“Ryker, no—fight it!” I screamed into the suffocating darkness.
The void pressed down on me like a living thing, heavy and absolute, swallowing even the memory of moonlight. In the place where the moon should have hung, all I could see were his eyes—once proud gold, now twin pits of burning, malevolent red.
The man who had knelt before me only minutes ago, begging for forgiveness and a second chance at our shattered bond, was gone. In his place stood something ancient and wrong. Ryker’s skin split open with sickening cracks, dark smoke pouring from the fissures as if his soul were being burned alive from the inside. A grinding, mechanical screech tore from his throat—not a wolf’s howl, but the sound of something far older and far crueler.
“He is mine now, Sun-Walker,” Malphas’s voice bo
