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Slow and steady, she dropped like a stone into the fathomless depth.

Until—

Somethingclawedat her from the inside. Scraped against bone.

Her lungs seized, and the warmth she’d been sinking into shattered under a single, brutal truth.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her eyes snapped open, and her body jerked against the sudden pain.

She tried to draw a breath—tried, and tried, and failed.

Calcifer stirred beside her. She placed a shaking hand on his flank.

Breathe.

She needed tobreathe, to get air into her lungs.

But her body refused to listen. Every muscle was locked tight, every gasp falling short.

She balled her fist and slammed it against her ribs. Something was lodged there.

She tried to call his name.Skye.But her voice was gone, trapped somewhere between her burning lungs and her strangled throat.

Calcifer mewled, tail swishing nervously.

“I— I—”

A cough ripped out of her, jagged and punishing.

She doubled over, pressing her forehead into the dirt as pain bloomed across her chest.

Snap.

Calcifer’s head whipped towards the sound, ears flattening as a low growl built in his throat.

Taly’s eyes widened, her heart pounding with fresh panic, but she managed to lift a trembling hand.

Weakly, she gestured, fingers barely forming the command.Go.

Calcifer hesitated, eyes locked on her, before whining reluctantly. There was nothing for him to do here. Out there, he could at least stop her from getting eaten by a wyvern or a grendel or whatever was trampling through the underbrush.

With a tense flick of his tail, he turned and slunk off into the shadows, moving toward the source of the sound.

Taly rolled onto her back. Her chest heaved. The sound of it—a rasping, broken wheeze—rattled in her ears like a dying bellows.

She tried a few more times to call his name—Skye, Skye…and wondered if the Universe was mocking her.

If she admitted she needed help but no one was around to hear it, did it count?

It was almost funny. Almost. Until her chest seized again, and all she could do was cough.

Taly’s vision narrowed.Stars, she thought distantly, as golden flecks shimmered at the edges of the encroaching darkness. The kind you saw when you stood up too fast or when the world tilted dangerously out of reach.

She blinked, and the stars shifted, stretching into thin, glimmering threads.

Another blink. The threads multiplied, fracturing—like two mirrors facing, their reflections warring, twisting and tearing at each other in an impossible, infinite loop.