in the dead silence. She walked blindly forward, completely locked onto the frequency of her Mate.
Thump-thump
Turn left.
Thump-thump
Step down into a shallow ravine.
Thump-thump
Navigate through a narrow, jagged passage where the stone walls threatened to scrape her shoulders.
As they moved deeper, the oppressive environment began to shift.
The dead black stone beneath Sydney’s shoes didn't just sit there anymore…
it reacted. With every step she took, thin, fracture-like veins of brilliant white and gold light spiderwebbed through the rock under her soles, pulsing in tandem with her stride.
Carrick’s heavy boots ground to a halt behind her. "Syd."
"I see it," she whispered, her chest tightening.
“It’s recognizing us, my girl,” Kara warned, her mental voice laced with a cold, sharp dread.
The realization hit Sydney like a physical blow. She was the key, and the primeval Magic of his prison was waking up simply because she had arrived. The trap was springing itself.
"We need to move. Faster," Sydney urged.
They broke into a jog, winding through the glowing stone labyrinth until the stagnant air suddenly changed. The heavy mist vanished, replaced by an overwhelming, metallic stench that made Sydney's stomach abruptly cramp.
Acrid burning blood. Corrosive silver. The suffocating choked scent of Chimera ash and scorched Dragon scales.
Sydney stopped dead in her tracks, the breath completely abandoning her lungs as the horrific reality of the scent registered in her mind.
"Garrett," she choked out.
Sydney rounded the final jagged column of black stone and stopped.
Her brain simply refused to process the image. For a long, disjointed second, her mind fragmented the scene, processing it in jagged pieces because looking at the whole truth was too much to bear.
First, her eyes locked onto the floor. It wasn’t black rock anymore. It had been painted in dark, sticky pools of crimson that had soaked into the stone. Next, her gaze traced upward to the thick, spiked iron links hanging from the cavern ceiling.
Then her eyes found… him.
The man she had spent agonizing weeks searching for. The man whose soul had reached across Realms to call out to hers. The fierce, unbreakable Dragon Guardsman she was meant to awaken.
Leviathan had completely systematically broken his body. He had brutalized Garrett in ways she hadn’t known were possible.
Garrett hung from the chains, his wrists raw, shredded, and black with necrotic bruising where the heavy iron laced with silver bit into his flesh.
His left shoulder was horribly dislocated, jutting out at a sickening, unnatural angle with a hole large enough to put both her fists through right in the center.
Deep, jagged lacerations scored his chest, oozing a mixture of dark blood and silver residue that hissed against his skin.
Every breath he took was a rattling, wet wheeze, his ribs lifting in a shallow, agonizing rhythm that told her even a single inhalation was a battle against his own collapsing lungs.
Sydney stopped breathing. She couldn’t move.
“Sydney,” Carrick called out behind her, his voice sounding as though it were underwater, miles away.
She didn’t hear him, just knew he was talking.
Inside her head, Kara went frighteningly, utterly silent, the boisterous Dragon Queen retreating into the furthest shadows of their shared psyche.
The rage didn't come. There was no fiery explosion of Magic, no desperate scream. There was only a vast, hollow, suffocating grief that threatened to swallow Sydney whole.
“This can’t be him,” she shakily whispered into the stagnant air, her voice cracking like dry glass. “This can't be Garrett.”
Even as her mind denied it, her soul ripped itself wide open, screaming a single, primal word that shook her very bones, “MINE.”
Then, the chain rattled. A horrific, grating sound of metal against stone.
Garrett moved. It was an agonizingly slow, excruciatingly painful tilt of his head. He dragged his chin up off his chest, and his eyes– once a brilliant, striking silver, now bloodshot, clouded with agony, and completely unfocused– blinked through the heavy mist.
He searched the darkness. And then… his gaze found hers.
The entire universe ground to a halt. No villainous laughter, no sudden attacks, no cosmic prophecies. Only a broken man and a shattered woman looking at one another across a blood-soaked cavern floor.
“Garrett,” Sydney whispered.
At the sound of her voice, she felt his soul violently react. Garrett's pure White Dragon Magic flared, giving one single, desperate, weak pulse. The Mating Bond, starved and suppressed for so long, slammed violently through both of them like an electric current.
From deep within Garrett's fractured consciousness, Syd heard King Aodhan give a fierce, echoing roar. Kara answered instantly, her presence flaring bright. King recognized Queen. The ancient souls knew exactly who stood before them.
Sadly, Garrett didn’t.
His heavy brow furrowed. His unfocused lavender eyes drifted over her face.
Her skin warmed everywhere he visually touched.
As he studied the curve of her jaw, she felt a brush of the back of his hand.
When he looked at the blond hair falling over her shoulders, it was as if his fingers were softly winding the curls around his fingers.
But there was no recognition. He looked at her as if she were a beautiful ghost he couldn't quite place.
The realization hit Sydney before he even parted his cracked, bleeding lips. Her stomach dropped into a bottomless pit. “He doesn't remember me.”
The physical torture Leviathan had inflicted was monstrous, but this? It hurt worse than any blade or dark spell she had ever encountered. It was a clean, agonizing slice right through her heart.
Garrett’s jaw worked, his throat swallowing hard before he finally managed to rasp out a single syllable. “Sydney.”
Her breath caught in her throat. He didn't remember her face. He didn't remember their Bond, but he knew her name. The Magic of his soul had saved that much.
Wiping a tear from her cheek, she took a frantic step forward. “Garrett, I’m here. We’re going to…”
“No!” Garrett suddenly gasped, his voice cracking with a raw, unexpected panic that made the chains rattle violently.
Sydney froze mid-stride, her hands hovering in the air. “Garrett…?”
“You have to go,” he wheezed, his lavender eyes wide with terrifying clarity as he tried to pull against the chains, ignoring the way his dislocated shoulder groaned. “Get out of here. You have to leave. Now.”
Sydney stood completely still as the weight of his words wrecked her, shattering whatever pieces of her heart were left.
Her man was broken. He was chained, bleeding, and entirely tortured. He couldn't even remember who she was to him. Yet, faced with her presence in this nightmare realm, his very first instinct wasn't to beg for rescue or ask for help.
His very first instinct was to protect her from the trap.
Ignoring his panic, Sydney took another determined step across the blood-stained rock.
“I told you to run,” Garrett wheezed, his lavender eyes flashing with a desperate, fractured authority.
Stopping dead in her tracks, Syd’s mouth dropped open as a memory from weeks ago slammed into her mind. “That was you?” The phantom command that had echoed in her head during her darkest hour… The one she hadn't been sure had come from a broken bond or a dying mind… had been his.
Garrett blinked, looking thoroughly confused by her reaction. He swallowed hard, his raspy voice dropping an octave. “You didn't listen.”
“You're gonna learn something about me real fast, Dragon Man,” Sydney said, a watery, fiercely protective smile breaking through her tears. “I'm a terrible listener.”
Deep within his chest, Aodhan let out a low, appreciative rumble.