I tore myself free of the memory and gasped.
It was violent. I fell to my knees on the floor of the Records and dry-heaved. My brain was ringing, overloaded by the sheer weight of the life I had just walked through.
I hadn't watched it. I had lived it. I had felt the grinding gravity of the Abyss, the heat of the Genesis Breath, and the bottomless, terrible hunger of the thing called Tenebria.
And under all of it, one small fact kept turning over in my head. The platinum dragon dying on that marble was Bahamut. The heart Tiamat had given me in her lair, the one I had studied to build my eight-circle magic, had once beaten inside that chest. She had told me whose heart it was. She had never told me she'd watched him die, or that she had gone back for him.
"She's," I wheezed, wiping sweat off my forehead, "complete."
"Yes," Akasha whispered.
I looked up.
