Chapter 22 #2
Valroy staggered and fell to his knees, the distorted view throwing him off balance. It was the distraction Serrik needed. Golden threads met the flesh of his left wing. The membranous flesh parted like silk, spraying dark blood across the twisted grass.
“Better,” Valroy admitted, flexing his damaged wing with apparent satisfaction. “But it will not be enough.”
The darkness around him coalesced into a spear of pure void, and he hurled it at Serrik. Serrik twisted away, but the weapon clipped his shoulder, and Ava watched in horror as part of her lover's skin vanished, leaving raw muscle and bone beneath.
He didn’t make a sound. Didn’t even flinch in pain.
“Keep going,” Abigail urged. “You must not stop, Ava. No matter what.” The Seelie Queen was helping Alex to her feet, doing her best to heal the poor Unseelie witch as quickly as she could.
So Ava continued chanting, tears streaming down her face as she watched the most important man in her life tear himself apart in the name of buying her time. The worlds were separating faster now, the cracks in reality widening into chasms that revealed glimpses of their intended destinations.
Valroy pressed his attack, moving faster than something his size should have been able to move.
His fists, wreathed in consuming darkness, hammered against Serrik's defenses with relentless fury.
Each blow that connected left wounds that didn't bleed—they simply weren't anymore, as if pieces of Serrik were being edited out.
Serrik gave as good as he got, his threads finding their mark again and again.
Valroy's left arm hung useless at his side, ribbons of flesh hanging where golden strands had carved through muscle and bone.
His face was a map of cuts, and several of his clawed talons on the tip of one of his wings had been severed completely.
But it wasn't enough. Valroy was winning.
Ava could see it in the way Serrik's movements were slowing, in the way his threads were becoming less precise, less deadly.
Her spider was magnificent and terrible…and utterly outmatched.
Valroy had been created for this—for destruction, for war, for the unmaking of all things.
Serrik was a weapon of precision and control. For magic to be wielded from a book. Not a fistfight. In a battle of pure annihilation, there could only be one victor.
A particularly bad strike left Serrik staggering back, collapsing down to his seven jointed knees.
“Serrik!” Ava cried out, her concentration wavering as fear for him overwhelmed her focus on the ritual.
Serrik turned his head toward her. Just barely. But just enough. The moment of distraction cost him. Valroy's darkness wrapped around Serrik like living chains, lifting him off the ground and beginning to squeeze. That was the first time the spider showed pain, his face contorting in agony.
“Did you think your love would make you stronger?" Valroy laughed. “Did you believe that caring for someone would give you power I lack?” He tightened his grip, and Serrik let out a sound of pure agony. “Love makes you weaker, brother. It gives you something to lose.”
That was when Alex struck.
The purple-haired woman’s magic was…Ava couldn’t really wrap her head around it. The world around her simply changed. From one thing to another, it warped. The grass around Valroy became a sea of bizarre poisonous snakes that all set upon him in unison. Ava might have sworn she heard music.
“Love makes us braver, you psychotic bastard!” Alex snarled. “It means we’re willing to lose it all!”
Valroy staggered from the bites, his concentration broken, and Serrik dropped to the ground in a heap of tangled limbs. But the reprieve was brief. Valroy spun around with inhuman speed, his hand catching Alex across the throat and lifting her off her feet.
“Braver,” he repeated thoughtfully, studying her face as she clawed uselessly at his iron grip. “Perhaps. But bravery without power is just suicide with a conscience.”
Before he could tighten his hold, Abigail was there.
Red flowers erupted from the ground beneath Valroy's feet—not the controlled, elegant blooms of controlled power Ava had seen before, but wild, ravenous things that snapped and whipped at him.
Valroy released Alex and leaped backward, but Abigail was ready for him. Vines thick as pythons burst from the earth, wrapping around his legs and dragging him down. The flowers followed, their petals opening to reveal hungry mouths that sought to devour him entirely.
For a moment, Ava thought they might actually succeed. Valroy disappeared beneath a writhing mass of vegetation, his struggles growing weaker as the plants drained his strength.
Then the darkness exploded outward.
The flowers withered and died in seconds, their red petals turning to ash that drifted away on the wind. The vines crumbled to dust. Abigail herself was thrown backward, her connection to the growing things severed so violently that she cried out in anguish.
