The blinding white light didn't just take my sight; it took the floor, the air, and the very concept of Seraphine. I was suspended in a vacuum of pure, terrifying silence, stripped of the silk and the status and the dragon-rider bravado.
And then, the light coalesced.
It didn't show me a throne. It didn't show me the Goddess Novella and her eternal coffee requests. It showed me a hospital bed, or maybe a mortuary slab. It was cold. Clinical.
There she was. Ehra Marie.
The real me. ME!
I almost stopped breathing. My knees didn't just give out; they vanished. I was looking at a ghost, but the ghost was me. The real me. Not this high-cheekboned, porcelain-skinned noblewoman I'd been inhabiting like a borrowed coat. I was looking at the woman who had died in a screech of tires and shattered glass, a victim of a mundane taxi accident.
