The world did not just go grey; it went hollow.
The moment Kaelum's fingers—cold as the vacuum between stars—brushed the black serpent coiling around my palm, the Sanguine Song in my blood hit a wall of absolute silence. It wasn't the silence of a quiet room, but the silence of a tongue that had been cut out. My heart, which had become a rhythmic engine of gold-red magma and sapphire frost, stalled. The tectonic resonance that connected me to every stone in the North and every wolf in the South snapped like a thread in a gale.
I fell. My knees hit the ash-covered sand of the Whispering Coast, but there was no sound of impact. The ash swallowed the noise, the vibration, and the very intent of my movement. I looked up at the Wraith-Prince, my vision blurring into a sepia-toned nightmare.
