Cecilion remained frozen, staring at Zixuan.
He couldn't properly breathe. Every inhalation felt shallow, like the air had turned too thin for lungs to function. The space between them was only a few feet, but it stretched like a chasm, like a mirror's surface on the verge of shattering.
She hadn't moved mid-air. The whites of her eyes gleamed unnaturally in the moonlight, and her pupils—once the warm hue of memory and laughter—had dilated into inky voids that swallowed everything they touched. There was something—someone—else looking out through them.
And then he understood.
The lightness he felt since he woke up… the sudden absence of that suffocating presence that had hounded him since they left the forest, if not longer… It wasn't gone. It had left him. Slithered out like smoke from his flesh.
And it was now the thing coiled around Zixuan.
