Darkness.
It was not the absence of light—but the weight of too much of it. The Sovereign spirits slumbered inside Rowan, but their dreams whispered through his bones like static. He floated, suspended in a void of memory and magic, held in a liminal space not meant for the living.
He was… between.
And in this place, the walls of time were thin.
He heard them first—faint, like voices through a frost-glazed window.
“Don’t trust him.”
“She should have run when she had the chance.”
“Rowan never lived past the Hollowmere.”
“The Sovereign broke the world.”
They weren’t voices from his life.
They were from other lives.
Other versions of himself.
In the Waking World
Jace held Rowan’s unconscious form tightly, panic pounding behind his ribs. “He’s not waking up.”
“He’s breathing,” Qu
