I keep telling myself the ache in my bones is just ritual fatigue. That the hollow ache behind my ribs is nothing but nerves. That the world feels tilted because I haven’t slept, not because something ripped half of me out like it was turning a page. The lie feels pathetic even in my own head. I grew up on stories about my family’s devotion, their “offerings,” their sacred duty. All the whispered prayers. All the blood spilled in bowls. All the careful marks carved into skin with hands that shook but never hesitated. Centuries of worship poured into something no one ever saw. I used to imagine the entity as ancient and benevolent, maybe asleep, maybe waiting. Something that guided generations of us with invisible hands. Now I know the truth: It wasn’t asleep. It wasn’t benevolent. It just wasn’t interested. Not until me. The moment the ritual opened, when the heat swelled, and the gold in the bowl shuddered, the breach didn’t bring Zhravel. It didn’t bring destiny. It didn’t bring what I was calling for. It brought something that had been watching my bloodline like a cat watches a string it can’t be bothered to chase. Until tonight, apparently. A pressure rolled through me so fast it punched my breath out. The air collapsed inward, warping, folding, like the house itself was being inhaled. Light snapped white. My chest lurched. And then a hook sank into the center of me, cold, familiar, inevitable. My soul moved. My body didn’t. It peeled away from me like silk. I felt the weight of my limbs fall to the floor, but I wasn’t in them anymore. The world smeared sideways and then simply wasn’t. I landed in… a draft. A blueprint of a world. An unfinished pocket of existence stitched together with tension and hunger. The kind of place you get when a god doesn’t bother making scenery. And in the middle of it, watching me with the unhurried satisfaction of something that’s waited centuries to get a proper look at the toy it’s been handed blood from. It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Its attention hit harder than any voice. I felt its recognition like a hand sliding under my spine. A sort of bored amusement. A pulse of affection twisted wrong. “So this is the one”, the feeling said.

  “This is the first one worth touching”. It leaned closer without moving, and something inside my sternum tore gently, like a seam coming undone. A part of me detached, claimed, tucked away for safekeeping in this pocket-world. A souvenir. It shoved the rest of me back toward my body with the indifference of someone closing a drawer. I hit myself crookedly, only half reconnecting. My limbs felt like borrowed furniture. My heartbeat sounded a fraction of a second late. And the hollow place under my ribs, that’s where the missing piece used to live. I lie in bed now, staring at the ceiling, trying to keep myself anchored. The room is too quiet. The walls breathe wrong. Every few seconds, a ripple of pressure rolls through the house, subtle enough I’d think I imagined it if it didn’t make the hairs on my arms rise. The entity’s attention never fully leaves. A crack snakes down the wall near the window. Just a hairline. Just plaster. Except plaster doesn’t pulse. Heat blooms under the floorboards for half a heartbeat before fading. Something structurally wrong hums under the foundation, like the house itself is absorbing the aftershock of that ritual and deciding to react in its own suicidal way. The entity doesn’t care that it might destroy the place.

  If anything, it feels entertained. I force myself to sit up. My body moves like it’s reluctantly remembering how to be mine. I press my palm to my chest, right over the hollow place. It thrums faintly. A tether connecting me to that unfinished dimension. A promise that the entity can yank me back anytime it gets bored again. A reminder that it didn’t come tonight because it was summoned. It came because it finally felt like indulging a family that’s fed it for hundreds of years. My throat tightens. I swallow hard. The house groans again, deep, warping, unhealthy. Something whispers across the back of my mind. Curious. Expectant. I clench my teeth. I hold onto myself with everything I have left. If the entity wants fun, it picked the wrong generation. This house is still going to burn.

  It made a mistake letting me still have some semblance of control over my body. I know what I have to do, even though it’s going to be a whole lot harder now. The house still has to burn, Yann?k still needs to think that he has no choice but to kill me. There is nothing that can convince me to change my mind on that. Not even some fucking arrogant deity thinks it can toss me around. I am not going down that easily.

