Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
Sy
The onyx arrow pierced Barbie’s heart and mine.
Pain detonated every nerve we’d ever shared. Not the sharp, clean cut of a blade, or the raw burn of fire, but something deeper. The agony of being unmade. Of existence itself unraveling.
I felt myself torn from the only home I’d ever known. Twenty years of shared breath, shared blood, shared thoughts now shredded like gossamer by Heaven’s Arrow.
“Sy…Sy…” Barbie could barely hold onto her own name, but she still remembered mine.
Our faces blurred and overlapped, features shifting like reflections in a mirror that broke into thousands of pieces.
For a desperate moment, her dark flame and my light intertwined, wrapping around us like a womb—the same space we’d shared for so long. Her heartbeat synced with mine, her terror tangled with my own.
We didn’t know where this would lead or how it would end. There was only now, and we were still us. Still one.
Then the womb burst and burned to nothing.
Nothing could shield us, not her goddess essence, not my magic. The agony became everything. One second, I had control of our mouth, screaming. The next, Barbie surfaced, her scream pitching differently but just as raw, just as terrified.
Together we burned and blurred, consciousness spinning so fast I couldn’t tell where I ended and she began. Or where I began and Barbie ended. Our throats were hoarse with silent screams. Blood filled our mouths. The lava around us felt cool compared to the inferno raging in our chests.
Would this unbearable unmaking ever end?
My entire existence flashed before me, the early years when I was nothing but instinct and hunger, a beast wearing a girl’s face when Barbie let me out.
I tasted everything through her, watching from the other side of the glass.
Always wanting. Needing to consume and never sated.
The only thing that kept me from becoming a true monster was my duty to protect her.
Until Rowan came.
Silver hair, cruel beauty, gentle hands—he awakened me.
The way he looked at me made me want something of my own. Made me want to separate from Barbie and carve out my own identity.
The oracle’s words echoed through my fragmented mind: The last drop of old magic, hidden within goddess flesh.
That magic was being extracted now, in Hell’s inferno, along with everything else I was.
The tearing sensation peaked, then the remaking began.
I was condensed, then stretched. Scattered, then gathered. Ancient and newborn. The pain was indescribable as every atom was erased and rewritten. Barbie and I felt it all.
Then, suddenly air.
My lungs pulled it in desperately. My ribs expanded. My heart beat again.
I was outside Barbie’s body, looking down at my own hands. Long fingers tipped with subtle claws. Skin paler than hers, shimmering faintly. My fingers traced my face—high cheekbones, pointed ears, radiant white hair flowing past my ankles. When I ran my tongue over my teeth, I felt fangs.
I was myself. And I was complete.
I lifted my gaze and looked at Barbie—really looked.
Not her reflection in a mirror but her right in front of me.
Those full, pale lips trembled. Freckles scattered like constellations across her cheeks.
And her eyes, one green, one sapphire, stared back at me with the same shock, sorrow, joy, and wonder I felt.
“Sy? Sy,” she whispered, “do you copy?”
Her voice came from outside my head for the first time, and it was music.
“Roger.” My voice was mine alone now, lower than hers, rougher, edged with smoke.
We lunged at each other, tumbling into an embrace, sobbing in the lava that could no longer touch us. Twenty years of never being alone, of always sharing thoughts—and now, a hollow silence where she used to be.
“We’re still here,” I told her, swallowing hard.
She nodded. “Still two peas in a pod.”
“Still two peas,” I said.
The volcano erupted around us. Lava sheeted down the chamber walls. My magic of creation wrapped around us in radiant light as her dark flame rose to meet it. Two shields became one.
“Ready to go, Sy?” she asked.
“Born ready,” I said.
We rose together, hands locked as though we might dissolve if we let go. My hair whipped around my face, a strange and thrilling new sensation. Beside me, Barbie’s curls bounced, shedding droplets of lava as we shot upward from the magma chamber.
Finally leaving.
Two bodies. Two hearts. Two souls that had been one for so long we’d forgotten how to be apart, yet still bound by a love even Heaven’s Arrow couldn’t sever.
We burst from the volcano into the Underworld’s blood-red sky, reborn and broken and whole, all at once.