Hello!
Gosh, I have been so busy that time is flying by. Here is a bonus scene of chapter 2 all in Evran’s POV from A Court of Dreams and Deceit. Enjoy!
The First Light
The construct shuddered beneath his palms.
Evran pressed harder, fingers splayed against a surface that had once been marble, veined with silver, cool and solid beneath his hands. It had thinned to little more than will stretched thin. He held it the way he held everything now. Through habit. Through the blunt refusal to be the one who stopped first.
The grey pressed in from every direction. Not darkness—darkness held depth. Dimension. The promise of something concealed. This was absence made visible, stretching without horizon, without boundary, without the mercy of an ending.
His body was a ruin. The cracks that had once pulsed with violet-blue fire—his power, his blood, the inheritance of a royal line that governed the borders between worlds—had gone dark and dry. Hairline fractures branched up his forearms, his throat, his temples. The skin between them had thinned to something translucent and wrong. More fissure than flesh.
He breathed because breathing was what bodies did.
The hounds circled beyond the construct’s edges. Shapes that registered wrong against the grey tears in fabric given appetite and patience. They’d been something else once. Beings with names. The void had taken everything except the hunger, and the hunger was enough.
They were waiting. They could afford to wait.
At some point he’d stopped trying to seal the cracks. At some point the effort of holding himself together had narrowed to this—a platform, a floor, the single stubborn declaration that he existed, and the grey could not have him yet.
Not hope. Hope required a future, and futures required imagination, and his had been scraped thin enough to see through. Not defiance, defiance required an audience.
Just the mechanical continuation of a thing in motion. A stone rolling because nothing had stopped it.
The largest hound pressed closer. Its breath scraped the air. Low, guttural, wrong. A sound that might have been laughter, from a throat no longer built for it.
Evran didn’t look.
He held the floor. The floor held him. The arrangement was all that remained.
A presence brushed the edge of his awareness, and his body ignited.
Not gently. Not gradually. The cracks in his skin flared violet-blue—a dim pulse, barely visible, but there after months of nothing—and every nerve that had gone dormant under the weight of the grey fired at once. His fingers curled against the floor. His chest locked. The breath that had been mechanical stuttered ragged, uncontrolled.
Warmth.
Not the memory of warmth. Not the concept. Actual heat bleeding through the grey like light through a fracture, brushing the border of his prison with the carelessness of a mind that didn’t know it was being observed.
A dreamer. A mortal mind drifting close to the membrane between worlds in deep sleep.