  Even though I was watching myself in third person, I knew I still had things to get done. The mess of the ritual was still on the floor, staining the rug red and gold. Why the fuck had I done it on the rug?! I could berate myself about being a fucking idiot all day, but that rug isn’t going to move itself. Willing my body to move took a lot more effort than I thought it would. Not being attached to it made everything so much harder, like forcing a tired toddler to drag its feet and actually move. I watched myself roll up the rug and hide the ritual components away. I hadn’t even carved the rune into my side like I needed to. Why didn’t I do that before this whole ritual? Yann?k would not believe my story if I didn’t have any proof of it. And now I have the glowdust, so I might as well try to figure this whole mess out. First things first, get my incorporeal self back into my corporeal self. My soulless husk of a body isn’t doing anyone any favors by moving like it’s already dead. The problem is how. I studied this ritual, thinking that it would work, and I didn’t need to know anything else. Magic has never been my thing. I stood in front of my mortal coil, staring into my own lifeless eyes and watching myself stare back. Suddenly, I felt bad for her; she wasn’t me anymore, she was someone else whom I had treated so badly all these years. I had put her through all that pain, all that torture. I had forced her to hurt herself. Cut into her own flesh and bleed because I couldn’t handle the things around her. She had taken all that damage so I could stay alive and fight my stupid fucking family. A fight I’d never win at this rate. I wanted to cry for her, apologize for everything I had done, for everything I had put her through. Now, when I really saw her, when she wasn’t just an extension of me, I saw just how much she’d actually taken.

  How much abuse she had been put through; all the missing teeth, the broken bones that never healed right. That little crick in her right pinky after it was snapped one too many times.

  I reached out, placing my ethereal hands on her shoulders. My fingers slipped through, not because I missed, but because she was shying away. She’s scared of me. With every right. How had I never noticed how thin she had gotten? Had I really forced her to skip so many meals, or had I just not bothered to make her eat? Either way, this is all my fault. I grabbed her hands; they were so cold, like she’d been out in the cold for hours. I squeezed her fingers, silently praying she would let me back in, that if she had any say in this, I hadn’t made her hate me with everything that I had done. She didn’t react to my touch. Whatever was pulling her strings didn’t want her to see me. For some twisted reason it wanted us kept separate. I’m not letting it win. I may have treated my body like a puppet, treated it just like it’s being treated now, but it is mine. I pulled her into a hug, linking us together with the hope of becoming one again. I felt hopeless; I had no idea what to do. If there was anything I could do at all. I can’t let it end like this. Even though whatever did this, really wants me to. I can already feel it trying to pull me away from her. A cold, deliberate blade ripping us apart at the seams.

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  “Come on, Leonora, you have so much more to fight for. I can’t do this alone. ” I whispered into her hair.

  I held her as everything went dark. Squeezing as hard as I could, like pushing myself back in through the tears in her skin, would get me back to where I needed to be. Then the tears came. Flooding my eyes and pouring down my cheeks. I didn’t realize I could feel the cold wet on my cheeks for a long moment. My skin was wet, my body was screaming in pain. It wasn’t only hers anymore; now we share it again, and I realize that I have to bear my part too. If we are not whole, there’s no way we’ll get through this. I can tell that whatever tore us apart wants to keep us that way. It’s already tugging me away again. I never thought I’d have to fight this hard just to keep myself inside my own body. A body I don’t see as my own anymore. She deserves so much better than me.

  The fact that the first thing I have to do now that we’re back together is carve into her again makes her nauseous. I’m putting her through more pain before even having the chance to let her heal.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered again, though the words sounded useless even to me. A flimsy apology to a body that had carried every wound, every bruise, every bruise I’d told myself didn’t count. I pushed my blouse up and over my head, fabric dragging over my shoulders, the cold air kissing skin that still didn’t feel mine fully. My hands shook. Not from fear, fear would have been honest, but from something closer to shame. The desk drawer slid open with barely a sound. The knife lay exactly where my body had left it. Waiting. As if it knew I’d come back. I picked it up. The handle was warm. Not from use, no one had touched it since the ritual, but from a cold that didn’t belong in this room. The entity’s cold. I swallowed hard. My throat felt tight. My body didn’t move away this time, but she didn’t move closer either. She just stood there, hollow-eyed, like a ghost that still remembered what lungs were for.

