Benedetta

Being resurrected felt almost the same as dying. My death had begun with dragon fire, blooming with intense heat through my body, the flame blinding. The difference was that when I'd died, the sooty blackness of the aftermath dragged my soul under fast. This time, instead of being sucked into darkness, I hurtled toward the fire itself, yanked unwillingly into the core of its blaze and held there, suspended while the light sent searing pinpricks into extremities that I hadn't felt in eons.

It hurt, but it wasn't the same pain as dying. It was the pain of numbness dissipating as circulation returned to a limb. My body hadn't existed for a very long time. I didn't quite know how long it had been, but some core of my awareness told me long enough.

Long enough for the maddening sticky ichor that had once corrupted my mind to be no more than a niggling memory. Long enough that the overwhelming love and pain that had filled that deadly fire had long since faded to ash and blown away on the wind.

When the numbness finally cleared and the painful tingling stopped, I opened my eyes, unsurprised to find myself hunched naked amid a pile of pale—gray ashes. I stared down at my hands, splayed on the ground, and curled my fingers into the soft powdery substance. The scent of charred bones still lingered. My bones. But the heat of the fire that had done this was long gone, leaving nothing but cold, charred earth behind.

I expected a pang of grief, of loss and abandonment, of betrayal or hurt. Any number of feelings should have existed inside me. I had loved my murderer, and he had done this to me. Yet all I felt was emptiness.

A gritty, sardonic laugh erupted unexpectedly from my chest, sending a puff of ashes into the gray air. It was fitting, wasn't it? I'd loved an immortal dragon everyone called "The Void," and all that was left of that love was an empty void inside me.

"You saved me though, didn't you?" I asked, tilting my head back and staring up at a colorless sky that seemed to arc above me like glass. Breathing deeply, I stood, surprised that my limbs and joints didn't protest. I felt…disturbingly normal. The sensations and emotions of my being were just as gray and colorless as my surroundings.

The memories were far more interesting to dwell on, and with the clarifying filter of time, I could see the truth of that day. The day I'd died.

I'd become a monster. I was recruited into the rarified ranks of the Ultiori Elites by a powerful general who had once been beyond reproach and therefore had my trust.

That general, Nikhil, had been my closest friend since childhood, before joining the pharaoh's army and working his way up to becoming her warlord. Then, through a tragic twist ending in the pharaoh's death, he'd taken her throne for himself, swearing vengeance against the dragon race who had taken his wife and lover from him.

When he returned to our village and asked me to join him to avenge her death, he'd been different from the man I remembered. He was dark and brooding and set on a mission I was only too happy to take as my own. I knew he'd wedded the pharaoh herself—all of Egypt had celebrated the day—and that she'd been killed on their wedding night, so I was happy to lend my own sword to his cause. Anything for my best friend.

What I hadn't realized was the depth of the darkness that corrupted his soul at the time. Not just the darkness of grief and rage, but something far more sinister. Something I was unprepared to fight when it ultimately infected me too.

I was just as unprepared to fight an unbearable attraction to the dead pharaoh's dragon brother, the very target of Nikhil's coldest rage. My enemy, and my eventual downfall.

Everyone else knew the immortal dragon as either Osiris or the Void, but in the heat of our affair he was only Ked. We'd been drawn to each other with the same strange pull, at first ignorant of my diminishing lack of control over my own mind. Ultimately, the darkness inside me warred with my love for the immortal Void.

The conflict drove me mad.

Ked had saved me by killing me. He had recognized the corruption tainting my mind, turning me into a monster like the thing Nikhil had become. Ked had made the impossible choice to turn his fire on me, a choice made out of love.

Only now, I believed that thanks to that love, I hadn't truly been allowed to die.

So even though my bond with Ked had been severed, and I felt less than nothing about what we once were to each other, I still had a soul. I still had consciousness.

I just wish I knew where it was I'd been resurrected to. This gray wasteland couldn't be the remains of my world, could it? Had Nikhil's thirst for vengeance gone that far?

Staring down at my hands, all I saw was translucent gray, the remnants of ash coating my darker—hued skin. Skin that still wasn't quite here even though it felt sensation. Light still passed through when I held my hands up, as if I was an empty shell of glass, waiting to be filled with light. Like a ghost, trapped halfway between purgatory and true resurrection. How do I complete the journey back to the world of the living?

I turned to survey every direction. The horizon stretched in an even line of pale, powdery ash for as far as I could see, except to the east I saw a shape. It was no more than a shadow against the drab background, but its disruption of the sameness in this world was enough to make me take the first step toward it.

Whatever a tree was doing in this stark landscape, I would find out.