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“I don’t want to sit down. I want you to tell me what this place is, and why it’s so different from everything around it.”

“Because it’s protected.”

“Like Erebos?”

“With far stronger magic than that city, or any of the others throughout Rivenholt.”

“Rivenholt?”

“That’s the name of this kingdom.”

“Kingdom?” I realized I was doing nothing except stupidly repeating everything he said in a breathless tone, and I tried—desperately tried—to figure out something more intelligent to say. “The world of the dead doesn’t have kingdoms; I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

I had researched this realm for years before descending into it, after all. I had planned it all out so rigorously. I’d mapped it out in painstaking detail. I’d known what to expect…

And it all turned out to be completely different, whispered a small voice in the back of my mind.

I stared at the ground, suddenly unable to deny all the strangeness—thewrongness—I’d encountered any longer.There was no making sense of it all within the framework Iwantedit to make sense within.

So I had no choice but to keep silent as he said, “This is not the world of the dead.”

I shook my head, but he didn’t stop talking.

“This palace was once the center of a thriving,livingempire,” he said, “one that lived in peaceful tandem with the empires of the Above. And the beings you’ve encountered over the past days are not dead. They’re cursed. A curse our mother hoped we might someday break, which is why we were sent to the Above over twenty-five years ago.”

I forced myself to lift my gaze to his.

He smiled sadly at me, his eyes shining with an emotion that was impossible to name. “Welcome back to your true world, Nova.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Nova

It feltas if the ground beneath me had vanished and I was falling, tumbling, careening through nothingness.

I might have fallen forever if not for the steady hand that gripped my shoulder. Slowly, my gaze traveled upward, over the odd scar that split through the inside of his arm—a charred black line of rough, ruined skin. The scar on the opposite arm was identical. I couldn’t see his abdomen, but I wondered…did he have a mark splitting up the center of it, too?

These were the sort of scars that had destroyed my brother’s skin, according to the ones who had found him dead in his crib over twenty-four years ago.

Ripped apart by his own magic, they’d claimed.

I choked on a breath.

None of this made sense.

Those scars should have been smaller. More faded with time. And yet…the longer I stared at them, the more convinced I became that theyhadbeen left behind by magic, whether it had torn through him twenty-four years ago or otherwise. The gnarled twists of black clearly weren’t normal. I couldsense something brooding beneath the surface of them, too—the energy of something far more powerful than any common blade or other weapon.

“Sit down,” the man suggested again, nodding toward the nearby bench.

I listened, this time, just barely making it to that bench before my knees gave out completely.

He hesitated a moment before sitting down beside me. We were silent for a long moment. I clenched my hands together in front of me to keep them from shaking.

“Who are you?” I asked, again, my voice cracking.

“My name is Bastian.”

I gripped my hands more tightly together. “No, it isn’t. Itcan’tbe.”