33. Gavriel
Gavriel
She dies, and I die with her.
There’s no warning. One instant I’m hurling myself at the cold ring for the hundredth time, shield blazing, roaring her name.
The next her fire turns inward, I feel it through the shield like a blade through the gut, and the bond that ties my soul to hers yanks tight and drags me down into the dark after her, because that’s what a Guardian is.
Where she goes, I go. Even here. Even into this.
The abyss again. I know it now. I’ve been here twice before.
Cold and endless and alone, no Queen, no shield, no self, just the long falling nothing that is what death is for a thing like me.
And the worst of it, the part I’ll never say aloud even to her, is that every time I’m here I’m certain this is the one I don’t come back from.
That her last life and mine ran out together in some hellhole and no one’s left to grieve us.
But I feel the others, even here. Faint. Far. Four heartbeats where there should be five, and they’re screaming.
Because up there, in the light I can’t reach, Luka has her burned body in his arms and he’s howling.
Azaan’s holding the seam open with tears streaking the soot on his face, and Valerian, Valerian is doing the thing he swore he’d do, the thing that nearly killed him last time.
He’s got both hands buried in the ruin of the circle and he’s pouring every drop of blood magic he owns into holding her soul in Sanguisca, refusing to let it slingshot back to Earth, refusing to let her wake up a realm away where we can’t reach her, because we don’t have time for that anymore, because the Sorcerers are coming and he needs her here, now, whole, and he will burn himself to a husk to do it.
Mordecai is screaming too. I feel that, distantly, and it’s the only good thing in the dark.
His circle’s broken. His ritual’s ash. The woman he waited three centuries for just set herself on fire rather than let him have her, and he’s realising, too late, that Tabby was never the scrap.
Tabby was the one who mattered all along.
Good, I think, from the bottom of the abyss. I hope it kills you. I hope her fire took you with it.
And then the bond yanks again, the other way this time, up, hard, and I feel her catch. I feel Valerian’s magic close round her soul like a fist and haul. I feel the fire in her flicker, sputter, and catch. Six lives left. She’s coming back. And because she’s coming back, so am I.
I come up out of the dark retching, alive, my chest heaving, the shield hot as a coal against my hip. And an arm’s length away, in Luka’s shaking arms, her burned body knits itself whole in a rush of gold, skin and hair and breath returning, three black claw-marks stark on her arm.
Her eyes open.
And I know, before she says a word, before she moves, that something’s wrong.
Because Tabby wakes up frightened and swearing. Tabby wakes up making a joke to cover the terror. That’s my Queen, every time.
The thing that opens her eyes in Luka’s arms is calm. Cool. It looks at the four of us, at the broken circle, at Mordecai crumpled and screaming across the room, and it smiles a slow, cold smile that has never once been on my Tabby’s face.
“Well,” it says, in an accent that isn’t hers. “That was clever of her. She’d rather die than let me live.” The smile widens. “But she keeps forgetting. Every time she dies, little Guardian, I get a little more. And she’s died three times now.”
Luka goes rigid. Azaan makes a broken sound.
I know the truth of it in my bones, because I’ve just come back from the dark alongside her, felt the shape of her soul as we both clawed up out of the abyss, and I felt something wrong in it.
Frayed. Thinner than it was. Three deaths have worn her down to almost nothing, and the thing that’s been feeding on every fray has finally got hold of the wheel.
“Tabby,” Valerian rasps, grey and swaying, all but spent. “Tabby, fight her. Come back.”
“Tabby’s very tired,” the thing wearing her says, and lifts a hand, fingers arranging to snap. “Let her rest. I’ll take it from here.”
And here’s the thing that guts me, the thing I’ll carry the rest of my long life.
I’m her Guardian. I was made to stand between her and every threat in every realm.
My whole self is one job, keeping her safe.
And the threat is now inside her, wearing her face, using her mouth, and there is nothing, nothing, I can put my shield in front of, nothing I can put my ax through, because to strike the danger I’d have to strike her, and I would sooner unmake myself.
I raise the shield, and I don’t know, for the first time in my long life, whether I’m raising it to protect her or from her.
And that’s the worst feeling there is.