Valroy rose from the destruction like a phoenix from ashes, his form wreathed in shadows that seemed to drink in the light around him. He was battered, bleeding, barely standing—but he was still the most terrifying thing Ava had ever seen.
“Enough.” His voice carried the weight of finality.
Alex tried to crawl away, but the darkness reached her first. Not killing, not destroying—simply holding, wrapping around her like chains of living void. Serrik struggled to rise, but more shadows pinned him to the ground, pressing down with inexorable force.
Abigail knelt where she had fallen, her strength spent, her red hair spread around her like spilled blood. She looked up at her husband without fear, only grief.
Valroy approached her slowly, each step deliberate and careful. When he stood at her feet, he lifted his hands, darkness gathering around them. “I shall keep your memory with me until I return into the void that made me, my one and only Queen.”
This was it.
If he killed Abigail…
The rest of them were done.
Darkness curled around his fingers.
Ava held her breath.
Valroy shut his eyes.
And with a deep, ragged sigh, he collapsed to his knees.
“What lies I tell myself…” He hung his head. The shadows that held Alex and Serrik restrained faded into mist and were gone.
His dark blue hair fell along his features.
“I cannot,” he whispered. “I cannot kill you, Abigail…I could not then, and I certainly cannot now. I was created to destroy everything, to reduce existence to the void where it belongs, but I can’t…
” Tears streamed down his face, cutting tracks through the dirt and blood. “What have you made of me?”
Abigail reached up and touched his cheek, her thumb brushing away his tears. “I am sorry.”
“What am I?” The question came out as a broken sob. “What is the point of my existence if I cannot fulfill the purpose for which I was made? I cannot bring myself to unmake the one thing that matters most to me. I am a failure. A joke.”
“You are more than what you were made to be,” Abigail said softly.
Valroy pulled away from her touch, his expression twisting with anguish. “Destroy me,” he begged. “Please, Abigail. If you ever loved me, end this. I cannot live with this contradiction. As this contradiction. I cannot exist knowing I am too weak to be what I was born to be.”
“No.” The word was gentle but final. Spring itself, wiping away the last traces of the winter frost.
“I shall do it.” Serrik was in his human form, bloodied and injured but standing.
“No,” Abigail repeated, and this time there was steel returned to her voice.
“His life belongs to me. It always has, even before we met.” She looked back at her husband, her expression tender.
“Just as mine belongs to him, for as long as it may last. For one of us is truly infinite. And the other is not.”
Understanding dawned in Valroy's eyes. He chuckled softly, sadly. “You knew this would come to pass. You clever little witch of mine…”
“I had an inkling.” A coy smirk twisted the edge of Abigail’s lips. She turned to Ava, her green eyes burning with purpose. “Complete the spell, Weaver. Send us to the Web.”
“Wait. Us?” Ava blinked. “What do you mean, us?”
“Precisely as I said.” Abigail reached down and took Valroy’s hand in hers. “He will remain by my side in the Web as my prisoner and companion until I cease to be myself. At which point, the restraints he finds upon himself now that prevent him from completing his goal will no longer be in place.”
Valroy let out a sound that was half laugh, half snort. “Peace? You think there will be peace in that prison? You think I can find anything but torment, watching you fade away piece by piece?”
“Then it is up to you to ensure that will never happen. You will have what you've always wanted,” Abigail replied calmly. “My complete and undivided attention. Forever.”
That seemed to intrigue him. He paused long enough for someone else to voice their concern.
“But we still need someone to rule Tir n'Aill,” Alex said weakly as she picked herself up off the ground. “Someone has to guide the courts in your combined absence.”
“I am still King.” Valroy snarled. “No one shall take that from me.”
Abigail was quiet for a moment, considering.
“No. He is right. No more kings or queens. As we are not dead and gone, merely…dreaming, it would be wrong to give away the crown.” She smiled slightly.
“Perhaps what Tir n'Aill needs is not a ruler, but a councilor. Someone to guide both Seelie and Unseelie, to help them find balance.”
“Who?” Valroy asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected the answer. And he was already dreading it.
“Who better than the only soul to be of both? The only one who understands both courts intimately? And the only one with the humor to suffer their cruelty without flinching?” Abigail's smile widened. “Puck.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Then Valroy began to laugh.