Alena tried again, this time pressing her entire weight into it. She connected to her gatestone and pulled on the strength there.
The knife bit into the thread, slowly.
Off in the distance, the queen screamed in rage. Alena risked a glance. The queen’s eyes were on her, filled with fire, but the emperor held her in an unbreakable embrace.
That wouldn’t last long.
Alena focused on the blade. She thought of Azaleth dying in the dark passages under the mountains. She thought of her family, waiting for her to return.
And the knife cut deeper.
Bit by bit, it cut.
A roar of pain. The emperor.
Alena didn’t dare look.
Another yell, all too familiar.
Somehow Brandt had found his feet. She couldn’t help but look.
The former wolfblade blasted fire from his hands, flames billowing over the queen. She stepped through them, unscathed, and backhanded Brandt through a tree.
With a final heave of desperation, Alena cut through the string.
The queen stopped in her tracks.
Alena had never seen such hate. It was cold, freezing her where she stood.
“Enough,” the queen growled.
The world shattered around them. Hanns fought the change, but could only hold on for a moment.
The trees disappeared, replaced by a freezing void of perfect blackness. Alena felt the air freeze in her nostrils. She imagined being outside on a warm sunny day, but her efforts counted for nothing. “Brandt?” She meant to shout, but her voice came out a whisper.
“Here.” She could barely hear him. Words didn’t seem to carry in this new place.
She visualized appearing next to him, but she didn’t know if it worked. The darkness was too absolute. But when she reached out she felt his skin, cold against hers.
She brought him close.
Next to her, Hanns spoke. “I’m here, too.”
She jumped at the proximity of his voice.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Her question was greeted with silence.
They floated in nothingness. The cold creeped ever closer. Alena lost feeling in her fingers first, then her arms. Her teeth chattered. But somehow she knew the cold would never kill her. It would only torment her.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
Again, silence. For a few moments she wondered if the others were dead.
She closed her eyes. In the perfect darkness, it made no difference to what she saw, but the action helped her focus. She went inside and focused on her breath.
There had to be something.
Alena lost the feeling in her legs. She felt drowsy and had trouble focusing on her thoughts. There was only the pain of the cold and the darkness of their surroundings.
Then she heard it.
A whisper, barely heard, even in the silence of the eternal void.
It sounded like her brother.
She reached out to him, her consciousness stretching along the bond she’d built with him.
Then she found him.
She pulled the others toward her, then Alena dove toward Jace, pulling at the threads connecting them with all her strength.
The void dissolved, light and sound slamming against her battered senses.
The sun beat down on her and she raised her head. She was lying in the grass and Jace stood over her, a concerned look on his face.
She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
Alena’s head collapsed back into the grass and she surrendered to the encroaching darkness.
11
Brandt awoke, sitting bolt upright in bed as he suppressed the urge to scream.
His nightmare vanished as soon as his eyes opened. Had it been the endless darkness, or the cave this time?
Over the past two nights his nightmares had blended together with haunting memories, a repeating kaleidoscope of dark terror. Sleep no longer rejuvenated his body or his soul, and he dreaded the falling of the sun each evening. If not for Ana, Brandt wasn’t sure he’d even seek rest willingly.
Ana woke a moment later, her arm reaching out to him.
Her grip was solid and steady. Without a word, she said all he needed to hear.
Guilt flooded him. She deserved better than this, night after night. Like him, she woke in the morning with bags under her eyes.
The fight in the cave against the queen gave him nightmares, but those, at least, felt familiar. He always relived the battles he fought, but they faded in time. The cave would fade, too, buried by time with all the rest.
But something about the void afterward haunted him. It buried itself in his thoughts and lurked in every shadow. Describing it to Ana had been simple. It was perfect emptiness. But the words didn’t capture the heart of the horror of that experience.
He shook just thinking about it.
Ana held him, silent support against the void, the warmth of her body and the brush of her breath against his arm a reminder that he was here. He existed.
His shivering subsided, but all thoughts of sleep fled. He stood and walked to the window. Their room in the palace was high enough he could look over the wall and into Estern. The night beyond was quiet, but flickers of firelight could be seen in places.
He wasn’t alone.
His thoughts wandered, but they always returned to that endless expanse of emptiness.
“Come back to bed.” Ana’s voice held a hint of request and a hint of an order.
Brandt looked out on the city one last time, then returned to her. She snuggled next to him. “It will pass,” she said.
He grunted, wishing he shared her confidence.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Someday, I’ll have to soulwalk again. And that terrifies me.”
Even confessing that helped. Ana’s ears would be the only ones that heard his fears. He wouldn’t be called a coward, and if the emperor requested his presence in another soulwalk, Brandt would step forward without complaint.
But soulwalking was a reality he feared, wrapped in mysteries he couldn’t penetrate. He understood the basic principles well enough, but his entire lifetime of training counted for next to nothing there. The queen had destroyed him with a thought. The memory of her hand gripped around his organs sent another chill down his
