Page 108 of Iridian

Just me and those souls, so many of them tied to my very core, and they were now tearing that core apart little by little, like tearing pieces of the fabric of my soul.

Almost a hundred of them, and the more I tried to hold in that scream, to hold back the pain, the faster that number declined. Ninety, eighty six, eighty-two, seventy-nine…

The scream came out of me and I gave it every ounce of energy I had left. Because I realized that these souls weren’t being set free at all.

They weredisappearing.

Their lights shone in the darkness I’d been thrust in, and I saw them only in the distance—until they were no more. Until they simply turned off, ceased to exist.Gonefor good.

Goddess, this was wrong.

And I had no idea how to stop it.

Soon, the lights came to me, grew bigger and brighter and warmer against my skin that was being torn apart exactly likeTaland’s had been. I thought I knew what I was doing, thought I would carry the weight of their release together with him so we could both see the light at the end of the tunnel, but this was no tunnel at all. The only light came from the tricked souls of those soldiers, who were now being released from their linking with Taland—no.

They were being released from their bond tome.

I got to watch them as they flickered off and died like they had never breathed the air of this world at all.

Lights all around me—and the soldiers were screaming. Goddess, I heard their voices in my head and I couldn’t stop screaming myself, hoping to make them stop.

So heavy. So all consuming. I’d give up my life just for a second of silence.

How I’d taken being alone in my head for granted all my life. How I wished I could go back to when I only heard my own voice…

Now, I heard them all, begging, pleading, their lightsstickingto my skin—stop, please stop, don’t let us go!they screamed in one language or the other, but I understood all of it. Of course, I did—our souls were linked together.

So much light died in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t stop it, didn’t know how. No thoughts in my head except for them, their pain, the way they dimmed, the way they turned off, never to be seen again—and the way they all took a part of me with them.

NowIwas dying, it seemed, and the more I screamed, the heavier the souls, and thebiggerthose sources of light became. Until they morphed into humanoid figures, and grabbed me by the hands and feet, and pulled me down as they begged—please, please, please, please!

Over and over they begged.

A mistake. All of it, a mistake. I couldn’t stop tearing, and the lights around me wouldn’t stop going off. It had been a mistaketo start this ritual because this wasn’t going to set them free at all.

But there had to be a way, right? Wasn’t that what always happened—wasn’t therealwaysanother way?

“Remember the quest for a body that had come to its death by natural causes?”I asked Taland—or Taland asked me, but it was also my own voice.

So strange. None of it really made any sense, but that didn’t mean that all of it wasn’trealto me. The dark and the souls dragging me under and my fight to keep afloat as if I was in water and only my head was above the surface.

“Remember those beautiful moss-green eyes and the impossible task of getting an animal the size of a vulcera to bond to a person without accessible magic?”I asked or Taland asked—it really didn’t matter.

“Remember how she lay on that ice? How impossible the challenge given to us seemed?”

And finally,“Remember how it became perfectly possible then?”

There was always another way. The Iris Roe had taught me that, even if it had scarred me for life, had almost killed me on multiple occasions.

There was always another way.

“Stop!”

I screamed it at the top of my lungs. I called with my everything—and again, half my voice could have been Taland’s and half my thoughts could have belonged to him, but we were one. We’dbecomeone through magic, and now, with these tears in our bodies and our souls in pieces, disappeared with long-dead soldiers into this never-ending abyss, we were one physically, too.

The souls stopped pulling. The lights stopped flickering, dying. So few of them left—only sixty.Halfof what they once were. Only half.

But they stopped. They heard me. They listened.

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