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Turning forward again, he continued toward the street while ash began to filter down around him, falling from the crevice in the sky.
Isobel latched on to his words, trying to visualize the wound in the clouds closing, but the crater only grew. With Varen’s every step, the ash poured thicker.
She started forward, about to go after him, but was halted by the deafening smash of glass at her back.
Shards flew, bursting from the strip mall.
Screams rang out, and Isobel swung away, her own shriek mixing with the noise of sudden chaos while glinting slivers rained over her, tinkling as they showered the cars and the pavement.
A cacophony of alarms blared.
Lowering her arms, Isobel looked around her. Panic-stricken people darted this way and that, flying past her as they streamed out of the strip mall.
Ahead, farther than his slow steps should have carried him, Varen stood among a group of stalled vehicles in the middle of the street. The wind raged through his hair. It pulled at the hem of his long coat, causing the fabric to flutter and snap.
From the chasm came a torrent of crows. Screeching and flapping, they shot into the storm-torn sky.
The pavement crackled and shifted beneath Isobel. She skittered back, but the fissures spread quickly past her, fanning out in all directions.
The ground shook. The fractured glass rattled and slipped into the widening rifts.
The quake sent Isobel to her knees. She caught herself with her hands, bits of glass biting her palms.
Above, the crows squawked louder, their unending buzz like a swarm of locusts.
Isobel did her best to tune out their cries, the people screaming and running, the rumbling of the earth, and the ash that had begun to catch on her clothing and cling to her hair.
Focus, she told herself as she tried to conceive of some way to halt the rupturing of her surroundings, but she couldn’t concentrate. Not while the trees dotting the patches of strip mall landscaping began to twist and shrivel. Not while more trees burst through the fractured blacktop, jutting upward like spikes.
Isobel pictured the lot as it had been moments before, restored, whole, holding the visual for what felt like an eternity.
When this attempt failed too, she tried picturing her and Varen somewhere else entirely, in a desert far away.
Instead of sand, the pavement beneath her dissolved into the gray dust of the dreamworld. Isobel closed her fists around the powder, crying out in frustration as the scrapes in her hands burned with pain.
Nothing was working.
She was too late. He’d become too strong. She couldn’t fight against him like she had before.
Whatever this was—wherever this was—it felt like the end Reynolds had warned her about.
Opening his arms, Varen threw his head back.
Spears of violet lightning shot up from the ground around him, connecting with the darkness above and forming a cage.
Isobel zeroed in on Varen’s illuminated form, his arms spread like the wings of the white bird on his black coat.
As the lightning fluttered in and out of view . . . so did he.
In that instant, Isobel realized that no matter what dimension they occupied, Varen was not there in physical form. He was projecting. Like he had the day of the Poe project. Like she had when she’d crossed through the veil.
If that was true, then this—the parking lot, the coffee shop, and the street—must be reality. Because Varen wouldn’t need to project in the dreamworld. And if he was projecting here, then that meant the veil hadn’t completely eroded. At least, not enough to allow Varen to physically rejoin his own world.
But that would also mean that she could not overpower Varen, and she would have no way of stopping this. No way of stopping him.
Everything would merge. Reality and dreams. Eternity—it was all headed for oblivion.
Time itself would end.
