The scream didn’t stop when the light died. It crept into me, into the cracks of the earth, and into the air.
There was silence when the silver eventually faded. Too quiet. No rivers. No wolves. No cradle. There was only a profound silence that echoed in my ears like a heart that had lost its rhythm.
I forced what was left of my body off the ground. The cavern had vanished. The sky was a huge void filled with floating ash and fragments of light, where stone should have been. The words itself hollow as if it had exhaled and never breathed in again.
"Thorn?" My voice came out splintered and rough.
He lay a few feet away, half-buried in glowing dust. His chest rose and fell, shallow but steady. The veins of silver that had run through him were fading, replaced by faint, golden flickers be
