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A talisman hovered over his palm, floating like the circlets around his wrists. Whispers came from him then, as inaudible as his promised threat. They were only felt like a chill on the wind. She could hear him because she was not alive.

But the words he said were strange and broken. Not any language she could have ever fathomed. But it called to her—sang to her—and her soul responded. The talisman hovering over his palm began to glow. It pulsed with a white light, not quite a heartbeat, but not quite anything else.

She began to glow, all the same. Her soul shone and pulsed in time with the glowing talisman.

The light left it. Like lightning striking a tree, it entered her. The talisman clattered to the rocks, empty and abandoned.

Pain surged through her, like nothing she had ever felt before. Agony of her injuries, and something else. It felt like roots were inside her, squirming, writhing things that wanted to wrap around her and never let her go.

She had been broken to pieces, and he had mended her with the only thing he could use.

Himself.

Darkness, as deep as the void, as cold as death, wormed into her soul. Twisted and tangled together with her own until she was more the tree than she was herself anymore.

Marguerite screamed. She screamed with her body, with her mind, and with her soul.

For none of it belonged to her anymore.

And it never would again.

Maggie flew backfrom the table, tears streaking down her cheeks. She was shaking violently and collapsed into a chair before she wound up sprawled on the floor. “N—no, no, no, no…”

Gideon was sat across the room, his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. By the shaking of his shoulders, she knew he was silently weeping.

She wanted to run. The urge was sudden and overwhelming. She wanted to run into the street and leap from a bridge into a river—or jump in front of a moving truck—or find a way to hang herself. She wanted to be free.

Shaking her head, she forced herself to breathe. Forced herself not to throw up again. No. Running wouldn’t do any good. Running was as much of a lie as everything else had been. She felt faint, and she struggled to stay awake for a long moment before her heart stopped being the only thing she could hear, pounding away inside her head.

“It’s me,” she whispered, shutting her eyes. Saying it out loud made it more real. More concrete. “I’m the phylactery.”