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I knew how to getback. I let that realization work its way through the pain. Up until this moment a part of me believed I would never make my way home.

My bargain with Asher was back on.

I began to rise, but the grip of the potion hadn’t loosened. Another wave of agony washed through me as another shield was ripped away. My mind recalled portals that no longer existed—it recalled andmournedfor them. Weaving a portal took time. Lots and lots of time. Time and magic. It was almost a living thing itself.

And so many of them had been destroyed.

But it was more than just the portals that resurfaced from my shielded memory. Another lost memory came to me. A horrible memory, one that was both an end and a beginning.

I was falling back, back into it...

I ran through the encampment, my battle leathers straining with the movement, my ivory necklaces shivering as the pointed beads rubbed against one another, my hair snapping behind me.

The world around me was on fire. I screamed as the web of lives I held inside me shrank and shrank, soul after soul snuffing out. Death felt worse than I imagined. It felt like I was being unmade piece by piece.

Everywhere bloody, slaughtered bodies lay. Screams and smoke and magic released from the dead—it all filled the air. It was terrible and beautiful, and it was killing me from the inside out.

I sprinted toward where I last saw my mother and father—my blood parents. They’d been in their tent, eating breakfast.

Please don’t be in there.

An arrow sliced through my shoulder, and I released an agonized cry.

I ran on, using my magic to force the arrow out of the wound, then using more magic to patch the skin up. There were so many mortally wounded Infernari—there was no need for temperance when it came to spending my powers now.

Then I saw it.

In the distance, through the burning haze, I could make out the top of my parent’s tent. Flames enveloped the faded fabric, letting off great plumes of smoke. Inside I could hear howling shrieks.

Down my web, I felt their life forces pulse, then flicker.

I was young, still unskilled at healing through my connection... I needed to see them, touch them for my affinity to work.

I forced my legs faster, even as I took another arrow in the gut. And then I was limping as I shoved magic at the wound, ordering it to purge the weapon and heal the flesh. Then I turned my power on my burning lungs. My hair whipped about me, snapping at the air.

I leaped over fallen bodies. Any other time I would’ve stopped to heal those that could be saved. But my parents...

In the next breath, my mother’s life force snuffed out. I shrieked out of anger and pain. Five steps later, my father’s joined hers.

Horror—such immense horror. It choked me from the inside out. My lungs heaved but I couldn’t catch my breath. I stumbled, falling to one knee.

Far worse than death, this feeling.

I pushed myself up, refusing to listen to the truth inside me. Refusing to accept it.

By the time I reached my parents’ tent, a tent I’d so recently moved out of, there was nothing left of them but charred bones.

I collapsed in front of their skeletons, uncaring that the fire burned me. All I wanted was to die with them; I felt like I was dying as the web of souls shrank and shrank.

I crouched in front of their remains, and I could smell my hair smoldering and my flesh cooking.

But my powers wouldn’t let me die. Like a parasite, it culled from the fallen soldiers nearest the tent, using the blood magic to continuously regenerate my flesh.

The tent had long since burned away, most of my clothes incinerated along with it, when they found me.

The primus’s men.

The rest of the memory was an afterthought. How I was dragged, naked, to the soldiers and the other Infernari. How I was calledslave. How Clades, when he saw me, cut his pelt in half to fashion it into some sort of covering. His comrades had laughed at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance as he roughly covered me.