Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Nova
A dozen explanations tried to tumble through my lips.
It was an accident.
I don’t know how I did it.
I’d send him back into that cursed sleep, if I could .
Nothing coherent made it out.
The woman spoke again before I could utter so much as a whimper. “For seven years, we have been trying to finish him off.” She dug her staff deeper into my chest. “We have kept him confined to his forest—kept him and his magic from wreaking more havoc here, at least. Who are you to have woken him up? To have freed him? To have led him here , so close to Erebos?”
“…Erebos? I don’t even know what that—”
“ Quiet .”
Phantom circled the two of us, snapping threateningly at the woman’s heels. Her eyes darted his direction several times, but she didn’t so much as flinch at the sight of his fangs, even as his body shifted and swelled into a larger size and his eyes glowed to a haunting shade of white.
He let out an otherworldly snarl that made even the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It finally, fully caught her attention; she looked as if she was considering spinning her staff around and pointing it at him instead.
Before she could move, Zayn arrived as well, along with the remaining two soldiers of our company. He exchanged a quick look with Aleksander before striding toward me without hesitation. The situation must have seemed like pure chaos to him as he blindly walked into it from afar, but he met it all with his usual, easy smile and simply said, “I suggest you point your weapon at something other than my friend. Now.”
The pressure against my chest relaxed a bit as my attacker calculated her odds.
Aleksander stepped to his cousin’s side, his hand balanced threateningly upon the short sword at his hip.
The woman finally relaxed her stance and let her staff drop. My breath followed the movement, a slow exhale of tension that left a pain in my chest and had me feeling lightheaded, as if I’d just had all the air stomped out of my lungs.
“Quite the traveling party,” the woman remarked, her gaze sweeping over us all before returning to linger on me.
“We’re not so foolish as to travel alone,” Aleksander said, gripping his sword tighter, “as it seems you are.”
“The shadows heed my beck and call. I am not as alone as I appear.”
Despite her boast, I didn’t sense any of those shadows building around her anymore. I kept this to myself, though, as I stared at her, trying to make sense of who she might be. How she had found us, and why she seemed to be so knowledgeable and concerned about me waking Aleksander. I had so many questions…
But all I kept coming back to was what she was .
Another necromancer.
Like me.
The words kept repeating over and over in my head: She’s like me. She’s like me. She’s like me…
I was so caught up in the impossibility of it that I didn’t realize, at first, how dangerously close the two separate sides were drawing to one another. Aleksander had unsheathed his sword. Zayn was staring in the direction of Elias’s remains; he seemed to be piecing together all that had happened, and now he looked as if he was considering aiding his cousin in whatever bloody murder Aleksander was planning.
And as horrified as I was by what had happened to Elias, I couldn’t let them attack this woman.
Not before I had a chance to truly speak with her.
I caught her attention the same way I had earlier; by calling upon the power channeled through my black-rose bracelet.
I threw a bit of my essence into her staff, this time, and it proved easier to possess an inanimate object than magic. I lifted my hand toward her, squeezed it into a fist, and I quickly felt the telltale pressure upon my palm—as if I was actually gripping the staff itself. With a twitch of my wrist, I had the weapon dipping backwards, sending her stumbling back with it.
This was already proving to be a useful new ability.
I again only managed a few seconds of control—but it was enough to frustrate her, to make her rethink her plans and ultimately put more space between herself and my group.
Aleksander cut his eyes toward me, clearly curious about this latest trick I’d pulled.
“Just another abhorrent, abysmal, deathly chaotic thing,” I said, echoing his words from back at the outpost.
I didn’t wait around for his retort, already jogging after the woman.
“Let’s talk for a moment,” I softly called to her, once we were out of earshot of the others. “Just between you and me, perhaps?”
“Why?”
I hardened my tone. “Because I can explain things to you. Give you more information about that Light Beast you’re so concerned about.”
She threw a skeptical look over her shoulder, but—after a wary glance at the hand I’d used to conduct her weapon mere moments ago—she allowed me to catch up to her.
We made our way toward a secluded hilltop, where our only company included two skinny, brittle-looking trees and a scattering of broken stones. Phantom ran ahead of us, sniffing and scouting out the area for threats.
Zayn started to follow us as we made our way up the slope, but I quickly doubled back and cut him off.
“She used very powerful magic a few minutes ago,” I told him, quietly. “We should tread carefully, I think—let me try and get on her good side.”
