Dog

Previously

…My fingers closed around the fragment. Cold. Unbearably cold. My hands seized. My breath stopped. The blue-black light surged upward through the crack and swallowed everything — the ice, the future sky, the distant memory of the maze above, the roots, the pages, the walls — and in the middle of all of it, warmth. One point of warmth in the absolute center of the cold. Small. Dog-shaped. Pressing against me from the inside. Sirijus. Still here. Still ours. I held the ice and the ice held me and somewhere far above, the maze exhaled.