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If I could just find our bedchamber, if I could just get back to the bed where I had fallen asleep safe and warm in his arms, then surely all of this would come apart like smoke. That I would open my eyes to find Atlas curled around me, and the darkness would be nothing more than a cruel thing I had dreamed.

I clung to it.

But then, what else did I have? I had nothing else to cling to.

I turned down a corridor I half remembered, toward the place our bedchamber had been, and there at the end of it stood a door I knew. The heavy, carved door of the room where I had slept curled into Atlas’s side, where I had felt safe, actually safe, for the first time in longer than I could remember. The sight of it broke something loose in my chest.

He would be there.

He had to be there.

Of course, he would be. I would wake, and it would all be over. I crossed the last of the distance at a run, seized the handle, and threw it open.

I tore it open, and suddenly, my hope shattered as I was now standing on the battlefield surrounded by the worst of my crimes against his people. Because yes, there may have been no other way to stop the war, but that sickening feeling always assaulted me when I asked myself…

What if there had been another way?

The smell hit me first. The wet copper reek of it, so thick I gagged. Then the cold, gray light, and the endless churned earth, and the dead.

Oh God, the dead.

They lay where they had fallen, in their hundreds, in their thousands, heaped and tangled and sprawled to every horizon. Every creature, every person I had ever run from in the long nightmare of crossing two worlds to get here was dead on the ground. Each one decaying forever in the muck.

The great twisted shapes of the corrupted. Lycans with their jaws frozen open. Centaurs broken at the joints. Spiked and scaled creatures, a mangled twist of limbs. A vast, coiling ruin of serpents that had been the Typhon, and among them, everywhere among them, ordinary soldiers with ordinary faces. Men, women… people who had marched out under a banner and would never go home. A wall of the dead. A whole world’s worth of dying, and every cold and staring face of it seemed, somehow, to be turned toward me.

And I knew them for what they were.

The ones from the battle. The taken, the corrupted, the stolen bodies burned clean out of the world by a dagger I had driven into the earth because I couldn’t find another way to save a single soul.

Again, I told myself there had been no other choice. But standing here now, in the reek and ruin of it, I could no longer remember why I had ever believed that. There had been so many of them. And there were so many more still. Somewhere on the far side of this hell, hollowed out and walking. Screaming silently inside their own stolen skins, and a great many of the dead I looked on now, I had put here myself.

You did this, the dark said gently.

You.

The lightning was in your hands. You chose this. Look at what your choosing cost his world.

I backed away. I couldn’t breathe. My heel caught, and I nearly went down among them, into that cold and grasping tangle of the dead. I bit down on a scream, hauled the door shut, and ran as fast as I could. I ran in blind panic, away from it all and deeper into the dying castle with the smell of it still clinging to the back of my throat.

I should have learned my lesson. I should have known better than to open another door. But there was one ahead of me, and footsteps somewhere behind me now. Steps soft and unhurried, as if certain enough they would find me. But a door, a door is the promise of somewhere else… anywhere else! So, I wrenched the next one wide and flung myself through it.

And the castle was gone.

I stood in a corridor of cracked linoleum and flickering fluorescent light, in the gutted shell of the old jail where Riley had led me when injured. Right back to the very beginning of what would be my new life. Back to when every day mattered, and the next was all about keeping yourself alive. It was about learning to fight to make it happen, and no longer just about running away to hide.

The base, and my home for so long, yet it seemed like an entire lifetime ago. But here I was, no longer lost inside the ruins of his castle. And with it came the ghosts of my past. Faces not just from the camp, but from all those endless, terrified months of running before I got there. They moved through the dim and ruined halls in silence, reliving something I couldn’t hear. Everyone who I had ever witnessed die seemed to be here, like some macabre reunion waiting for me to complete the roster. As if I were the very last name on the list.

I saw the shadows pour in through the broken windows behind them, saw the figures begin to run, to fall, to reach for one another and find nothing.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “Please. Stop showing me this!”

The footsteps behind me grew louder then, and my heart hammered in my chest for a new reason.

So I reverted to the only helpless recourse I had. My default switch clicking on as I once again ran.

There was another door at the end of the corridor, though compared to the previous ones, it seemed ordinary. The others only now just flashing back in my mind as more ornate. This one was a door that in the waking world had surely only ever led to a stairwell or a storeroom. Of course, I had no idea what I would find behind it, but with few choices left, I threw myself through it and slammed it against my back.

I turned around slowly, and the second I saw where I was, a whispered, haunting plea fled my lips. “No. Oh God, please no. Not again.”