“You think you can manage that?”
“I managed to get on yours , didn’t I?”
He gave me a crooked grin. “Just…be careful,” he said, eyes lifting toward the woman. “No one who manages to live in this hell can be trusted. They aren’t natural beings. She may not even truly be alive .”
I thought about pointing out that we were both here in this hell, and very much alive. But I only nodded and asked him to keep his distance along with Aleksander.
The woman’s expression remained suspicious as I climbed the hill to her, her hands gripped fiercely around her staff even as I lifted my own in a gesture of peace.
“I won’t let them turn their weapons against you,” I told her, trying very hard to sound like someone who was actually in control of such things. “And I won’t use my own magic against you anymore, either. But in exchange, I have questions.”
Her mouth remained set in a hard, unflinching line, but she didn’t protest. I’d expected her to protest. Her silence was worse; I didn’t know where to start.
Phantom—who had curled up under one of the trees—lifted his head, sensing my discomfort, but I waved off his concern.
After I was quiet for too long, the woman spoke first, a sudden curiosity gleaming in her eyes that matched my own. “You controlled my shadows earlier. And then my staff.”
“Briefly.”
“Powerful necromancy, that.”
“Is it?” I asked, realizing as the words left me that they sounded entirely too eager.
She gave me a strange look.
“It’s just…it’s a new skill I’ve recently acquired.”
“A powerful and potentially dangerous one,” she said, flatly. “If you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Her point was implied.
You obviously don’t know what you’re doing.
I bit down my response to this, watching her as she leaned against one of the spindly trees, propping her staff in a crook of the branches and looking it over.
It was a beautiful weapon. Slightly longer than she was tall, the bulk of it carved from a dark grey wood. Some sort of silver metal wound elegantly around its tip, molded into the shape of a thorn-covered vine. It somehow looked both delicate and intimidating. Several of the thorns flashed in the low lighting—gemstones, I realized. She was inspecting each one, tapping them and occasionally whispering words in another language, both to herself and directly to the stones. Like a musician fine-tuning their instrument.
Several of the stones changed colors and luminosities as she did this, and I couldn’t help staring, mesmerized into silence by the deft way her hands moved over the piece; she reminded me of Orin, the way she moved so chaotically quickly, yet expertly—tinkering, but with purpose.
My chest felt like it might cave in at the thought of my mentor.
Was he managing without me?
It had only been a little over a day, I thought, but it felt like much, much longer.
I cleared my throat, uncomfortable in the silence and the memories it made room for.
Curiosity lit the woman’s gaze once more as she glanced up at me, and again, she was the one to interrupt the quiet. “The language you speak…you’ve spent extended time in the light.”
I considered the words for a moment before their meaning sank in. “In the living world, you mean?”
Her hands stilled against the metal vine around her weapon. She gave a single, curt nod before returning to her work.
“…I’ve spent all my time there, save for the past day or two,” I admitted. There seemed no point in trying to lie about it. And maybe the truth would make me seem like less of a threat—less like someone she needed to impale with her staff. “And I’ve never met anyone with powers like mine in that world above.”
She regarded me from under her lashes, not bothering to fully lift her head this time. “No. I would expect not. Such things don’t typically last long in the light.”
Twenty-five years , I wanted to tell her.
Twenty-five years I had lasted in that world, magic and all, though somedays I wasn’t sure how.
Most days I wasn’t sure how, if I was being honest with myself.
“Then again,” she said, her gaze sliding down the hill toward Aleksander, “things like him don’t typically last long in the dark, either.”
“…Yet here we are,” I mused.
She lowered her voice, even though the others were far in the distance and caught up in what looked to be an intense conversation of their own. “He should have succumbed immediately to the terrors of this realm,” she said. “This is not a place for beings like him.”
“His magic seems to have insulated him and the rest of his followers,” I said. “If such a thing is possible?”
“Yes. It’s possible.” Her jaw tightened, and her eyes appeared to shift from frosted purple to a deeper, darker shade that brought to mind a starless night sky. “Of course, it has a cost. It’s why we’ve been watching the Light Beast since his arrival. His initial landing unbalanced parts of this realm with catastrophic results. And every time he’s woken up over the years, more calamities have ensued, lasting until he went back to sleep. The wall you crossed over was still in one piece seven years ago, for example. And we’ve done what we could to reinforce it with our own magic, to try and keep the destruction from spreading past it, but now…”
Now, I’d escorted that destructive beast right over their barriers.
