Chapter 33
Amara
It’s weightless where I am. Weightless and warm and untethered, like I’ve finally slipped beyond the grasp of all that ever hunted me.
I’m floating, drifting somewhere soft and golden, suspended far away from the death and cruelty and endless hardship that’s clung to me like a second skin since I left the Grove.
There is no fear here. No pain. Just quiet, perfect stillness.
For the first time in what feels like lifetimes, I am not afraid.
Not for myself. Not for the ones I love.
It’s just peace. Soft and whole and final.
Am I dead?
Is this what waits for us after our light flickers out and the world lets us go?
But then, like a crack shattering across glass, a metallic clang rings in my ears, so loud and sudden I think my skull might split open from the sound alone.
My eyes fly open on a gasp, and the weight of this world returns with cruel precision, rain slicing at my face like knives, my spine throbbing where stone juts against it.
Lightning cracks across the sky above Baev’kalath, followed by the deep, rolling growl of thunder.
I’m back. Here. Alive. My journey far from over.
There is no peace. Not in this world and as the fog clears from my mind in tatters and wisps, it leaves only chaos in its wake and a blooming pain at the base of my skull that throbs with each passing second.
I blink through the haze, through the sting of rain and blood in my eyes, and see them.
Zyphoro and Orios. Reon and Solena. All of them bound and facedown on the courtyard stone like discarded scraps.
Ronin lies sprawled opposite me, unmoving, and lining the courtyard walls are poles, too many to count, each one strung with a grotesque offering: bodies, slack and rain-slicked, their lifeless forms swaying in the storm.
But worse than what I see is what I hear.
A cry, high and terrified, slicing through the sound of the rain and my heart stops.
My daughter.
She’s in Modok’s arms, while his sister hovers too close.
I shove my palms against the stone, every muscle in my body screaming as I fight to rise, my stomach lurching with the effort, but I don’t stop.
I can’t. Because then, then I hear it. The screeching drag of a blade against stone.
That high-pitched shriek that sets my teeth on edge, makes my entire body recoil in instinctive horror. I turn and see him.
Daed.
He walks with slow, striding steps, stalking toward Modok, his hand wrapped around Death Singer, and though he is mine—my Daed, my husband, my mate—I can already feel the wrongness radiating from him.
I see it in his eyes as they roll black.
I feel it in the tether between us, stretched and fraying.
The rain carves rivers down his skin. The ink of his sigils, the ones that protect him, the ones that hide him from Gygarth, from the void itself, they begin to run. Thick, oily streaks of black bleeding from his body like tears.
He raises his sword, voice like smoke and thunder.
“Give me the child,” he demands. “Or give me your head.”
Modok’s arms tighten around our daughter, pressing her closer. “One move, Daedalus, and I will crush the life from her body. You know I will.”
But Daed doesn’t stop.
He keeps coming.
His steps slow, unrelenting, deadly. The last of his sigils melts away, pooling around his feet. They’re gone. All of them. The last protections he had, the only thing keeping him from being found. From being taken. From being consumed.
But Daed no longer looks like a male who cares about being found.
He walks like vengeance incarnate. Like a Fae who has surrendered everything that once tethered him to this world.
He is what I was warned about. The cursed prince whose soul belonged not to me, not even to himself, but to the darkness that waits with outstretched hands and as the final drip of ink falls from his fingertip, splashing against the stone like a heartbeat, something stirs.
A speck of midnight and silver, flaring to life in the air before him. Small at first, a flicker, but it grows. Faster than I can breathe. A maw opens wide and infinite and full of screams, a gaping mouth of nothing.
The void.
He is here.
He has found us.
But it is not Gygarth who slithers through, descending on this world like a nightmare.
No, it is the other. The one I glimpsed in the portal.
The one who haunts the edge of dreams. A skeletal figure draped in black, flesh like dried leather stretched too thin over bones too long, claws that drag like blades through the air, and beneath his chin, a writhing beard of tentacles, slick and twitching and hungry.
Modok snarls, voice cracking with rage tainted with fear. “Save your pathetic Mordorin tricks! I will kill every fucking last one of…”
But he doesn’t finish. The creature lifts one hand in a slow, languid motion, so casual, so cruel, and the air itself answers.
Smoke, black and thick like spilled ink, erupts from his fingertips, soaring across the courtyard in serpent coils.
