Isadora:
The scriptorium reeks of blood, sweat, and exhaustion.
Rhett slumps in the chair, smeared streaks of red across his skin. Kai hasn’t moved from my bed—his chest rising in shallow, feverish waves, shadows clinging beneath his eyes. Lucian kneels beside the girl he saved, using blood magic to heal her wound, his stare sharp enough to cut steel, though his hand is steady where it presses against her bleeding leg. And Silas—my Silas—is a trembling coil of shadows in the corner, his chest rising with a thousand unshed emotions, his eyes twin pools of obsidian fixed on me, I can hear the shadows screaming, he is living a nightmare right now.
They are all wrecked. Broken down to marrow.
And me?
I’m standing. Alive. My heart a drumbeat, my veins a furnace.
But the storm outside howl
