I try to focus, but everything keeps shifting, blurring at the edges like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
“I don’t understand. I stabbed myself. I remember the dagger, the blood...” My hand drifts to my chest, fingers searching for the wound, but I feel nothing. No tear in my flesh. No searing pain.
Her form wavers like a mirage in the desert heat. “Your path continues. The thread hasn’t been cut.”
“What thread? I don’t...” The words tangle in my throat as spots dance across my vision.
Her gaze drops to the turquoise ring on my finger. “You’re wearing my ring.”
I stare down at the stone. “Zerah gave it to me.”
“The ring chooses,” Mazaline says. “It always has. It always will. And it chooses to bring you back.”
My head spins as the mist thickens into an impenetrable fog.
Up becomes down. Light becomes shadow.
Mazaline’s form dissolves into smoke, but her words linger, swirling through my mind like the ever-shifting mist.
Not finished…
Not done…
The ring chooses life…
Chapter Seventy-One
Jasce
The healers tryto pry Annora from my arms, but I refuse to let her go. Instead, I carry her to my tent and lay her on the bed, then lie down next to her.
I’d give anything—everything—to see her eyes open again. To see her smile at me one more time.
How can I face tomorrow knowing I’ll never see her eyes light up when she discovers a new seashell or hear her laugh when I say something ridiculous just to make her smile?
I would gladly trade places with her, give my own life just to see her chest rise and fall once more.
She gasps as her eyes fly open, locking on mine with startling intensity.
A jolt of surprise crashes through me. “You’re alive!”
I touch her cheek, her jaw, her neck, where her heartbeat proves this miracle.
Confusion clouds her eyes as she lifts her hand to her chest, where the dagger went in.
“You were gone. I held you as you...” I can’t finish, can’t say the words, can’t make them real again.
“I saw your mother,” she whispers.
My chest squeezes. “What?”
“Mazaline. She said...” Annora’s brow furrows. “She said I wasn’t finished.”
“What else did she say?”
“She said her ring chooses life.”
I glance down at the turquoise ring on Annora’s finger—the one that allowed us to meet in The Elemental.
