I love you. I will be waiting for you on the other side.
It lashes through me and then, impossibly, toward whatever is left of Kael’s attention.
The dock gives under my hand.
Cold takes my limbs.
The woman’s voice is distant, like an echo churned through surf.
Her cackle becomes a smear of sound.
I think maybe someone screams my name. Amber? Aloysious?
My ears ring with it and with the drum of Kael’s vow, the promise that had warmed me for days.
I want to lean into that promise, to hold it like a rope and climb back up.
I reach for something, anything. My fingers slide through the frigid waters.
Darkness is not theatrical.
It’s simply the world going soft around the edges, colors bleeding into one another until there is only pulse and the taste of salt and the one sharp, bright regret that I ran out of time to say everything I felt.
Somewhere above, on the storm-split horizon, I feel the sea send for Kael.
With it, I send one last, ragged echo into the bond—hope, not surrender.
Then something takes hold of me.
It pulls me under, and everything goes muffled.
It’s no longer blue here. It’s black and slow.
Cold. Alone.
Oh, Kael. I’m sorry.
Chapter 25
Kael
Last Fightfor the Eastern Tidal Lands
The bond sears hot, sudden and brutal, tearing through me with a pulse of terror.
Not mine—hers.
Phoebe.
My Telya.
My viyella.
Her panic flares in my chest, wild and desperate, followed by a flood of regret so sharp it nearly drops me to my knees.
“No,” I snarl, my voice booming over the crashing waves. “No!”
Something is wrong!
