Page 77 of Beyond the Winter Kingdom
Silence stretched between us as we walked back, and I noticed for the first time how strange this landscape was compared to what I expected it to be. I had stormed off so quickly, I wasn’t paying any attention to it. What should have been lush forests with jewel-toned leaves was steadily turning to jagged ground with scattered trees. The air warmed ... as if heated by the light of two suns.
I stilled. My pulse quickened.
Sadie stopped, turning in circles, looking for the source. “Do you feel that?”
Everything waswrong.
Beneath us, something thrummed with rhythmic anticipation. Like a second heartbeat underneath the land.
“Is that—” Sadie broke off suddenly when the air around us warped inward, turning hazy like a mirage.
“It’s shifting.” My eyes narrowed. “Eversus is coming.” The name left my mouth like a curse.
Sadie spun around again, eyes scanning the horizon. “We need to run.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I snagged her wrist and took off at a dead sprint in the direction we came from.
In the distance, a flicker of motion caught my eye. Two figures, one embracing the other.
Meera and Damon.
My breath caught as I saw the panic in her features. Her copper hair whipped around her face like fire in the wind. She was calling out something—my name, maybe—but the wind had swallowed her words, and the steady drum of my own heartbeat galloping was the only thing I could hear.
“Meera!”
The land twisted beneath our feet, shifting between realms. The oily hues of the forest stained red. Trees fell away one by one like an earthquake was rolling through and flattening everything.
Meera shouted again. I was close enough to make out the shape of her lips, but the sound was swallowed by the roaring of the wind. My name. She was calling to me.
I put everything I had into reaching her in time. With Sadie at my back, I reached out while closing in on Meera and Damon. Her eyes locked with mine and everything else fell away. The rolling terrain, the reality that our world was tearing itself in two—none of it mattered in that moment.
Only her. Only getting to her.
In a moment of horror, the mirage shimmered harshly, and I realized I was too late.
We were feet from each other.
And then the ground betrayed me.
My boot caught on something jagged—a rock that hadn’t been there a second ago, jutting up like a spear from the cursed soil. Pain tore through my ankle. I tried to right myself, but I was moving too fast.
I fell hard.
The impact knocked the breath from my lungs. My shoulder hit first, then the side of my head cracked against the ground. I tasted blood.
Meera’s scream pierced the chaos.
Darkness surged in like a wave, cold and unrelenting.
I didn’t have time to reach for her.
It was just the echo of her name in my chest.
Then nothing.
Chapter 21
Vareck
I came to with a groan, the world around me little more than a haze of gray and blinding light. My senses filtered in slowly. Pain first. My head throbbed with an intensity that made it feel like someone had taken a chisel to my skull. Again. And again. Every breath scraped down my throat like broken glass, sand clinging to my tongue and coating the inside of my mouth.
