Page 159 of Forgotten

“You tied their fates to yours the moment you let them meddle in the affairs of the dead,”Death says smoothly.“The moment you let them stop what was meant to happen. The moment you let them revive what was meant to be lost.”

Shit.

“If you fail,”Death continues,“you will not merely cease to exist. You will become nothing. Not a soul, not a Reaper, not even a whisper. You will beunmade, Skye.”

Unmade.

Not death. Worse than death. The kind of punishment that doesn’t just end you—it erases you. From time, from memory, from existence itself. Like you never were. Like you never could be.

My breath shudders. My very soul shudders. I know what I have to say. What I have to do. There is no other option.

“How do I stop her?” I ask, somehow.

Death chuckles.

And oh. Oh, I do not like that chuckle.

“That, my child,”he purrs, “is what you will have to figure out.”

His presence swells, pressing in from all sides, vast and dark and endless. “You have already broken the rules.”His voice coils around me, a promise, a curse.“Now you will learn the cost of fixing them.”

Then—agony.

I feel it before I recognize it. The pull. The weight. The impossible, unbearable force of being ripped apart, of being shoved back into my body with the kind of violent cosmic whiplash that makes my soul scream.

The last thing I hear is Death’s whisper—soft, cruel, inescapable.

“The only thing I'll give you… is this.”

And then—

I am falling.

Falling—

Plunging—

Until I wake.

And this time, my body is real.

I'm a fucking human again.

To Be Continued…