Lyra's POV
It had been weeks since the attack, and still the same dream plagued me—Isolde’s body, the memory of what I had done. The guilt clung to me like a parasite, gnawing at my thoughts, never letting me breathe. Every night the vision replayed: her lifeless eyes staring, her body twisted and broken on the ground.
Blood pooled around her head. Blood I had spilt. Then the dream always shifted—her corpse rising, her hands around my throat, strangling me. She wandered the castle corridors like a ghost no one else seemed to notice. No one asked about her. No one spoke her name. Only me—tormented by her phantom presence.
She suffocated me in my sleep, and in her waking hours, the guilt did the same.
And I bore it alone. No one to confide in. Not Kale. Not Dimitri. No one.
The chamber
