Page 4

“Sweet child.” Its chuckle hurt and soothed at once. “I know you as I know myself, for from mine own center were you made. Fate has loosed its indelible cry upon us, and thus here you stand, time and body no match for that which must be.”

“I d-don’t understand.”

“You needn’t. I have understanding enough for the both of us.”

Eira was loath to admit it, but there was an odd sort of comfort in that. She was sick unto death of trying to make sense of things for herself.

She ignored the swirl of nausea, the dizziness, and turned her back on the inner voice that was still hers, almost imperceptible as it wept in the background. “What must I do?”

“Kneel, little one, and dip your hand into eternity.”

Eira did as she was told, her bony knees hitting the desolate ground. Her hand shook, unsure in its movement, especially when a tiny pair of glowing eyes blinked back at her.

Then another, and another, until hundreds—thousands—of ember stares were locked with hers.

“Come. Touch. They mean no harm and will be yours when all is said and done.”

Hers. Something to call her own when everything else had been taken—a thought too tempting to deny.

Breaths shallow, Eira seized the darkness.

✧ ✧ ✧

Hours must have passed by the time she came to. Blinking up at Solyrian’s diluted orb, Eira knew without looking that she was changed.

Still, she had to be sure.

Tears were already spilling down her cheeks as she sat up, trying to reconcile what she was seeing. Feeling. Touching.

No longer was her skin an earthy olive, but the white of sun-bleached bone. Her hair was longer, sleeker, and so black it devoured any light that hit it. Claws where manicured nails had been. A pair of fangs instead of regular teeth. And her beloved horns, the ones so like her mother’s…

Gone, as if they’d never been.

The long, tortured scream that left her was someone else’s—a husking alto that sat ill on the tongue of a child. It was probably a good thing that an answering cacophony shattered the air, silencing the grotesque sound of her new voice.

Screeching. Cawing. Clamoring. The voices in her head.

The sea of crows around her heaved, tendrils of shadow leaking from their oily plumage. Some butted up against her and dissolved into her skin, while others took to the sky, rolling and pitching through the air before landing again. They morphed into other crawling creatures, melted into a seething mass, surged up on feathered wings again.

Over and over, same as before, it was only the one word they spoke to her…

Just before the closing of the Ghostbor Dread Chasm…

“Hello, Brandir.”

Brand the Greater sank a little deeper into himself as his skull split in two, trying to ignore the sounds of his lesser half screaming on the surface. He didn’t even care that his name was being called by an intruder. Hearing it was a welcome distraction.

Across the landscape of his mind, above sienna sand and marbled, jutting boulders, a beacon shone in the sky. As it fell, the waves quieted. The breeze stilled. Even the fiery sunset dimmed in comparison.

Brand squinted against it, his eyes watering as he searched the center of the mass for whoever had spoken.

The creature he found there wrenched the breath from his lungs. She was as the starlight, all snowy hair and ivory, feathered wings. When she smiled, it consumed him. His knees went weak. Tears threatened to fall.

Weeping Sisters, she was so damned warm.

“What, no greeting for your savior?”

A giggle bounced after her words as she landed, a pair of fangs flashing. Brand nearly buckled at the sight of them, so like the ones he longed to see glinting on the far side of a perfect smile, and yet all wrong because they weren’t hers.