I shake my head emphatically, my resolve bursting into a firestorm. “I’m coming for you before he can.” I raise my Wand, my power churning through my lines. “I’m coming for you tonight,” I insist, fierce love for him breaking like a wave, “and nothing can stop me. I’m going to fly to the Wyvernguard and take control of a portal...”

“There’s no time,” Lukas counters harshly. “Elloren, look at my eyes. Vogel’s going to absorb me into his hive.”

“His hive?”

“I’ll try to show you. I can merge you to me through Vogel’s Shadow tether.”

Confusion rattles me. “How?”

“Through my shielding magic. It’s stronger than Vogel’s, and I can trace his magical bindings through it.” He holds up the wand in his fist. “That’s how I got hold of this.”

I remember the strength of Lukas’s shields as he wove them into me, again and again, during our escape from Valgard.

“Show me,” I press.

Lukas closes his eyes and inhales, neck cording. The ropes of Shadow around us draw sharply in, Lukas’s earth power branching around both me and the Shadow. All the energy in my lines suddenly warps toward Lukas’s power, my body arching toward him as I’m swept into the bizarre sensation of my very essence pulling out of my body and into his.

Lukas’s translucent form slips over mine, the terrace snapping out of sight.

I blink uncomprehendingly at what now lies before us—a cavern’s shadowy alcove, a larger cave just beyond. A knot of multi-eyed, grotesquely stretched-out scorpios scuttle past without taking notice of us. Another Shadow-corrupted scorpio stands stock-still before us, as if on guard, its powerful forelimbs coated in blood. Lukas turns his head, and we take in the dead Mage soldier lying crumpled in the shadows, his body mutilated, as if slashed clear through before being dragged to the back of the cave and stuffed into its darkest recess.

I remember this space—the prison Lukas was in when I connected to him via the dead wraith bat’s Shadow rune. A fragile hope lights. Somehow, he’s gotten hold of a wand and struck down the prison’s Shadow bars...

Lukas moves forward, and the motion pulls me with him. We peer into a gigantic cave opening just beyond our alcove...and fear grips hold. It’s mammoth, expanding seemingly forever, the height of the vaulted ceiling rising to obscurity. Affixed all over the cave’s obsidian walls is an organic growth resembling combs of a wasp’s nest—if wasps were as large as humans.

Soldiers are emerging from the nest’s wall of hexagonal cells, their eyes glowing gray as they drop to the stony ground. And not just Mage soldiers, Alfsigr too, their ivory bodies elongated, their eyes an enlarged, insectile gray.