Page 89 of Too Dangerous To Die

As the light inside me begins to flicker out.

She screams.

Her voice shatters the trees, the sky, the stars.

She holds me tighter, like her body alone can stop the breaking.

“I won’t let you go!” she sobs. “You hear me? I won’t let you go!”

But I’m already half-stone.

Already slipping from her grasp.

And still, I think I’d choose her again.

Even now.

42

NORA

I’ve never felt silence like this before.

It isn’t peace.

It isn’t stillness.

It’s absence.

Rhaegar lies broken beneath me, the last echoes of his laughter still warm on my skin. But his chest no longer rises. His body—stone and flesh intertwined—is still, fissured with lightless cracks like veins of ash tracing his final sacrifice.

He was smiling when he said it was love.

And now he’s gone.

No. Not gone. Notyet.

I press my hands against his chest, fingers trembling, heart breaking with every second that ticks past. The world around us is hushed in reverence—forest shadows standing vigil, moonlight pooling through torn branches, wind skimming the earth like it, too, knows something sacred has just been taken.

I won’t let this be the end.

I won’t let death win.

“There is a rite,”the memory whispers, not in my voice but Medea’s—before she was monster, before she was hunger. When she was still woman. Still Purna.

A rite for resurrection.

No, not resurrection—preservation.A shared soul. A divided life.

Two bound as one.

I fall to my knees beside him, blood streaked down my arms, heart thundering so violently it threatens to drown out the ancient words rising in my mind.

It’s forbidden.

Forgotten.

But not gone.

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