Sneak peek
“Open it,” she commands. A plea wrapped in an order.
You unclench your fingers.
The movement is stiff. Reluctant.
The obsidian pendant sits there, drinking the grey light of the room. The gold heartbeat at its center flares, casting a faint, sickly glow onto Laemir’s face.
She recoils.
She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t gasp. She stops breathing entirely.
“Draegan,” she whispers. The name breaks in her mouth like dry bone.
She looks at the stone, then up at you. And for the first time since you were a child, you see true fear in her eyes. Not the fear of soldiers, or fire, or pain.
The fear of something inevitable.
“He didn’t just find you,” she says, her voice trembling.
She reaches out, hovering her hand over the stone but refusing to touch it. The air between her fingers and the pendant hisses, a sound like water hitting a hot skillet.
“He claimed you.”
She looks at the window, where the sun is beginning to bleed out behind the clouds. The light is failing.
“Midnight,” you say. The word feels foreign on your tongue. “It says Midnight.”
Laemir closes her eyes. A shudder runs through her, violent and sudden.
“Then we have hours,” she says, turning away, moving toward the loose floorboard where she keeps the old books. “Not to run. You can’t run from a God.”
She pulls a tome from the dark, the leather cracked and smelling of the Cradle.
“We have hours to make sure you survive the conversation.”