Page 99 of A Fate Everlasting

I was dying. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, the way my lungs screamed without oxygen. The Rift was supposed to be a passage, a transition, achoice,but this didn’t feel like that. It didn’t even feel peaceful, like Dante said it might. This felt endless.

I choked, my lungs seizing, burning like I had been plunged into ice-cold water. I couldn’t breathe. The pressure intensified, a relentless force pressing me inward, curling my body into itself, forcing the last scraps of air from my chest. I was being torn apart, severed into nothingness.

It might have been days. My vision swam, flickering with glimpses of something. I was sure I was hallucinating. A light.

It glowed like memory, so fragile and far away, like a promise I barely remembered making. Something long forgotten.Just there, above me.

I clawed for it with everything I had left, my lungs a vacuum. But the weight of the darkness was too much. It wrapped around my ankles, my wrists, my throat, dragging mefurther down. I heard it whispering a name over and over, but I couldn’t be sure who it belonged to, anymore. It might have been mine, once.

My mother had tried to outrun this, and I couldn’t blame her. It was torture. She had tried to trade this all away. And now, here I was, paying the debt she could not. Facing the thing she could not.

The clever thing about the Rift was that although it stole breath, it also stole hurt. Worry.Pain.I let it take all of it, piece by piece. I didn’t want to remember, anymore.

A sob wrenched from my throat, though there was no sound, only the crushing dark swallowing me deeper. My body was breaking apart at the seams, my mind splintering like glass. I knew I was fading.

I let my mind unravel like a spool. The threads were slipping too far to ever catch again, but I let them go. The weight in my chest lessened with every tug, the space between heartbeats growing wider, the strength of them softer. I melted into the feeling.

It was so warm in the darkness, so plush. Who was I? What had I feared? If I could just stay here,forever…I would.

And I nearly did, until something pulled me back.

48

Apull snapped tight around my waist, sharp and sudden. It was not a hand, not flesh. It was immaterial. Maybe it was a part of me. It wove around me like a lifeline, a single unbreakable tether.

Then, a velveteen voice slipped through the dark. I didn’t recognize it, though it was familiar. “Not yet, Nocturne. You must live. Ask it to mark you instead.”

Nocturne? Who was that? But the words felt like the first I’d heard in a thousand years, the only true words. So, I listened.

“Mark me,” I called out to the darkness. “Mark me instead.”

The silence trembled. For a moment, I thought nothing would answer.

Then, I felt a tight force as I was wrenched upward. It was a violent, gutting pull that sent me hurtling toward the light, the spool of thoughts that had unraveled coilingtight, tight, tight…

The Thread. The Thread had me. I had asked to bemarked.The dark screeched as it tore from my skin, burning. My veins seared with unbearable force, the motion something that should have shattered me. But the Thread held fast, unrelenting as itpulled me upward. The glow expanded, blinding, and then I broke through.

I gasped, air slicing into my lungs like a dagger. My body arched, spine bowing against the cold stone beneath me as the chapel roared into focus.

Hands were on me. Someone was saying my name. All I could smell was peppermint. Someone was—Dorian.“You should’ve died,” he said. “No one in Lower Sixth’s ever done that before.”

I felt the warmth first, then arms crushing me against him, breath uneven. He held me like he was afraid I would disappear again. I was shaking too hard to respond, my limbs uncooperative. I pressed my head against his shoulder as my body fought to adjust to existence again, listening to the thump of his heart as it drummed against my temple, erratic.

I had survived, but not by luck, not entirely. Something,someone, had dragged me back. But survival didn’t feel like victory. It felt raw, unfinished. I was still piecing myself back together, unsure which fragments were mine and which belonged to someone I used to be.

Dorian whispered into my hair words I couldn’t make sense of. I couldn’t process them, couldn’t do anything but let myself be held, the weight of him grounding me. It felt like the only thing keeping me from floating away.

A faint burning prickled behind my ear. My hand flew to it. I should have died. I’d drunk the entire chalice. I’d intended to sacrifice myself. But something had stopped me. No,someone.

I looked up, past Dorian’s shoulder, past the ruins of the dais, past the still-smoldering remnants of ether, and the upturned carafe bleeding the remains of the tar-like tonic down the stone steps. The chapel was empty. I blinked, straining to remember.

The cards. The High King. Dante.How was I alive?

The Arcana Deck lay scattered across the marble, their gilded edges torn and ripped apart. My breath shuddered as I took in the wreckage, the devastation.

“How?” The words scraped raw. “How long was I out? What happened?”

My voice barely sounded like mine. Each word rasped against my throat like my voice was still clawing its way up from the Rift. The words echoed in the stillness of the chapel.

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