It wraps around Modok in an instant, twining around his limbs, tightening.
I scream. I scream, because I see her, my daughter, torn from his arms, flung skyward like a discarded doll.
The sound that rips from my chest is not human.
It is pain and terror and fury forged into a single note that rends the very core of this world.
Thunder silences. Lightning halts mid-strike.
The world holds its breath as my daughter sails through the air, arms outstretched, her tiny mouth open in a cry I cannot hear over the roar of my heart.
The demon flicks its wrist.
Modok explodes.
His body tears apart in a vicious snap, limbs ripped in four directions, blood raining down in thick splatters.
A scream shatters the air, not mine this time, but Nyraxes’, her brother’s blood hot on her skin.
Her hands claw down her cheeks in horror, but I barely register her. I see only my daughter.
She’s still falling.
I lunge, scrambling to my feet, legs numb, arms desperately reaching, but I am too far. The space between us is a chasm. My hands stretch through it anyway, begging the Souls, the void, the creature who brought this nightmare, anyone, to let me be fast enough, strong enough.
But then a blur of movement surges past me. A body, reckless and sure, hurls itself against the wet stone.
Ronin.
He hits the ground hard, the slap of his body making me flinch, but he never looks away from her. He reaches, catches, curls his body around hers just before she hits the ground.
A sob tears from my throat. My knees threaten to buckle.
“Thank you,” I gasp, the words barely a breath. “Thank you, Ronin.”
He nods once, the motion sharp, but there is no time for gratitude, no time for anything but survival.
“They have murdered your Lord!” Nyraxes shrieks, voice unhinged in its grief. “Kill them! Kill them all!”
The courtyard erupts.
The warriors of House Mor’Thravar descend like a tide of death, but before the first sword is drawn, the demon lifts his hands again, stretching them wide as if parting a curtain of reality itself.
The portal behind him groans, widening, pulsing like a wound torn into the sky.
Screams echo from its depths, high and thin, followed by the pounding of hooves and the screech of wings.
A dark swarm surges forward, creatures of nightmare and smoke, twisted things with too many limbs and eyes that burn white.
They come and when they burst from the void, when they flood the courtyard like a dam broken loose, the demon merely watches.
He does not fight. He does not command. He invites.
His arms are outstretched like a prophet baptizing the world in horror, and his children—his monsters—gladly answer the call.
Steel clashes. Claws tear. Screams rise and fall in a symphony of pain and fury as blood and rain turn the stones into a river of crimson. The air tastes of steel and ash, of endings.
And in the center of it all, the demon turns his gaze on me.
He smiles, I think, and speaks with a voice made of a thousand others, layered like a chorus of blight and shadow.
“You,” he says. “At last. The master will get his taste.”
“No, Emranth!” Daed roars, voice breaking against the storm. “Never!”
Death Singer arcs through the air, fast and furious, singing a deadly hymn of steel and fury, but the demon catches it in one clawed, leather-bound hand, like it’s nothing more than a toy sword carved from wood.
“Favored one,” Emranth breathes, voice curling. “Welcome back to the darkness.”
Daed snarls, his grip tightening on the hilt with both hands, muscles straining as he tries to wrench the blade free, but it doesn’t move, not even an inch. It’s as if the steel itself has bent to the will of the void.
Above, the sky becomes a writhing mass of wings and fangs, the winged horrors screeching down in relentless waves, crashing into the Fae with talons bared. On the ground, monsters thunder through the gates, shadows on all fours, jaws unhinged, tearing through warriors like parchment.
Daed turns to me. Not just to me. To Ronin, too. I see him fighting. I see that promise in his eyes that somehow, somehow, he will hold the darkness at bay.
“Free them,” he growls. “Keep them safe.”
And then he throws himself at Emranth, slamming the void-born creature back with the full force of his body. They crash onto the stone in a blur of shadows.
I don’t waste a second.
With a grunt, I scramble across the courtyard, legs aching, blood roaring in my ears. I reach Solena first, and with a flicker of flame that dances from my fingertips like a serpent’s tongue, I sear through the ropes binding her wrists. She gasps as they fall away, and I’m already moving.
Then Reon. His bonds hiss into ash.
Orios next, breath ragged, eyes wide with disbelief as the fire licks away his restraints.
Then Zyphoro.