Chapter 128
*Nathaniel*
Waking up inside someone else’s mind was nothing like I expected.
There was no gentle easing into awareness, no sudden flash of memory or light. It felt like falling through water that never wanted to let you surface. Slow. Cold. Weighted. When I finally blinked into consciousness, my body didn’t respond the way it should have. It wasn’t pain I felt–it was absence. Like I’d been hollowed out from the inside and stitched back together wrong.
The first thing I registered was fire.
Not hot. Not burning. Just everywhere.
Not flames exactly, but a dull red glow that pulsed in the cracks beneath the stone floor like veins of lava under skin. The air was thick–dense with magic, old and trembling. It felt like breathing inside a wound.
I was still in her mind.
Or whatever was left of it.
The throne room had changed since the last time I saw it. The silver had blackened. The floor fractured in jagged lines that spiderwebbed outward like something had detonated from the center. Above me, there was no ceiling–just an endless void where stars should’ve been, and instead, there was nothing but swirling smoke.
And silence.
I pulled myself upright, groaning as the weight of her subconscious pressed down on my shoulders like grief made solid. My boots scraped across scorched stone. The last thing I remembered was Eira grabbing me–her fingers ice and heat and memory all at once. I didn’t know what part of me was real anymore.
But I could still feel her.
Jiselle.
The bond between us–what remained of it–flickered faintly in my chest, like the last breath of a dying ember. I followed it. Because it was all I had. All I’d ever really had.
The throne stood empty now. Burnt. Broken. Splintered down the middle like someone had tried to slice it in half with a blade made of light. I walked past it without looking too closely. It was a symbol, once. Of her power. Of her fall. Of what Eira wanted her to become. And what she might still be.
The room led into a hall–one I had successfully unlocked! extended into darkness, the walls lined with fractured memories instead of stone. Scenes played across the surfaces
like oil paintings half–smeared by a storm: her as a child, curled in a bed far too big for
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her; her in the Trial arena, blood drying beneath her fingernails; her on her knees before Kael, flame spilling from her wrists as she begged herself not to give in.
Every few steps, I felt something change.
The air thickened. The ground grew colder.
The bond inside me pulsed stronger.
But so did the ache.
Every foot forward was a choice. And every choice dragged a memory to the surface- except they weren’t mine. They were hers.
And they hurt.
The first struck before I realized what was happening.
I blinked, and suddenly, I was standing in the rain.
Not here. Not in the throne room. Somewhere else. Familiar.
The clearing outside the Academy.
Jiselle stood across from me–barefoot, bleeding, eyes shining with betrayal.
“I waited for you,” she whispered.
My heart seized.
“I know,” I whispered back. But she didn’t hear me.
Because this wasn’t real.
It was memory.
It played out around me like theater carved into time. I watched myself turn away from her. Watched the flinch in her shoulders when I said the wrong thing. Watched the exact moment she stopped believing I would fight for her.
And the guilt crawled deeper.
I stumbled forward.
The vision shattered.
Another rose in its place.
Kael, standing behind her. His hand on her shoulder. Her face unreadable, Masked. The girl I loved sealed behind a layer of survival so thick even her wolf couldn’t reach her.
“This is what you failed to protect.”
The voice slid from behind me–low, elegant, cruel.
I turned.
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Eira.
She stepped from the shadow between memories, bare feet not quite touching the ground. Her presence distorted the air, bending it like heat over a flame.
“This is all that’s left,” she said, sweeping a hand across the ruined corridor of memory. “Fear. Rejection. A history of being chosen second.”
“She was never second to me,” I growled.
“No,” Eira said, voice softening. “She was first. That’s why it broke her.”
I didn’t answer.
Because part of me wondered if she was right.
Eira moved closer. “She trusted you. And still, she burned alone. You left. You doubted. You didn’t believe she’d survive.”
“I believed in her too much,” I said. “I thought she didn’t need saving.”
“Everyone needs saving.”
I stepped past her, unwilling to argue. I followed the bond again, the thread of gold and silver that still ran faint through the cracks of this ruined place. It led to a door–not a grand one, not dramatic. Just a small, old wooden door with the paint peeling.
I pushed it open.
And inside, I found her.
Or what was left.
She sat in the center of the room. Pale, still, spine too straight. Her hair unbound, falling over her shoulders like a curtain. The space around her glowed faintly white- light without source.
And her eyes-
Godddes.
Her eyes glowed with a blinding, steady white. Not like before, when power shimmered just beneath her irises, flecks of light swimming over violet or gold. This wasn’t that. This was complete. Unbroken. Consuming. Like her soul had been lit from the inside and every trace of color, of humanity, had been burned away.
No warmth.
No spark of recognition.
Just brilliance. Cold and hollow.
“Jiselle,” I said carefully, not moving too fast, not daring to break whatever fragile thread might still be anchoring her to this place. To me.
She didn’t move.
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Not a twitch. Not a blink. Just… silence.
“Jis,” I tried again, voice softer, stepping closer despite the chill that suddenly filled the air between us. “It’s me.”
Still nothing.
No flicker in her expression. No change in her stance.
It was like talking to a reflection.
Then–she stood.
Slowly. Deliberately. Every movement calculated, unnatural in its smoothness, like she wasn’t using her body the way it was meant to move but puppeteering it from
somewhere deep within.
Her head tilted, just slightly, just enough to make my chest clench.
She looked at me–not in fear, not in fury, but in blank curiosity. Like I was a puzzle with too many pieces. Like the shape of my face, the sound of my voice, meant something, but she couldn’t quite remember what.
Like she’d never seen me before in her life.
My heart sank.
I swallowed hard, breath shallow. “Jiselle… come back. Please.”
She blinked once. Slowly.
Then she opened her mouth.
And when she spoke, the voice that came out was hers.
But warped. Distant. Echoing with something far older.
“Who are you?”
The words dropped between us like stones into water, rippling through the ruined space of her mind.
The light behind her eyes flared brighter, burning without heat, burning with finality.
And I knew-
I was too late.
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