Page 106 of The Madness Within

It devoured him while he was still alive, still screaming.

Then the Gate began to close.

I turned to Ember… She was barely breathing.

I rushed and dropped to my knees beside her. Her body was cold, light still leaking faintly from the sigils burned into her skin. Her chest barely moved. Her pulse… gone.

“No,” I whispered, voice shattered.

The bond flickered.

I laid her down, brushed the blood-matted hair from her face, and pressed my forehead to hers.

“I love you,” I breathed. “I always have. Before the Gate. Before the prophecy. Even before I knew what this was. I love you. Ichooseyou.”

Magic pulsed from me, wild, unrestrained.

I dropped to my knees, her lifeless body in my arms, her blood still warm against my chest. My heart shattered, and from its ruins, something ancient and violent erupted.

The Madness within me, no longer chained, rose like a storm. Shadows burst from my skin, antlers of night twisting behind me like a crown of damnation.

My magic bled from my hands, raw and red, glowing with the fury of a thousand broken promises. The mark that bound us flared, searing through my skin, and I poured every ounce of myself into it.

Keeper. Monster. Lover. I was all of it now.

The Gate pulsed, a heartbeat out of sync with the world, but I defied it. I defied death itself.

My blood curled around hers, our veins igniting in tandem, silver wrapped in crimson, tethering fate to fury. “Come back to me, Ember,” I whispered, not as a command, but as a prayer, dark, desperate, divine.

The ground shook. The magic cracked. Light erupted between us, violent and holy, exploding into a scream of finality as the Gate slammed shut behind us with one last banshee howl.

And in the silence that followed… she breathed.

Alive.

Chapter Forty-Seven

??The Death Certificate of Love

Ember

It was quiet.

Too quiet for a battlefield.

No screams. No magic. No fire. Just... stillness. Soft, clean, and endless.

And stars, so many stars above me, like a sky dipped in silver ink.

I stood barefoot in a place that didn’t feel real. My wounds were gone. The blood. The pain. The weight of the world. It had all been stripped away like an old coat I never asked to wear.

“Hello, my firefly.”

My breath caught.

I turned around.

She stood there in a halo of soft white light, her long braid falling over her shoulder, eyes as fierce as I remembered, and as kind. Beside her, a man I’d only seen in photos.

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