POV: ELARA
Darkness.
Not the comfortable darkness of sleep, but something vast and empty and terrifyingly final.
I tried to breathe and couldn't. Tried to move and found my body impossibly distant, like it belonged to someone else entirely.
Am I dead?
The thought drifted through the void without urgency. Almost peaceful, if peace could be wrapped in growing horror.
Then sensation crashed back in fragments.
Kael's voice, raw with desperation: "—don't you dare leave me—"
Pain. Gods, the pain. My throat felt like it was on fire, burning with something far worse than the physical wound.
Lyra's frantic words: "—the dragonbane is reacting with her Reborn nature—creating some kind of compound poison—I don't know how to—"
Blood. So much blood. I could feel it, warm and wrong, pouring out of me faster than any healing could stop it.
Then darkness again. Pulling me down, down, down into depths I couldn't fight.
I should have been afraid.
