ARIN
The charm was eating her alive.
Not slowly. Not gently. Not with the careful, creeping heat of a fever building over hours. It was consuming her the way fire consumed parchment — fast, greedy, total. The obsidian burned against her collarbone like a brand, and the skin beneath it had gone from pink to red to something blistered and raw that she could smell.
Burning flesh. My flesh. That's what burning flesh smells like and I always wondered and now I know and I wish I didn't.
She was on the floor. She didn't remember falling. One moment she'd been standing at the window with Ryven's hand on her arm and the connection blazing open between her and Dhaelon, and the next she was on cold stone with her cheek pressed against centuries of dust and her fingers still locked around the charm like they'd been welded there.
The room was gone.
