Chapter 17 Kai #2
And just when he thought he’d done it—that he’d gotten rid of Clover, sent him to the void beyond the stars—the shadows withdrew, umbrae screeching in pain and fear as glaring light cast them back.
Kai shielded his eyes. When the light dissipated, when the screams of the umbrae faded, Clover was still standing on the path of stars, light rippling off him, tendrils and vines keeping him rooted in place.
His face was stony and cold. He didn’t look surprised at Kai’s attempt at ending him; had likely seen his intent before Kai shoved him.
But now he was pissed.
A maelstrom of vines and dirt and leaves, of knotted tendrils of light and dark, shot from Clover’s hands to wrap around Kai like a vise.
Somewhere, Luce was shouting. Then she was similarly bound.
Clover’s eyes shone bright turquoise, his hair fluttering on an inexistent breeze.
Power crackled around him. He looked like a vengeful demon, like a spectral god.
The magic squeezed around Kai, making him gasp for breath.
Kai was going to die here, he was sure of it.
“Go on, kill us, then,” he said on a breathy laugh, which only seemed to piss Clover off even more. Good. He wanted Clover to be driven to a rage, if only to prove to them both what kind of monster he was. To prove to himself that he wasn’t the only one defined by anger.
If Kai could never know peace, then he would make damn sure Clover was denied it too.
“DO IT!” he screamed with all the air left in his lungs.
Darkness pressed in at the edges of his vision.
Perhaps this was always how it was meant to be: that he should die here in the dark among the stars, still clutching that anger he’d been carrying all his life, the same anger he’d always used as armor and weapon both.
He wasn’t afraid of death. There was no peace for him either way.
Fear Eater, Nightmare Weaver.
The familiar voice slithered along Kai’s bones.
It came from all the umbrae lingering around him, all the dark places they hid in, speaking through all of them so that it was layered and many.
But it was a singular voice in a guttural tongue that Kai understood intuitively.
Judging from the unchanged look on Clover’s face, he didn’t hear it. Only Kai did.
The voice of the crowned umbra.
But it was different from when he’d heard it before, when his nightmares had often been haunted by the crowned umbra in the wake of Emory slipping through the Hourglass.
It was strained and croaking now, as if it hadn’t been used in a millennium.
As if speaking through the umbrae took every single ounce of his power.
I will help you, the voice said, if you promise to free me.
The words jostled a memory. A long-forgotten dream that Kai remembered with sudden clarity.
He knew it was a dream—a nightmare, back at the printing press he’d visited so often in sleep—but it felt too real, too vivid in his mind.
How Baz had kissed him as if they’d never see each other again.
The weighted look in his eyes, like he was trying to tell Kai something beyond the words that spilled from his mouth.
Whatever happens, promise me you’ll remember that… that I love you.
Kai choked on a sob as all the air was squeezed from his lungs.
Promise me, and live, the crowned umbra’s voice said.
Baz’s face stark in his mind. Promise me you’ll remember…
“I promise,” Kai managed to grit out, unsure which voice he was replying to. It didn’t matter. He was dead anyway.
But then—a tidal wave of darkness. Not death, but the umbrae, charging over to them like soldiers on a battlefield.
They passed right through Kai and Luce and swarmed around Clover.
Whatever power he’d wrapped around Kai and Luce loosened, enough for Kai to gasp for air, to catch his bearings.
His hand shot out to Luce. Together they ran from Clover as he screamed, as the umbrae kept swarming and swarming until he was buried beneath a heap of nightmares.
Kai and Luce did not stop running. There was no knowing which door they were running toward. Back to the Wychwood or onward to the Wastes. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was getting away from Clover while they had the chance.
Free me, that voice boomed in Kai’s mind. Promise you will pull me from this nightmare and into the realms of the living.
Kai could see a door in the dark, glistening gold. They were so close….
Silver light erupted at their backs, drowning out the sleepscape like a negative photograph showing stars as dark spots in an ocean of white.
Kai knew it was Clover’s power blasting away the umbrae, because of course the bastard would survive this place, a god in the making whom nightmares could not stop.
Kai had only a second to pull Luce into the shield of his arms before the blast hit them.
The force of it shoved them forward in a rush of searing light and screeching umbrae desperate to evade it, and there was nothing they could do as this riptide of power swept them over the edge of the path of stars.
They were falling.
No one was ever meant to veer from the path. It was like diving at too great a depth under the sea, where everything became a crushing weight, a space no one could exist in. It was an abyss, empty and unknowable.
It was death.
Kai wanted to rage at the cruel irony of it all.
He, a Nightmare Weaver. Luce, a Dreamer.
Both were well-versed in the ways of the sleepscape.
Both had survived so much of its strange horrors, and this, despite constantly pushing the boundaries of what was safe here, venturing further than any other adept of the sleepscape, save perhaps Romie.
All for it to end in this final daring moment.
Anger and Luce was all Kai had to hold on to as they plummeted to their deaths.
An endless sort of fall, the space around them becoming more and more oppressive the further they fell.
Their hearts would likely give out before the end.
Or maybe this was to be their hell: an eternal fall, a constant state of powerless fear.
But then… Kai’s feet struck something solid. The breath was knocked right out of him as he and Luce came tumbling in a heap on the floor—because those were floorboards beneath them, the wood splintered with age, its dark polish flaking from scuff marks and years of use.
Kai felt his stomach plummet as the floor lifted, swooping upward in the dark.
It was like being in the Obscura Hall elevator, though the stomach-dropping feeling was ten times worse here with the oppressive weight of the world around him.
And now the floor was tilting, and Kai found himself sliding down the near vertical slant, Luce screaming at his side as she was flung down.
He grabbed on to something—a post of some kind—and snatched Luce’s hand with his free one.
She held on to him for dear life as they climbed up through the dark at impossible speed.
Kai shut his eyes to fight off the vertigo.
And then his ears suddenly popped as the floor righted itself and the world became less oppressive. Still oddly weighted, but manageable; he didn’t feel like his limbs were being crushed, like his skull was about to cave in and his eyes pop out of their sockets.
Kai met Luce’s equally perplexed and relieved gaze. “Kai.” She jerked her chin up, eyes going wide. “Look.”
The post Kai had been holding on to—it was a mast. A great billowing sail, dark and moving like liquid silk, was attached to it.
They were on a ship. Sailing through the dark between stars, for those were stars around them. Yet they seemed distant, sparse. Not like the multitude of them that made up the path between worlds.
Kai and Luce helped each other to their feet. They were unsteady on the moving ship, but at least it didn’t seem like it was going to topple over again anytime soon, its sail calm and steady. They came to stand at the side of the ship, peering at the dark.
“What is this?” Luce murmured.
But they both knew. The breezeless dark, the strange, distant stars… They were sailing through the space beyond the path. Just like the girl of dreams and the boy of nightmares from the epilogue.
This ship, whatever it was, had saved them from plummeting to their deaths. Or maybe this was death. A vessel carrying them to the afterlife, if there was one at all.
“Praise the Deep, am I ever glad to see you.”
The voice crept along Kai’s bones, lifted the hairs off the back of his neck. Slowly, he turned to its owner and knew then that surely he and Luce must be dead, because the face that smiled at him with such pained sorrow was that of a ghost.
And it was not one he was pleased to see at the end of all things.
“What the fuck is this?” Kai breathed roughly. “Why are you here?”
If he took offense to Kai’s brusqueness, the boy did not show it. “The gods of the living have been waiting for you two,” said Farran Caine. “And I’m here to bring you to them.”