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Then cold. Icy cold.

My body was pressed to something flat and hard.

I pushed my eyes open. At first, there was only a brilliant, flashing light.

I focused my gaze. Above me, lightning sparkled, illuminating the sky overhead.

My other senses were returning slowly. I could hear someone shouting.

Through a sliver of sight, I saw them.

My uncle, splattered with blood, breathing hard as he stood over me, tendrils of darkness spiraling into a shield that formed an impenetrable barrier from the storm that raged around us.

My aunt, dancing with death itself, her every movement a symphony of destruction as she unleashed torrent upon torrent of magic upon...

A man. The dead man on the throne I had seen in the vision Kaye had shared.

My grandfather. The man who had not stitched me here but torn me, wrenched me, forced me to this place to do his bidding. I was a child. A mere child. And he had violated my body and my will.

He was battling my aunt. I knew if he emerged victorious, what he had done to me would be only a taste of things to come.

I touched my hands to the thing I lay upon. Flat, cold stone.

An altar.

So, it came to this. I was to be his ultimate sacrifice.

Transfixed, I lay there, still half-dazed with pain, and I watched. And I saw. I saw this fight was taking everything my aunt and uncle had. And they were giving all of themselves, unquestionably, to save me. To save my world.

Lightning crackled through the air. Flames licked at my grandfather’s heels. Cracks ran across the grove, meeting in a giant fissure that grew with every moment.

The trees around us were fractured and splitting. The marble chamber that held it all together was crumbling.

Destruction and death. I had arrived just in time to witness all of it.

I snuck a look up at my uncle. His eyes were closed with the strain of shielding me.

His face was different from how I remembered. One half was a mess of torn flesh. His upper body was slick with blood, the skin ripped and shredded away.

He opened his eyes, not to look down at me, but over to where my aunt spun and wove her body around the grove. She was engaged in a deadly duel. Blades of darkness swirled around her as she met my grandfather’s thunderous blows. A fire of defiance burned bright in her eyes.

And in my uncle’s? I saw the fear and the pain.

He loved her. And he thought she was going to die.

He looked down at me then, and our eyes met. His expression was shocked. Then the shock vanished, and in the next instant, I saw something so familiar and so long-forgotten on my uncle’s face that tears pricked my cheeks before I could stop them.

Love.

I knew it with a certainty I had no need to question.

I thought of Odessa, and in my mind’s eye, I knew exactly what would happen next.

Their deaths. Their sacrifices.

I might go on, but it would be alone.

My grandfather was laughing as he fought his defiant daughter, his pale skin stretched across ancient bones that I suddenly longed to break.