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There was no water inside them. Nothing answered me. Nothing obeyed.

“Run!” Helion roared.

I turned on my heel and sprinted through the woods.

“Call your monsters,” Kaezlyn panted, red hair flying around her as she ran, voice barely breaking over the buzz of the dead.

“What?”

“Your monsters, Lyra!” Kaezlyn shouted, ash whipping through her crimson hair. “None of our powers work on the dead!”

“My monsters,” I breathed, confusion blending with something far more dangerous.

The words struck something buried so deep within me, it felt like a sickening instinct.

Yes... Maraveth’s voice rose from the deepest part of my soul. Our monsters.

The world slowed.

Ash drifted through the air like snow suspended beneath the sea. Sound stretched and warped until the screams behind us became little more than distant echoes beneath an endless tide.

Sing for them... she urged, voice wrapping around my heart with terrifying tenderness. They will answer.

My feet stumbled, and I stopped. Her melody wound through my mind like a poison I somehow craved. It was the same song she had sung to me while Edgar cut me open.

My lips parted before I realised I had begun to sing.

The note slipped into the air, low and mournful, carrying a fragment of my soul with it.

It carried until my voice and hers became indistinguishable, woven together into a single haunting ballad that rolled across the burning forest.

“Lyra, stop!” Helion yelled. But I kept singing, the song pouring from me like it belonged.

Click. Click. Click.

I stilled, the song dying in my throat as I spun towards the familiar, bone-chilling noise.

Four Skanthi prowled through the trees, on sharpened, insect-like legs. Their heads jerked towards me as if answering my call. I craned my neck to look at them. The sharp pincers of their mouths gaped open, and a series of clicks echoed through the night, like bones breaking underwater.

My monsters.

I stood frozen, and my stomach dropped out from underneath me.

A hand clamped around my wrist, pulling me backwards and making my eyes tear from the Skanthi rushing towards the souls.

My feet moved on their own accord, every step that carried us away pulled me towards a familiar thrum in my chest.

The Dead Sea.

“This way!” Selkie yelled, changing direction towards the sea’s call.

The trees finally began to thin.

The Dead Sea stretched beyond the black shoreline, endless and impossibly blue beneath a sky raining ash, its waves rising and falling with a rhythm so ancient my own heartbeat instinctively answered it.

Every breath I'd fought for loosened from my lungs.

Home.