Queen Kaila looks torn between wanting to see me die and wanting to ensure she saves her own neck.
But the prince isn’t waking, his body keeps thrashing, the thread tangled between his hands. His father curses and rushes over, tries to snatch the thread away, making Isolte scream. But even that does nothing.
And I...I fall back.
My shoulders hit the poles, and I look down at the gold that’s now splashing around my chest, some of it reaching the puncture marks from the swords. Seeing them springs up the pain that surrounds me from all sides, my blood mixing with the rest.
“Slade...” My voice doesn’t come out as more than a whisper, but he hears me.
He always hears me, even when I don’t say a thing.
Expression full of animalistic fury, Slade rips out the sword from his belt, raises it up, and slams it down across the fabric. Even though it looks like it shouldn’t hold any hope against Slade’s sword, the threads absorb the blow, the sharp blade completely impotent, the barrier immune to the slash.
But he slashes at it again and again and again.
He throws his brute strength at it, trying to slam his body through it, trying to hack at it, trying to pour so much rot over the barrier that the noxious veins encompass so thoroughly that it nearly blocks my sight of him completely.
“Hold on, Auren! Hold on!”
But my knees shake, legs giving out. I don’t sink down in the gold though, because the black, liquid roots seem to catch me, keeping me afloat.
Panic comes over his face, and that’s when I know there’s no hope.
He can’t get to me.
There’s pure torture in his eyes, and my entire soul just cracks.
My bottom lip wobbles. My love for him drains from me as much as my power, collecting around me, wishing it could reach him.
But it can’t.
I can’t.
He came for me, but he can’t get to me.
Hot tears score lines down my shaking cheeks. But I try to pull them up. Try to give him a smile. “Find me in another life.”
“No!” The anguish thrown from his throat feels like it tumbles right at my feet.
I blink, head cradled against the bars, and I watch as he suddenly brings up both hands. And then I feel the hair rise on the back of my neck.
In the next instant, magic comes slamming out so forcefully that it steals the breath from my chest and holds it in its fist.
Raw magic blasts from his body and pours into the barrier.
As soon as it makes contact, the entire dome starts to vibrate. Several of the monarchs clutch their heads, cringing back, while the prince passes out, body going still.
Slade’s power dominates the air.
He directs it all to the double-layered shield in front of me, pouring all of his energy into the spot around my enclosure. My skin is covered in chills, my ears ringing, even the rotted gold around me acts erratically. Unnatural wind gusts from the spot where he’s trying to breach through the barrier, and I’m stuck in the storm of its charged ferocity.
His body quakes, veins shrinking and expanding in an eerie pulse. I can see his jaw muscles working, see the fierce determination in his eyes as spikes burst from his arms, even as I grow weaker and weaker.
“Just hold on!”
I’m trying, I want to say, but I can’t get the words out.
“Hold—”
His words get ripped from his throat at the same time that a rip suddenly rends through the air.
I watch as the fabric right in front of me tears open, like someone grabbed it and ripped it in two. A rush of sweet-smelling wind blows back my hair as I blink at the twelve foot rip. It’s torn through the poles, split right down to the ground, making some of my gold start to drain into it.
The gaping slash is clotted with roiling clouds of black and white that churn in its starry, electrified depths. It looks bottomless, ethereal, and as soon as I smell the air, the beast inside of me sings.
Because it carries the breeze of home.
It feels like I release a breath that’s been locked in my chest for twenty years. With that long breath, my skin warms, my gold glows.
I was my parents’ little sun. And with the world torn open, with the fragment of home just inside that rip, I actually feel like one. Like if I could just fall into that cracked-open sky, I could shine forever.
And yet, when I look away from the rip right in front of me, past its mirrored and mottled air, I see the look on Slade’s exhausted face.
I see horrified realization in his dark eyes.
The shine, the warmth, the glow, it all dulls. It all chokes out like a fist at my throat.
“Auren...”
The moment he says my name, I understand.
He swallows hard, head shaking. “I was trying to rip through the barrier to get to you, but...”
But he tore a rip into Annwyn instead.
“Auren. You need to go into it.”
My eyes go wide, liquid gold churning in waves around my shoulders. If the runes forcing me to drain out my energy don’t kill me, I’ll drown in my gold instead.
“Auren.”
I glance from the rip to him, and I’m so terrified, but I know it’s the only way, because he’s tried everything else, and it’s home. Annwyn is home, and—
But then I realize.
Then I truly see.
“The rip...you can’t get to the rip.”
His lips are pressed into a thin line, his eyes full of speechless agony.
“You have to come with me,” I say, panicked, terrified, despairing.
He shakes his head, and my foundation shakes with it. “I can’t. You have to go into it, baby. You have to. I can’t get to you, and you can’t stay there. You’re fading.”
My head shakes, tears pooling from my eyes. “I can’t. I can’t. Not without you,” I beg. Fight. Wail.
“Look at me,” he demands, even as his chest heaves. “You have to go in. You’re strong. So keep your rage to fuel your courage and save yourself again.”
Sobs wrench from my soul, anguish suffocating me. “But—”
“I will find you. I will find you in that life. I fucking promise you that. But you have to go.” Two wet tears split down his cheek, and the sight makes anguish split through my soul. “Please, baby.” His beg bleeds through the cracks of his voice. Stabs straight through my heart.
“Slade…”
He gives me a nod. Tries to give me his strength. His dark eyes and darker aura bore into me, surround me.
“I’ll find you, Goldfinch. I swear to you. Now fly.”
So with a sob suffocating my throat, I close my eyes. Lift my arms. Suck in a breath I wish was filled with his scent. Then, I tip down into that fathomless, familiar unknown.
Through the rip in the world, with a rip torn through my heart, I plunge out of Orea, into the storming depths of Annwyn.
Alone.
CHAPTER 65
SLADE
I watch her drop.
Watch her pitch into the churning, storming sky, ripped straight into Annwyn. Watch her disappear through the slash I tore open.
I need to keep my grip on the ragged, frayed ends for as long as I can. Give her as much time as I’m able. My fists are squeezing so hard I can’t feel my fingers, power bleeding out of me too fast to sustain. But still I wait, shaking, draining, spikes punching through my spine while fangs pierce through the insides of my cheeks.
Not yet.
I feel my knuckles pop, feel my braced legs waver. Yet still, I hold the rip open, counting every second, because I don’t know if the tear needs to stay open for her to be safe, for her to reach Annwyn. But if it does, then I need to hold on.
So I do.
When my knees hit the cracked, decayed ground, I do.
When my head bows, hands quaking, I do.
When my breaths come out in painful bursts, when my jaw pops, when my back arcs, when my heart feels like it’s going to explode through my own festering veins, I do.
I hold it far longer than my body wants to, expel more power than I have. I hold on until my body can’t give any more of this raw, exposed power. Power that I shouldn’t even be capable of using, and certainly not to rip holes into the world.
When I’ve given my very last piece of power, the rip shatters shut.