Chapter 146: [146] Three Insects in the Snow
Silence.
No more screaming wind. No more grinding ice. No more reality unmaking itself one cobblestone at a time. Just the soft whisper of snow falling through pine branches and the distant echo of his own ragged breathing.
Xavier knelt in the snow, his hands pressed against the frozen ground, staring at the spot where the portal had collapsed. The dimensional tear vanished, leaving no scar in the air to prove it had ever been. The world offered no proof the nightmare had ever been.
But Xavier knew what happened.
Dalen’s weathered face, frozen mid-shout as he tried to organize a defense. Gareth’s young eyes, wide with terror, his scout’s instincts useless against something that could simply decide he shouldn’t exist. Marta, always ready with a joke around the evening fire, was now a crystal sculpture, her crossbow still half-raised. The transformation had been instantaneous.
Henri. Jorik. The others whose names he’d never deemed valuable enough to learn.
All dead because he’d made the call to go through that village.
Xavier lifted his hands from the snow. No blood. No wounds. Not even a bruise from his desperate leap through the portal.
A sound made him turn. Naomi lay crumpled, her purple hair spread across the white like spilled wine. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular rhythms. Classic Essentia burnout.
She’d nearly killed herself getting them out.
Ashley was worse. The golden fractures that had appeared during her psychic breakdown still crawled beneath her skin like living light. Her body convulsed in small, periodic spasms, and her lips moved soundlessly.
Xavier tried to stand, but his legs buckled. A foreign cold, sharp as a needle, shot up his spine.