The world fractured as they fell.
Selene's stomach lurched as the cliff face disintegrated beneath them, moonlit rocks tumbling into the abyss like broken teeth. Kael's arms locked around her waist, his stolen shadows erupting to cushion their fall...but the impact still drove the breath from her lungs as they slammed onto an outcropping twenty feet below.
Cyrus wasn't so lucky.
Her brother hit the slope and rolled, his injured arm flailing as he skidded toward the edge. Selene's claws scraped stone as she lunged, catching his wrist just as he started to slide into oblivion.
"Hold on!" she screamed.
Cyrus's weight nearly wrenched her shoulder from its socket. His one good eye met hers, the pupil dilated so wide the blue iris was nearly gone. Blood streamed from his nose, his chest markings now burning so bright they cast eerie shadows across his face.
"Let go," he rasped.
"Never."
Above them, Roran's monstrous form loomed against the Blood Moon, his bone-wings scraping the sky. The First Shadow's voice still echoed through the valley, turning the very air thick and syrupy. Where her words touched the earth, the ground twisted...trees uprooting themselves with wet, tearing sounds, boulders splitting open to reveal glistening hollows within.
Kael hauled them both back from the edge just as the mountain screamed.
The rock beneath their hands turned porous, then soft, then flesh-like, pulsing with veins that hadn't been there a moment before. Selene recoiled as the stone split open beside her, a yawning chasm exhaling the stench of rotting lilies.
From its depths, a hand emerged.
Not skeletal anymore.
Alive.
Pale and perfect and wrong, its fingers too long, its nails curved like crescent moons. Where it touched the transformed rock, the surface bloomed...sprouting eyes that blinked in unison, mouths that whispered in languages lost to time.
The First Shadow was climbing out of her prison.
And she was beautiful.
The Markings' Price
Cyrus convulsed, his back arching off the ground as his markings flared white-hot. "She's...augh...she's using them!" Blood vessels burst in his eye, painting the sclera red. "The markings...they're a bridge!"
Selene barely registered Kael's shout as the First Shadow's other hand breached the surface. The creature's skin shimmered like oil on water, her form flickering between a dozen possibilities...a woman, a wolf, a writhing mass of wings and teeth...never settling, never whole.
Roran's monstrous shriek split the night as he dove toward them, his bone-wings scattering droplets of blue fire. Kael intercepted him mid-air, their collision sending both tumbling over the edge in a whirl of shadows and snapping bones.
"Kael!" Selene's scream tore her throat raw.
The bond between them stretched...thin as a spider's silk, vibrating with shared agony...but didn't break.
Cyrus grabbed her face, forcing her to look at him. His lips were turning blue. "Listen! The markings... your mother didn't carve them to summon the First Shadow..." A wet cough. "She carved them to become her."
The world tilted.
Memories surfaced...her mother's smile too sharp, her shadow moving a heartbeat too slow. The way she'd hummed while skinning rabbits, the tune never quite right.
"She was the first vessel," Cyrus gasped. "But she was too weak. The First Shadow... she's been waiting for you."
Above them, the perfect hand flexed.
And the First Shadow pulled.
The Bond's Answer
Kael's shadow-filled roar shook the valley.
He erupted from the cliffside in a whirl of obsidian claws and borrowed power, Roran's broken form clutched in one hand. The herald's wings hung in tatters, his blue light guttering like a dying star.
"Selene!" Kael hurled Roran's body at the emerging First Shadow. "Now!"
Instinct took over.
Selene plunged her claws into Cyrus's chest markings...not to kill, but to connect. His blood burned against her fingers as their shared heritage ignited.
The world exploded in white fire.