The Shadow Bringer held his back as straight as he could manage, trying to stop his erratic breathing. His heart was a cracking, brittle thing; his eyes were half-closed, unseeing.
Darkness, everywhere.
It coiled around him, that endless shadow, squeezing the air from his battered lungs. It brought nothing except a faint, meandering wind that smelled of winter and night.
He was in the Beyond. He had to be.
“No ,” he murmured, the word a mere glimpse of the horror that poured through him. His bones felt brittle and false. Was he alive? Dead?
He blinked hard, clearing mire from his thoughts. Shook his hands through his hair, kicked the ground with the heel of his boot. Darkness, everywhere.
Save for in there .
He staggered forward, leaning heavily on the wall as the starlit cavern swam around him. It was as he had left it, a shadowed cathedral with a living sacrifice at its altar. Esmer, too, was how he had left her, dark hair curling over the stone and face settled into an expression of serenity. She was beautiful. He had resisted thinking—or feeling—as much, but he couldn’t deny it. Hadn’t been able to since he first met her.
In a different time, perhaps he would have told her.
Except—
Was that her brow tensing, her mouth twisting into a grimace? The Bringer blinked again, struggling in vain to rip the image from his sight. When she had first closed her eyes, sinking into the oblivion he had so carefully prepared for her, he imagined he would feel hope.
Relief.
Triumph.
Feel something besides the deep, roiling pit of regret and self-hatred.
Days ago, he walked through the depths of his tomb, clawing up to the surface where he would at last be free to claim his revenge. He had placed a hand over the stone entrance, feeling the damp and the grit of it clinging to his skin, and imagined what he’d do to the monsters who damned not only him but Esmer and her family, too.
But in cruel indifference, no matter what he tried, the door would not open.
And that had been days ago.
Now he was exhausted, dying of hunger and thirst. If he slept beyond the altar, his mortal body would perish within hours of entering the Realm, too malnourished to sustain itself. But if he slept atop the altar, his eternal, damned life would commence again.
No.
He should not—should not —go back. Seeing Esmer’s face twisting in agony assured him of that. He needed to fight for her—and for what remained of his life. But he couldn’t escape, either. He would rot in this earthly dungeon if he didn’t join her, his body withering away as the bones of his comrades had.
He knelt down, dropping his face into his shaking hands.
After everything he had been through—the misery, the isolation, the fear—would there be a point in letting it slip away? Now, when he had drank from the true air and felt light upon his face for the first time in centuries? Esmer—it was she who dared enter his castle, she who summoned him here, she who now laid upon the stone, fear and desperation forcing her features into something unrecognizable and wrong.
She didn’t deserve this.
He needed to go back.
A dry laugh sounded from his throat. He laughed again, half-delusional and amused that he sounded more like a dying animal than a man who held anything worthy of being saved. He crawled beside her regardless, breath fading into mist as he looked to the ceiling above. It had been crafted to look like the moon and stars, purposed to remind him of the open sky even when he was deep underground.
Or so he thought.
Memories threaded into place the longer he was away from the Realm, bizarre and half-formed. Memories of Ceveon and Sorren. Memories of a glass castle and the eager dreamers. Fragments of conversation, the faces of beauty and horror, a glimpse of a sprawling, shadow-infested sea. An armored demon with red, smoking eyes.
If he returned to the Realm, would he lose them all again?
Part of him did not care. Did not mind the idea of losing his sense of self, dissolving back into the Shadow Bringer and away from this man called “Erebus”. But another part hesitated. Hesitated with a deep, angry longing for something more .
It was too late to decide.
His eyes were sinking into his skull, hands heavy against his sides.
The last he remembered was Esmer’s warm skin, so full of life against his own, a single tear of hers that he brushed away, and the vague, echoing thought that he might never wake again.
But he owed it to her to try.
