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Dying wasn’t easy.

It wasn’t peaceful or quiet or filled with the gentle whispers of loved ones guiding you into the beyond.

It was a terrifying drop into inky blackness.

A flailing, thrashing struggle to keep from getting pulled under.

Everything was cold and thick. There was no up or down, no direction, no light, no air .

Nothing but a single, shimmering strand of light in the darkness. A lifeline. A tether.

Taly reached out and grabbed it.

“That’s it!” Skye cried. “I felt her.”

The bond gave a weak pull, and he yanked it back fiercely, refusing to let her slip away.

Beside him, Aiden dropped to his knees, hands already glowing green as he pressed them over Taly’s heart. The light spilled across her skin in clean, pulsing waves.

Suddenly, Taly was hurtling back to the surface.

To life and air, light and warmth.

Her chest began to burn. Shards, she needed to breathe .

Feeling came back. Her body ached. Her skin prickled. Hands pressed to her chest.

Her heart sparked.

Then it caught fire.

Someone was screaming her name, begging —

She was ripped sideways before breath could reach her.

Not a gentle nudge or a subtle shift—this was a violent, bone-jarring impact that ripped her from the pull of life back into the dark.

“Shit, I lost her!” Aiden barked.

Skye paced like a caged animal—nothing to swing at, no enemy in sight. Just walls closing in around the silence where her heartbeat should’ve been.

Sarina was up now, face white with fear.

Ivain stood rigid, fists clenched so tight the sharp tang of blood permeated the air.

The world splintered apart, collapsing into shards of black and gray, until only the silence remained.

And in that silence, Taly floated.

Not falling, not rising. Just... there.

Suspended in an endless, weightless void. A breathless pause between one reality and the next.

It was cold but not biting. More like the absence of warmth.

The space around her shimmered faintly, like a ripple on still water. Then a shadow appeared, looming above her.

Its size defied comprehension, stretching beyond what her mind could grasp. Vast. Immense.

This was not the grimble. It was something else. Something older. Bigger . A darkness that carried weight.

Its presence pressed against her like the crushing depths of the ocean.

“Kairó vuun’manii?”

The words echoed, bouncing like they’d struck stone.

Maybe Taly had been capable of fear once. Perhaps she would’ve wondered what those words meant and why they kept following her. But those worries were for the living, and she was already slipping beyond them.

A shudder tore through the fabric of this strange half-place. It made no sound—only the sensation of reality buckling.

A flicker of warmth pierced the cold.

Then, something solid wrapped around her, yanking her backward through the void.

The empty vastness fractured. The weightless drift was gone.

In its place came a rush—like being pulled and pushed at once.

Behind her, Calcifer surged, driving her forward.

He was huge—so much more massive than she’d ever seen. And this was still only a fragment. The bulk of his mass was kept outside the Weave. Transforming was simply a matter of rethreading himself through dimensions, stitching matter onto space and time like thread onto fabric.

A shifting mass of black ribbons, writhing and unfurling without end, stretched beyond sight into the void. Taly—what remained of her—hovered at the eye of the storm, a spark of rapidly fading gold nestled amidst the black.

Chrono-stasis had a limit. She could stall her heart for only so long before her soul could no longer be rejoined with her body.

Up and up, they tore through the darkness. The surface still seemed impossibly far.

At a certain point, warmth came back into her chest. Not the warmth of life—but of him. The man on the other side of that string, pulling her back.

The bond flared to life in a surge of heat. It seized her, hauling her upward.

With Calcifer pushing from behind and Skye pulling from above, the light at the surface grew brighter.

And brighter.

But not fast enough.

The ache in her soul sharpened, pulling taut, stretching thin.

Life loomed closer, but all she felt was what wasn’t there. Her body. Her breath. The hollow where she should have been.

The clock was ticking down.

The bond wavered.

Calcifer shoved—hard. Skye yanked her forward. Together, they wrenched her into the light.

And then— pain .

It was the first sensation.