Chapter 736: Love Is An Unlocked Door

Serena sprinted to Gavriel.

Her legs were moving, the grass was real beneath her, the distance was closing, and none of it was fast enough. He was thirty feet away and the thirty feet stretched like something alive, the ground adding distance between her strides the way nightmares add hallway to a corridor that should have ended.

The black threaded itself through his veins the way she had watched it thread through dragon scales, climbing his neck, branching across his jaw, and his face was changing, the warmth leaving it in stages, the Gavriel she knew being evacuated from behind his own eyes and replaced by something hollow that wore his features and used his mouth and smiled at her with teeth that were his and an expression that was not.

She screamed his name across the field. The name left her mouth and died in the air between them, eaten by the distance that should not have existed and the silence that should not have been possible, and the field swallowed the sound the way dark water swallows a stone, and the stone sank, and the sinking was the last thing she felt before his green magic, now fully black, reached her chest and she felt him die.

She was running. She was closing the distance. She was not going to make it.

He reached for her. The reaching was wrong. His hands were wrong. The green that had always healed her was black now, and the black was reaching for her chest, and the reaching was not healing, it was consuming, and the consuming was methodical, and the methodical was the worst part because it meant whatever had taken him was intelligent and the intelligent thing was using his hands to do it.

When she finally got to him, his eyes were closed.

She tried surging her magic into him to save him but it was too late.

He died in her arms. In the dream, he collapsed, and the collapsing was the worst thing she had ever witnessed in any reality because the collapsing was Gavriel, and Gavriel did not collapse, Gavriel held, Gavriel was the person who held everyone else.

There was nothing she could do. It felt like she was reliving the worst memory of another lifetime.

But then the dream shifted into another kind of nightmare.

One that felt like something that had not happened yet.

The room was one that felt familiar. She had seen it before in her dreams.

Marble. Dark. A throne at the far end, occupied by a figure whose face she could not see but whose laughter she could hear, and the laughter was low, rolling, carrying the specific amusement of a man watching something he had designed perform exactly as intended.

The High Emperor of Orosia towered over her.

"The dark tether on your soul, did you think it only reached you?"

She looked down.

Gavriel’s body was in her arms. The body was cold. The cold was spreading into her hands, up her wrists, through her forearms, the cold of a life that had left and was not coming back.

"Everything attached to you is attached to me." The laughter wrapped around the words like smoke around a flame. "Him especially. His magic was always reaching for you. Foolish man. The reaching gave me an unlocked door."

She tried to scream. The scream was swallowed. She tried to move. The moving was denied. She was trapped in a marble room holding a dead man while an emperor laughed from a throne she could not see, and the laughing was getting louder, and the louder was filling the room, and the room was shrinking, and the shrinking was pressing the walls against her from every direction until the only thing left was his voice and Gavriel’s weight and the cold and the dark and the understanding, total and devastating, that her existence was the weapon and everyone she loved was the target.

The dream broke.

???

SHADOWCLAW - ALPHA’S CHAMBERS

Serena woke gasping, bolting upright so fast the motion sent the pillow to the floor. Her chest was heaving. Her skin was drenched, the sheets beneath her soaked with sweat that had accumulated during the hours her body had been locked inside the nightmare. Her hair was plastered to her neck and her forehead and the sides of her face.

The room was dark. The room was real. The room was Shadowclaw, not marble, not a throne room, not the place where Gavriel had died in her arms.

She pressed her hand to her chest. Her heart was slamming against her ribs so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her teeth, in the trembling of her fingers against her sternum. Her breath was coming in shallow, rapid bursts that were not breathing so much as surviving, her lungs taking in air in the minimum amounts required to keep consciousness from leaving again.

Tears were already on her face. She did not know when they had started. They were running from the corners of her eyes down her temples and into her hair, and the running was silent because her crying was always silent, and the silence of it in the dark room was the loneliest sound she had ever produced.

She sat in the dark. Drenched. Shaking. The nightmare still living in her chest, replaying behind her eyelids every time she blinked, Gavriel’s gray eyes and the Emperor’s laughter and the word tether sitting in her sternum like something swallowed that would not go down.

???

SHADOWCLAW - MASTER MAGE’S STUDY

Serena closed the door to Aeron’s study behind her. The closing was deliberate, the sound of it carrying the specific weight of a woman who needed the room sealed before she opened her mouth.

Aeron was at his desk. His eyes lifted from the text he had been reading and found her face, and whatever her face was showing him produced an immediate shift in his posture, the text forgotten, his full attention redirected to the woman standing in his doorway with her back against the door she had just closed.

"Serena, what is it?"