Darkness.
Not the darkness of sleep or the darkness of a shuttered room. This was something else. Something older. An absence so complete that even the concept of light felt like a foreign language; something I'd heard of once but couldn't quite remember.
I floated.
No body. No breath. No heartbeat to count the passing seconds. Just consciousness suspended in nothing, drifting through a void that had no edges, no direction, no purpose.
Azurene.
The thought came slow. Sluggish. Like pushing through honey.
Azurene, where are you?
Silence. Then, faint, so faint I might have imagined it, a pulse. A thread of warmth somewhere in the black. Not a voice, not quite. More like the memory of warmth. The echo of scales against my skin. My soul, reaching for me from very far away.
I'm here. Her voice was a whisper from the bottom of a well. I'm here. I'm right beside you. Can you hear me? Please hear me. Please wake up.
I tried to reach for her. Tried to move toward that distant warmth. But I had no hands to reach with, no legs to carry me, no direction to travel. The void held me suspended like an insect in amber.
I can hear you.
Thank the gods. Relief flooded through the bond, strong enough to feel even at this distance. You've been... it's been days. The healers don't know what's wrong. Your body is healing but you won't wake up. Your father is...
Her voice cut out. Static in the bond. The thread of warmth flickered and dimmed.
Azurene?
Nothing.
Azurene!
The void pressed closer. Not threatening, not yet. Just present. Vast and patient and absolute, like the space between stars where nothing has ever lived and nothing ever will.
I was dying. Or close to it. Some part of me understood that with the detached clarity that comes when the body is too far gone to feel fear. The kidnapping had hurt me more than I'd realized. The beating, the bond strain when they separated me from Azurene, the days of pretending I was fine when I wasn't. And then the rooftop. Cassandra's face closing. The mask I'd worn to save her life, cutting deeper than any fist.
My body had simply... stopped.
Is this what death feels like? I wondered. This floating? This nothing?
If it was, it wasn't so bad. Peaceful, almost. No more masks. No more performances. No more watching the people I loved walk away because keeping them close would kill them.
Maybe I could just stay here. Float in the dark. Let the void swallow me whole.
Then something changed.
A light appeared in the distance. Small at first; just a pinprick against the endless black. But it was moving. Getting closer. And it was wrong somehow. Wrong in a way I couldn't name. Like looking at a color that didn't exist, or hearing a sound that had no source.
The light wasn't alone. There was something in it. A presence. A consciousness. Something vast and ancient and utterly alien, folded impossibly small so it could fit through whatever door it had found into my darkness.
Azurene, I thought, but the bond was silent. The thread of warmth had gone dark.
The light drew closer.
Closer.
Closer.
It touched me.