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If I’d been in my right mind, I would have realized that I had never heard the smooth-talking elemental garble his speech. But my entire consciousness was a churning miasma.

“He has lost his mind,” I said, summoning my commander’s voice and fixing my attention on Lyrena instead. “We combine your and Cyara’s plans. Send parties out in all directions, but we go to the Split Sea.”

“But if she commands the void…”

I froze.

The witch’s words echoed in my head—in Veyka’s voice, as she’d recounted to me in those all too short days of rest and closeness after the Tower of Myda.

Why was Arthur taken?

To make way for you, Veyka.

Parys met my stare with an uncharacteristic, unflinching gaze. “I thought the Void Prophecy meant rifts all along.”

Veyka had laughed at that supposition. She’d dismissed prophecies altogether, even as we sat at the same damned stone table and fulfilled the one made by Merlin at Lugnasa.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I didn’t have time for this nonsense. But even as I tried to tear myself away, to push off of that table, something held me fast. A tug in my chest, visceral and real—the mating bond.

The pull of it was almost unbearable. My body was screaming out for her, reaching. What was happening to me? I ground my hands into the surface of the stone table, trying to keep myself upright even as my muscles tensed hard enough to edge on pain.

“You are saying that she is the queen from the Void Prophecy?” Cyara was chewing on her bottom lip, considering. Ancestors, she thought he was onto something.

Parys swallowed, glancing between all of us. His eyes snagged on me; I shoved away the sensations roaring through me, trying to focus on his words.

“I am saying she went through a rift. We all saw that explosion of power. I don’t… none of us know what it is, or was. But she was here, and then she was gone. Just like moving through a rift,” he explained, every word measured. He’d been thinking about this since she disappeared.

Lyrena was shaking her head, her golden braid flashing in the candlelight. “If there was a rift in the goldstone palace, it would have been discovered by now.”

“Unless Veyka created it,” Cyara said, understanding lighting her turquoise eyes. Parys nodded his agreement.

I didn’t understand. Not whatever they were explaining, not the torrent of feeling crashing through me.I could feel her.

“Veyka.”

They all looked to me now, the strangled sounds of her name coming out a rasp from my throat.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your Majesty?”

“Arran,” Gwen said, voice cutting through the air, sword already drawn as she edged around the table.

I tried to lift a hand to wave her off. But I couldn’t. I was anchored to the table, unable to move, unable to flex a single muscle other than the one beating inside of my chest.

Veyka. Veyka. Veyka.

“I…” My entire body was consumed with fire, just like it had been in the throne room when my blood joined with Veyka’s and her body was consumed with that incandescent flame of power.

Then a terrible crash rent the air and all the tension tore from my body. Gwen lunged forward, catching me from collapsing. But just as quickly, I felt my muscles responding, my legs moving under me as I shoved through the doors into the bedroom.

Their gasps behind me were drowned out by the roar inside my chest as we all saw what had crashed into the room, what now lay between the bed and the balcony in a heap of matted white and silver.

Veyka’s broken body on the goldstone floor.

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