He couldn’t get it off. Couldn’t get it off.
His scream caught in his throat as the vines burrowed into his neck, like a striking snake, then slithered through his body, stole his air, and claimed all the space in his chest. The thorns tore through tissue and skin and clamped onto his bones with permanence, jagged and rough. Blinding agony tore through him.
This was what it felt like to die.
Pain overtook him as he fell to the floor. His consciousness wavered, his strangled heart slowed, and—
Stopped. A haze fell over his eyes, like looking through tinted glass. His world, once full of light, became drenched in shadows, trapping him in a groggy stupor. Reality slipped through his fingers and control leached from his body.
His father crouched at his side. “Now we can begin.”
???
This had to be a frigid, lucid nightmare.
He sat in a red pool on the floor, trousers and shirt saturated. Blood soaked her hair, too, the once silver strands now a thick, sticky red. He tried to hold her cold, still body without the thorns cutting her, but they writhed uncontrollably inside him. White speckled his vision, but he blinked away the pain.
“Emmery,” he said, his voice alien. Far away. He shook her, but her limp arm only fell to her side. His chest tightened like a clenched fist. “Em, look at me, angel. Come on. Open your eyes.”When she didn’t move, his shaky hand lifted to brush her hair back from her face. “Please, open your eyes for me.”
Outside the castle, another structure fell with a crashing boom. He glanced out the window to watch it crumble. Her firebird had torched Ellynne to ash, and though her phoenix was gone, now so was she. He traced her bruised cheekbone with his thumb and smeared a mottled mix of both their blood across her face.
He clutched her to his chest and pretended she hadn’t been taken from this world. He’d thought the thorns were agony. He’d been so unfathomably wrong. This was the deepest pain. Between the stab wound in her chest, and the slash across her belly, oh gods, he didn’t pray but—
A sob ripped from his throat. “Don’t d-do this. Don’t … ah, don’t do this to me,” he whispered into her hair. He couldn’t decipher reality from the haze, and yet he knew his world ended with hers.
Futilely, he cried his agony into her neck. This was all his fault. His father had kept his word and broken thevotai, but he’d warped the pactum, and stolen Emmery, too.
Everything inside him shattered until nothing remained to hurt.
He begged. Begged the universe, the gods, anyone who would listen, and he pleaded for help. He couldn’t lose her. He wouldn’t lose her after all of this.
A voice answered. It called to him, led him from Castle Dusk, away from Ellynne. With Emmery’s cold, limp body still in his arms, the black water of the Whispering Spring opened for him, and he descended.
A shadow lingered behind that wall of ice, stagnant, trapped, and yet it had called to him. He laid his hand on the ice and it spoke in a voice unlike Brennen or Izora’s. This voice swam in his blood.
He’d bargained and bartered and sold his soul before, why not give what little remained?
The vision blurred as the deal sealed in a haze of terms, conditions, and sacrifices. Emmery turned to ash in his arms, reborn across the gate, and bore her wounds so her body would remember though her mind wouldn’t.
Since everyone thought she’d died in the fire, he would keep their story in his heart, and hold their love within him. Keep it safe.
It would be his best kept secret.
???
The day Zyphira discovered Emmery was alive, she called in her bargain, so he couldn’t refuse, and ordered her retrieval. Without his magic, he couldn’t cross the gate, so he made a pactum with Fionn to retrieve her. He never told him why, never divulged their past, and though he knew it would bring him trouble, he made the terms clear it was up to Fionn’s judgement if she remained safer across the gate.
If things had to play out like this, he decided to take as much control as he could. So he wrote her a book of his unwavering love and their painful loss, in the hopes that this story would bring her comfort. Even if he couldn’t be with her, he sent a piece of himself and engraved the book and her wedding ring with his promise:Until my last breath, I will wait.
It was a version of a silly idiom they once said to each other. As he sat and waited for Fionn’s return, some fragile, foolish part of him hoped that somewhere, deep down, she would remember it, too.
But when Fionn returned without her, the agony of her loss struck him all over again. He told him how she would wake screaming, and of the painful death of her sister and mother. What Nathaniel had done to her. How they were huntingKennaacross the gate. And of course, Emmery had slipped away before Fionn could bring her back.
He had to do something, to help her, but that day the gate sealed.
Forever.
???