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The forest.

Real.

But something is wrong. The transportation is incomplete. Shadows unravel where they should hold. Sereven’s disruption has followed me through the void.

Blood soaks my side, a deep wound reopened. Warmth spreads across my ribs, fading quickly to cold. My vision frays. My left arm won’t respond. Nerve pathways burned or severed—by blade, crystal, or failed crossing, I can’t be sure.

Above me, my familiar circles low. Its shape flickers. Where once it was made of certainty, now its wings blur with each beat. I reach for it with what little energy remains, trying to draw it back into myself as I’ve done countless times before. To preserve what’s left of our connection. To save some part of myself that might survive even if my body fails. But it resists me, for the first time.

It cries out in denial. Not rejection. Refusal to give in. Refusal to leave me here. It dives toward me, talons extended as if to drag me from the forest floor where I’ve fallen, its determination flowing through our connection.

I lift one hand, palm upright, blood dripping between my fingers.

“No,” I whisper, the word catching in the fluid rising up my throat. “Go. Find her.”

Her face fills my mind. Silver eyes. A will that refused to bend. The woman who broke my prison and upended everything.

The raven shrieks once more, the sound laced with defiance anddespair, then it launches itself downward again, passing through my arm like mist, the contact terribly final. Then it turns, rising into the storm. Wings spread against the silver-lit sky, flying north. Toward River Crossing. Toward Ellie.

I try to rise. To follow. My limbs disobey. The wound in my side pulses in time with my failing heartbeat, lifeblood leaking into the forest soil. In the distance, thunder rolls.

Darkness closes in. Not the familiar shadow I’ve shaped since childhood, but something colder. An absence of self. The stillness that lies beneath all motion. The silence between heartbeats. The void that precedes oblivion.

The final threshold every Shadowvein Lord eventually crosses alone.

As consciousness slips away, one final thought anchors me.

What began with her arrival won’t end with my absence. The silver under her skin carries something beyond either of us. A power that responds to shadows but isn’t defined by it. A light that does not erase darkness, but walks beside it.

The woman from another world will herald a future I won’t live to see, but one I helped to create. In her, shadow and storm will meet. In her, everything will change.

Lightning splits the sky. For a moment, the forest turns silver. My familiar’s cry pierces the dark.

One final sound accompanying me as darkness claims everything.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

ELLIE

“Where the known ends, the story begins again.”

Inscription found in Stonehaven’s oldest chamber

“No!”

The word rips from my throat, high pitched and frantic, as the soldiers close in around Sacha and Varam. From our position, the scene below unfolds with horrifying detail. A nightmare playing out in real time, each moment etching itself into my consciousness with brutal precision.

Only days ago, I was still convincing myself he was just a means to an end. My ticket home. Now the sight of him surrounded fills me with terror so complete it eclipses reason. When did his survival become more important than my own?

The forest falls away. There is only this moment.

Only this horror.

Onlyhim.

The ground beneath me feels impossibly solid. Sharp stones dig into my palms, drawing blood. Every sensory detail becomes hyper-real, as if my body is trying to keep me anchored to the ground while the world dissolves into chaos around me.

Birds scatter from nearby trees, their wings beating a frantic rhythm that matches the thundering beat of my heart. The silver light under my skin, the power that’s been building for weeks now, pulses in time with my terror. It pushes outward, testing the limits of my skin, trying to reach him. I taste metal on my tongue, as though the air itself has transformed into something electric and dangerous.