"Mia!" Liam shouted, lunging forward despite the searing pain in his limbs and the roaring chaos around him. Every fiber of his battered body screamed to stop, yet the thought of leaving her behind—of letting the Mia he once knew be swallowed by darkness—drove him on.
Her eyes, once warm with a familiar light, now glowed with an icy detachment that made his heart wrench. The divine aura that clung to her like a second skin was unmistakable—a far cry from the woman he remembered.
As he neared, the flames and falling debris seemed to slow, the inferno of collapsing corridors and shuddering golems fading into a dull roar behind his pounding pulse. "Mia, come with me!" he demanded.
A cold laugh echoed in the tumult—a sound that belonged not to the woman he knew but to a stranger wearing her face. "Why don't you make me? I want to see just what sort of a person that stuck up cunt lost to. He He. You are the first person in a thousand years to make her go crazy."
