Eira's POV

I was dead. That much I understood with a strange, detached clarity.

Death wasn't what I had expected. It was neither purely soft nor purely cruel, but something in between—an odd contradiction that brushed against my senses without ever fully taking shape. One moment I felt submerged in deep, shifting water; the next, I was tumbling endlessly through the void of space, with no direction to anchor me.

Everything that had once held me together—pain, weight, the limits of ...