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There was nothing.

Only an unnatural stillness where Rythos had once been.

Pain ripped through my chest so suddenly that my back arched, the bond constricting tighter and tighter around something deeper than flesh, something woven through my soul that refused to understand the body beneath me was dying.

I clutched at my sternum as the pressure became unbearable, choking another scream from my throat until I thought my own heart might rupture beneath it⁠—

Snap.

The tether broke.

The bond vanished with such violence that for one impossible moment I could still feel the shape of it around my heart, an absence carved perfectly in the place where Rythos had lived.

His body slackened.

I stared at him. Waiting for him to blink. For his chest to rise and fall.

But he was gone.

I screamed.

My voice fractured into a thousand overlapping layers—Siren, goddess and broken Mortal bleeding together until the temple trembled beneath the sound. Beyond its marble pillars, the ocean rose to mourn with me.

Waves towered against the shores of Elysium before collapsing with enough force to shake the island, seawater exploding against the cliffs as my power answered the pain within me.

It was suffocating me, the unbearable cruelty of continuing to exist in a world where he no longer did.

Warmth spread through my chest as Helion reached for me through our bond, anchoring me against the tide of grief.

But it wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t move.

I cupped Rythos’ face between my hands, trying desperately to memorise every part of him—the strong sweep of his brows, the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the thick swoop of his dark eyelashes.

My thumb brushed slowly across his motionless lips, and I stilled as a thin wisp of shadow slipped from between them.

Cold darkness curled over my fingers like smoke, and horror gripped me.

“No,” my voice cracked on a sob.

His skin dissolved into darkness, shadows peeling away from bone and flesh until the shape of the man I loved began slipping through my fingers.

“No, no⁠—”

I clawed desperately through the darkness, trying to hold onto anything that remained of him, but the shadows slipped through my fingers no matter how tightly I closed them.

“Rythos!”

But he was gone, sinking into the throne and paying for my sins.

The ground shook.

Black veins withdrew from the marble while fractures knitted themselves together, the ruined stone becoming smooth and pristine beneath my hands as though none of this had ever happened.

As though Rythos had not died to heal it.