Chapter 42 Silken Threads
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
SILKEN THREADS
Something strange was happening to me.
At first, I thought I had died, that the healing did not take. But as sensation intensified, I realized this was not death, but something else entirely.
Threads of silver light twisted across my field of view, weaving patterns that seemed to exist both before my eyes and somehow behind them, inside my mind itself.
They weren’t hallucinations born of pain or passing.
They were... glimpses. Fragments of something vast and incomprehensible trying to make itself known through the limited vessel of my mortal perception.
“What—“ I began, but the word died in my throat as one of the silver threads expanded, encompassing my entire vision in a flash of blinding light.
And suddenly I was elsewhere. Standing on a battlefield strewn with bodies, a sword in my hand that dripped with blood not my own.
The sky above was the color of bruised flesh, clouds swirling in unnatural patterns as though stirred by a giant’s hand.
Before me knelt a figure—copper-skinned, black-eyed, his face a mask of fury and something else. Something like awe.
Vharok. The God of Blood and Conquest, my husband, on his knees before me.
My mouth moved, words emerging in a voice that was mine yet not mine—stronger, resonating with a power I had never possessed. “Did you think I wouldn’t remember?” I heard myself say. “Did you think I wouldn’t come for what is mine?”
The vision shattered like glass, fragments spinning away into darkness only to be replaced by another scene, equally vivid, equally impossible.
A throne room, dark and cavernous, pillars of black stone reaching toward a ceiling lost in shadow.
Upon the dais sat not one throne but two, carved from materials I couldn’t name.
One emanated darkness so complete it seemed to devour light, the other gleaming with an internal radiance that hurt to look upon directly.
The scene shifted again. A woman kneeling before an altar, blood dripping from self-inflicted wounds on her palms as she whispered prayers to a deity whose name I couldn’t quite grasp.
Her desperation reached me across the void, her pleas for intervention tangling with the silver threads of my vision.
This dissolved too, replaced by a dizzying cascade of images too rapid to fully comprehend—a knife cutting into flesh, blood flowing into a silver chalice; a child with eyes of lavender; an empty cell, chains hanging from stone; The God of Chaos kneeling before me, his eyes alight with a mixture of fear and relief; my own hands, glowing silver as I watched the world burn.
And beneath these images, behind them, threading through them like a current through water, were whispers. Countless voices speaking prayers in languages I had never heard. Prayers directed not to Vharok or the Twin Goddesses, or even Death, but to something else.
The voices overlapped, creating a symphony of devotion and desperation that resonated within the hollow spaces where pieces of my soul had been removed. As if those absences were not emptiness at all, but doors newly opened to something vast and terrible and wonderful.
These weren’t memories. They couldn’t be. They weren’t even dreams or hallucinations born of pain and trauma. They felt like... possibilities. Futures not yet realized. Prayers not yet answered.
I couldn’t interpret all I saw, couldn’t even retain every image as they flashed by with increasing speed. But certain elements repeated—blood, chains, crowns, thrones. Symbols of power and bondage intertwined, inseparable.
Through the kaleidoscopic chaos of breaking visions, one image remained clear: myself, standing between the two thrones, a crown of twisted silver upon my brow.
My eyes in the vision were not the ones I knew—not simply silver-flecked, but solid silver from corner to corner, gleaming with an internal light that shone brighter than any I’d ever seen. Divine eyes. A Goddess’s eyes.
Then it was gone, along with all the other fragments, the silver threads dissolving. Behind my closed eyelids, there was only the darkness of sleep once more.