The rune-lit chamber trembled.
West didn't move. He couldn't. Not while that voice still echoed through the chambers of his soul—icy, familiar, and wrong in all the ways that mattered.
He stumbled to his feet, fingers tracing the crystalline moss for support. Above him, the runes carved into the curved ceiling of the ruined observatory flickered erratically, responding to something neither arcane nor natural. For a moment, he could see his breath in the air—then the frost on the walls began to recede. Not melt. Recede. As if something was drawing the cold inward, feeding on it.
His hand shot to his chest again, pressing into the skin above the second heartbeat.
That pulse.
That impossible rhythm.
It had returned.
