Page 119 of Burning Ice
“Mirel.”
The second detonation came from below. The world reared. The ceiling dropped. Kylix lunged, heat lashing, but a falling beam clipped his shoulder and knocked him into the smoke.
“Kylix.”
Mirel’s frost flared wild and caught debris in a hanging sheet. The impact jarred his bones. Cold sang down his nerves. Hecoughed. Vision went white. For a breath he lost Kylix in the falling light.
“Kylix, where are you?” He tried to shout, but the roar took the sound. Instinct moved first. He reached for Kylix through his mind. Desperation tore something open where thought met power. For the first time, the bond answered back, not as feeling but as soundless speech.
Kylix, can you hear me?
The thought stretched across the chaos, fragile and bright. Relief hit hard in his chest.
“Stay away,” Kylix roared.
Mirel’s heart clenched. Kylix could not speak this way. Not yet. But he was there. Alive. The flare still burned.
No. I’m coming.
Light surged. The tunnel of ice spidered and groaned. Somewhere above, a siren died. Warmth brushed his spirit, Norma Zephyranth passing like a hand through the blaze.
Then the light turned blinding. A broken support flared white and took the worst of the blast. Everything went out in heat and noise and falling glass.
The silence after was not silence. It rang metal on metal.
Smoke crawled across the ceiling, drifting through the broken beams like breath from a dying animal. Sparks hissed in the puddles. He could smell them, burnt copper, insulation, the faint iron tang of blood, each scent layered until the air felt heavy. He wanted to move, to call again, but his throat refused sound. Somewhere deeper in the wreckage, a wire still glowed, slow and stubborn, like a heartbeat that didn’t know it had stopped.
A heartbeat echoed in the wreckage. Mirel’s body could not tell if it was falling or floating. The city still roared somewhere above, a muffled world he could not reach.
He thought of Kylix’s voice.Stay away.
He wondered if this was how you disobey fire. Frost crept along the edges of his thoughts, a hand trying to hold him in the world.
Then even that slipped. The cold went first. The light after. Mirel gave in to the dark, and everything fell away.
31
The world still burned behind his eyes when he woke. Not a dream, not an echo, just the bond refusing to die.
A faint echo of his last thought shivered through the wreckage as debris rained down. Grit and sparks struck his skin while the dying emergency lights painted the smoke in flashes of red and white. Kylix’s voice pulsed behind his eyes, a ghost of the telepathic flare that had saved him a heartbeat earlier.
Heat spoke before words could. It told him the fire was alive, and somewhere inside it, so was Kylix.
The echo crawled down his spine, not sound but pressure. Every nerve still carried the shape of that command.
“Don’t you dare die. Not for me,” he whispered into the smoke. The sound broke.
His heartbeat staggered once, then found the rhythm that wasn’t his.
The world tilted red, smoke bending with each pulse. For a moment he thought the light itself obeyed the bond, flaring when he breathed.
It faded slow, leaving a hollow throb in his skull and a shimmer under his skin.
It was the proof, the connection. The bond refused to die, only changed how it burned.
Mirel blinked through the smoke, a flicker of thought cutting the haze. Kylix’s command cut through the fire. For a breath, the memory steadied him before the next wave of noise hit. The light was gone, but the heat still roared. He wasn’t waking from sleep. He was forcing his way back to awareness. The building shook hard. Metal shrieked.
Air warped around falling metal, bending light the way pain bends thought.
