It starts abruptly, right in the middle of something.

You cannot believe what you are hearing.

You can't move. On purpose, you can't move - he's holding you here, absolutely still, and the longer you sit and listen to this, the more the dread rises up your esophagus and the back of your throat and you feel like you could be sick any second now. Necromancers always do this, you think, distantly, they just keep breaking your heart, which is funny, because you keep pretending like you don't have one.

"Oh, it's going to take a great deal more than that," Not-Dulcinea is saying. The woman you thought you accidentally stole from Sextus but - isn't, that's not her, it's someone pretending to be her, but that's less important than what you know is about to happen. "You know what I am... and you know what I can do."

"Yes," Palamedes Sextus says. "I also know you must have studied radical thanergetic fission, so you know what happens when a necromancer disperses their entire reserve of thanergy very, very quickly."

"What?"

And he raises his voice. "Gideon! Tell Camilla --"

He stops. Your heart stops.

"Oh, never mind. She knows what to do."

And then the room explodes. There's just white fire, and the bonds holding you snap, and you don't really think. Your brain can't catch up with your body, which spins drunkenly and takes off down the corridor. There's no heat, but that cold, white death feels like flames licking at your heels, and you know that you can't stop. Somewhere, you're quietly glad for your body taking over, because your head isn't so good right now. You run, and you run, and you run even more than that, and your lungs seize and your heart thuds so loudly in your ears that you can barely hear the sounds of destruction behind you. The building collapses, and so do you, outside, against the marble fountain.

You want to cry, but your eyes won't make the tears. Your body won't respond how you want it to. So you just huddle there, and you try not to be sick, and you try not to think about how everything you even start to care about dies, and how you can't - keep - letting this happen. You can't.

All you can think about is how you didn't make things right.