  “I won’t make you do it again,” I murmured, even though she couldn’t answer. “It’s my turn.”

  I pressed the blade to my gut. The first touch was gentle. Almost tender. Then I pushed. Pain flared bright and immediate, hot as molten metal, sharp enough that the world snapped into perfect clarity. My breath hitched. My knees almost buckled. The blade slid through skin with a sickening ease, opening a thin red line that welled instantly. I sucked in air through my teeth and kept going. The rune had to be exact. One wrong angle, and all of this would have been for nothing. I dragged the knife upward, then curved it short and sharp, tracing the sigil I’d memorized from that cursed book. Blood followed the blade, a bright red tremor across my stomach. It hurt. Gods, it hurt. But pain was grounding. Pain meant I was here. I carved the second stroke slower, deeper. My vision blurred at the edges. The room tilted. A cold sweat rolled down my spine, and for a moment I felt the pull again, that terrible, deliberate tug from inside my ribs, like a hand curling around the tether. Not now. Not yet.

  “Stay with me,” I hissed at myself, because begging the entity was pointless.

  My body flinched at the sound of my voice. But she didn’t pull away. I carved the final arc, biting down so hard I tasted blood, my teeth, not the knife’s. The sigil’s shape completed itself under my trembling hand. My legs gave out, and I sank to the floor, clutching the edge of the dresser to stay upright. The rune flared. Not with light, light would have been too kind. It burned inward, a deep twisting heat that curled beneath my skin like a brand searing its way into the soul underneath. I forced in a breath that scraped like broken glass, fumbling for the vial Azure had given me. Red glowdust. I uncorked it with my teeth, my hands too slick to hold anything properly. The grains shimmered faintly in the lamplight, the color of dying embers.

  “Please work,” I muttered, begged, really, and tipped the vial. The dust spilled over the fresh wound. The reaction was immediate. It hissed on contact, the way cold water spits on hot metal. The rune drank the powder greedily, pulling the red flecks into the carved lines as if my skin were a mouth swallowing fire. Heat bloomed outward, threading itself into the cut with a sick kind of finality. I gritted my teeth as the sigil ignited. A slow, spreading crimson glow pulsed under the skin, brightening with every heartbeat. Like something alive. Like something waking up. For a moment, the air felt warmer than it should have, like the house was holding its breath. I ignored it. There was no turning back. My body shuddered. Not from pain, pain she could handle. This was the sensation of being filled. The flames already beginning to stir up inside me. The rune throbbed once, twice.

  Then the red light settled, embedding itself inside me like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to either version of myself. I gasped, actually gasped, because for a heartbeat, I felt her. My body. She blinked. Slow. Like someone waking from a long sleep. For one perfect moment, something in her recognized me. Not as the thing that hurt her. Not as the reason she bled. As the other half of herself. Then the tether jerked hard enough to snap my breath in two. I clutched the wound and forced myself back toward her, leaning into her weight, pressing our foreheads together despite the pain, the blood, the burning sigil.

  “Not this time,” I choked out.

  “You don’t get to take her. You don’t get to take me.” The rune pulsed once, hard, and the world went dark around the edges. But I didn’t let go.

  After all this, at least I had a backup plan. This rune would be nowhere near as effective as Zhravel’s power itself, but hopefully, it would do the job. Velisvet, our benevolent goddess watching over the realm, didn’t feel like the one who would help me burn the house down. Preaching goodness and all that shit that’s never going to happen. But maybe, just maybe, she would see how desperate I am and just give me a little spark.

  Now there was so much more at stake and so many more variables that could go wrong. Now, something I had no idea what is, has a grasp on my soul, and I know I’m about to die.

  Nothing good can ever come of that. If Yann?k doesn’t believe my story, then everything is even more screwed. Everything just needs to go right, just this once.

  I just need to hold on a bit longer.

  “Don’t leave me,” I begged Leonora in a whimper. Praying that she listens.