Whoops.
Had his magic really unbalanced and broken down that wall, though?
What else had he destroyed over the past seven years?
The ominous chasm I’d witnessed on the way to the grove where I’d found him…the cracked ground and crumbling mountains parallel to it…had he caused all of that destruction, too?
“If he’s causing such a disturbance, could you not have simply…gotten rid of him?” I wondered.
“All our attempts to kill him have been in vain. Something protects him from our strongest spells. And we keep expecting— hoping —the air itself will do the job for us, once he breathes it in long enough, but that hasn’t happened, either.”
Rather than trying to guess at the reason behind this, I said, “You said we. How many of you are there?”
My entire body tingled at the possibility of there being more necromancers hiding within the shadows of this realm. Was this why I’d never met one in the world above? Maybe they were all down here, serving the dead and keeping order among them.
It made sense, didn’t it?
But then…how had I ended up in the living world, so far away from the rest of my kind?
And why had Orin never mentioned anything like this?
“There were many of us, once upon a time,” the woman said quietly. “But not any longer.”
She didn’t seem to want to elaborate. I was nearly bursting with my need to know more, but instead of giving in to my curiosity, I simply asked, “What is your name?”
She jerked her gaze to mine, as if the question surprised her. As if she didn’t know why I would care.
But I’d heard the loneliness in her tone just a moment ago. How her words seemed to echo with a cold, lost sort of emptiness. I knew what that felt like. And sometimes it was nice just to hear your name out loud—to remind yourself that you could still exist within the emptiness, even if everything else you loved and related to was gone.
After a bit of hesitation, she said, “…Thalia.”
I offered my hand. “I’m Nova.”
She stared at my hand for a moment before lightly gripping it and shaking it. “Nova of the Above. A necromancer who walks in the light, alongside the Beast and his brethren. Pleased to meet you.” She didn’t seem truly pleased, but she did appear more curious than hostile toward me, now.
Progress.
Still, I had to fight the urge to shrink away from her touch and her almost too curious gaze.
There was no way she could have known the true history I shared with the King of Light. She didn’t know who I was, or what I’d done—how Aleksander had ended up in this realm after I’d channeled the shadows from it into an attack against him. How I’d apparently sent him crashing down into this place, triggering devastation in it when he landed.
And I wasn’t foolish enough to tell this Thalia all of my secrets right away, even if I was desperate to let every truth spill out in hopes of coaxing more information out of her.
“Tell me, Nova: Where were you leading the Beast?”
I hesitated, wondering how much more I should reveal. My gaze drifted down the hill, landing on Zayn first.
I liked him well enough, but I’d only been with him and the others for a day. I had no real loyalty to any of them—and I doubted they truly felt any toward me.
Besides, I’d come for the sword, not the king. And here was a potentially better guide to take me to that sword. One with the same magic as me. One who actually belonged to this realm.
“I wasn’t leading him anywhere,” I told her. “I came in search of something else, as I mentioned earlier. I just happened to find him first. I truly didn’t mean to wake him. I’m not even sure how I did it.”
She clearly didn’t believe me.
I wanted to insist upon the truth of what I said, to suggest we immediately leave Aleksander and the others behind without looking back.
Only one thing gave me pause.
“What calamities have ensued since this latest awakening of his?” I asked.
I needed to know before I risked leaving him behind.
Thalia’s gaze traveled the same path mine had moments ago, studying Aleksander and the others, her eyes glazing over in thought. “None, thus far,” she admitted. “But his past destructions are reason enough to be wary.”
None, thus far .
My magic had woken him up, but nothing truly catastrophic had followed. Something strange was clearly happening between our powers whenever we were close to one another, however…what if it was the influence of my magic that was keeping his under control—and keeping it from wreaking havoc on this realm?
I wanted to vomit at the thought of being so intimately tied to him.
It couldn’t be true.
I tried to think back on all the magical lessons Orin had given me over the years, wishing I’d paid better attention to the knowledge he’d attempted to impart. All the different laws and attributes—there had to be an explanation for what was happening between Aleksander and me.
But I’d never been one to take notes on these things.
I’d always preferred to learn by doing, however painful and messy the practical trials ended up being.
And so, I decided it was time for an experiment.