“Nor is going to forgive me,” he stammered. “She just told me so.”

“She came here to ease her own conscience,” Darai scoffed. “Because she has been given a choice to make, in order to save the mission.”

Valen remembered Nor’s words from earlier, about difficult choices. “What choice?”

Darai smiled smugly at him. “Your sister is going to betray you, Valen.”

“What?” Valen blurted out. The very idea of it was utterly ridiculous, and something Nor would never do.

But Darai continued, his expression eager as he leaned forward, reaching out to grip Valen’s arm. “Yes, princeling. Your body is dying, an unfortunate side effect of such a display of power, such a stretching of your compulsion across the galaxy. Of course, I knew that would happen all along,” he said dismissively, while Valen stared at him in horror. “No one can live forever, stretched in such a way. So, thanks to my plan, Nor is going to take your mind and wire it into Nexus before you die. Your body will falter, held in endless limbo by the satellite’s life-support system. But your mind, and your power...that will remain forever. Cast out across the galaxy, so that we can rule until the end of the end.”

Terrifying words.

And ones that Valen refused to believe, as shock raced through him, holding him in place.

“Guards,” he called out. “Guards!”

But his voice was too weak. And before Valen could reach for the panel beside his bed, to request a nurse, something seized him. His body froze, as if it was no longer beneath his control.

He cried out as a jolt of pain shot through him. A pain that Valen vaguely remembered feeling once before, the very first time Nor had entered his mind.

“What...what are you doing?” Valen asked frantically.

Because it was Darai touching his mind now. Darai, a man who had no power, a man who had simply hovered in the shadows all along.

“It has been far too long,” Darai whispered. Then he closed his eyes, and suddenly Valen’s eyes closed, too.

He tried to open them, but he felt like a hand was clasped over them. A mental hand was in his mind, too, squeezing, gripping tight, pulling all control from Valen. He groaned as the pain worked its way through his skull, like a parasite digging deep, inch by inch.

“Powerful, yes,” Darai said, his voice speaking into Valen’s mind. “But you are no match for a true Yielded of Exonia.”

Valen screamed as he felt himself ripped away from his own body. As he entered the familiar domain of his own mind, his fortress in the distance. Something carried him across the sky, over the valley of the dead, the cold wind slapping him across the face as he soared toward the castle.

He was thrown inside, into one of the turrets, where his head cracked against the black obsidinite stones.