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Endellion beckoned him into a clearing at its center, a circular formation of small boulders ringing the space.

The second he stepped within, his stomach rebelled. He doubled over, vomiting what looked like Solyrian’s blessed power, every heave seeming to come from his very marrow. His soul.

Endellion sighed. “It is, in a way.”

A blink, and Brand was on his back in the sand. Chanting started on the surface of reality, the wretched sound lashing down like blades, every nick and slice and stab imbued with poison. His lesser half bowed as he fought against his own encroaching darkness, taking the Greater with him.

“They are one and the same, I’m afraid,” Endellion said. “Night comes for the dusk and daybreak, their light both feast and ruin.”

“What is this?” Brand was breaking. Burning. His flesh, his bones—all of it was on fire. “What’s happening to me?”

“Things are happening, stone, outside of our control. The dawn dwindles. You feel your crown slipping.”

“That means nothing to me!” he bellowed, fighting against a building, gnawing pressure.

“It will, eventually. Hopefully.” A shadow fell over the cavern entrance and Endellion sneered, her ivory mane rising with power. “You’re out of time. You must choose, or die.”

With a wave of her hand, memories of Luna shimmered forth, the scenes flashing by too quickly for Brand to latch onto any individual one.

“Choose what?” Brand grunted through clenched teeth.

He could barely breathe through the agony, let alone understand what she was asking.

“A sigh, a thread, a sound, a drop, a strand—whatever will anchor you amidst your utter desolation. Whatever you can build upon.”

And then he saw it, clear as anything.

A gossamer strand of hair fluttering in the breeze.

The shell of her ear.

Silvered waves on a blackened sea.

The darkness battered against the cavern opening, shrill in its looming triumph, the two of them an island of stillness within the heinous cacophony.

All the while, Brand stayed locked on that hovering image as it looped. On its innocence. Its gentleness.

“Yes! Now…”

Endellion’s wings flapped and kicked up a cloud of crimson dust. As her hands wove patterns in the air, she cried out in words he didn’t understand. There was something ancient in the cadence, the movements, the sharp focus in her violet stare, the⁠—

Inner and outer merged, the Lesser and the Greater as one for the space of a single, choking gasp. His realities warred, the same, but not, flashing back and forth. Stinging bile rose at the sight of twin orbs laughing back from the face of his captor, the color exactly like the Oracle’s.

When Brand fell back into the prison of his mind, blessedly detached again from the pain of his lesser half, Endellion was kneeling over him with an arm of the chasm’s shadows clutched in her fist.

She presented the thrashing darkness like it was a gift. “I need you to be a good Demon and just do this one, little thing.”

Just after Lunara razed the Thodelemaia Dread Chasm…

Magnus thought he’d already seen the worst life had to offer.

Finding his people slaughtered at Glynmor. The absolute decimation of the Horned City. Battling dreadbeasts not once, but twice in the span of a couple months after going his entire existence thinking they were a myth.

After all that, he’d have sworn there was nothing else that could shock or shake him.

He was wrong.

“You get us there now, Araxis, or Lunara dies,” Amun growled, smoke curling from his nostrils as he fought his overwhelming power.