Chapter Thirty-Four #2
The grip on my throat loosens, the vine falling to the grass, and I drop the dagger, curling onto my side to cradle my shoulder. It clicks and grinds with the motion, sending relentless conscious-stealing pain coursing through me.
“I should have expected the demon to have claws.” Again, my voice, but not my words, and a resounding, ancient power resonating in my chest—like the soil of Illa Ysari.
Her words… they don’t sound like common tongue or Malbolge.
Yet somehow, like the raven, I understand them.
The sound of shifting grass has me launching myself upright and recoiling with pain. The bloodstone dagger lies near my knees, partially hidden by the tall grass, but easy to grab should I need.
A figure stops several feet away, her head tilting. Silver hair cascades over a shoulder, reaching the ground in soft waves. Silver eyes filled with contempt stare at me, set in a face identical to mine.
It’s her.
The other half of my soul.
The expression she wears is one I’m guilty of parading in the hells. A cold mask, filled with loathing. Dressed in a tattered and worn black gown, she lifts it to take a few slow steps forward. Veilflower vines curl beneath her bare feet, carpeting the ground.
Swirls of gold on her left arm glint in the low light of the night sky. The marking traces along her skin like the most vibrant demon mark I’ve ever seen. It climbs over her shoulder, glides along her collar, and plummets to her heart.
If it is a demon mark, it’s unlike any I’ve seen.
She lifts a hand and vines burst from the ground, snagging my face by the chin as if she were gripping it herself.
“An impressive replica,” she says as the vines turn my face for her inspection. “But a replica all the same.”
I jerk my chin away from the vines, wincing with the motion. They vanish in tufts of blue smoke. Snagging the dagger from the grass, I pull myself to my feet.
“Let us mend and be done,” I say firmly. “I cannot continue to exist with a partial soul, and you cannot continue to stay… here.” I glance around to find us standing in the middle of a rolling field of veilflowers.
“You mean my prison,” she retorts with a dry laugh as she swings her arms wide. “Where I’ve watched you live twenty lives. Each iteration of my shadow growing more compliant than the last.”
Twenty… lives?
Netharis has kept me for twenty lifetimes?
I swallow hard, searching for my voice. “Were that true, we wouldn’t be standing here,” I counter, using the same cold tone.
“Were the gods not greedy, you would not exist!” she shouts and the ground rumbles gently under my feet. “None of this should have ever come to be! I should not be fractured. I should stand whole. Left to live as agreed upon!” Her voice breaks with the ferocity of her words.
There.
There’s the bitter and cold rage.
Whatever happened to her—to me—in ages past, she still lives it. How could she not? She’s been wholly severed from the realms—removed entirely from everything.
Left to rot, I realize.
“How have you survived twenty lifetimes here, fractured?” I ask, unable to stop myself.
She laughs bitterly.
It’s a dark and haunting, almost musical sound.
“Without me, you would have withered eons ago,” she replies. “Netharis anticipated this. He devised a tether. A bridge so to speak. As long as it remained, you could draw from me to live.”
My brows crease. “Wouldn’t a tether require consent?”
“Yes,” she laughs darkly. “And you gave it… each time you signed your contract.” She shakes her head in a slow toss. “Imagine my surprise when you willingly shattered the very thing responsible for keeping you alive.”
“I-I don’t understand,” I stammer, my mind racing to piece together the truths she’s revealed. “Why? Why would Netharis—”
“By controlling you, he controlled me. That was his true intent,” she interjects.
“In an ironic twist of Fate, I came to realize if I let you wither, I would be trapped here—lost until some unwitting mortal stumbled upon me. I couldn’t take that risk.
I’ve waited long enough. You will be reclaimed and I will take my place beside Life. As it should be. As it once was.”
Reclaimed…
Not mended?
My eyes shoot wide. She means to assume my being to escape her prison—by stealing my body, my life. She steps toward me and my fingers tighten around the hilt of the bloodstone dagger.
“I will not be reclaimed,” I counter, lifting the dagger.
Her eyes fall upon it and she pauses.
“You do not have a choice,” she snaps. “The lives you’ve lived were never yours. Twenty lives and twenty deaths—I felt them all. Every end, each beginning—countless attempts Netharis made to mold you into something he could use to control me.”
“Aether?” the breathy word leaves my lips.
The sophont’s greeting… it knew.
“Are you telling me—are you saying—We’re—I’m—”
“Aether.” Her distant stare pierces through me. “Albeit, a particularly bastardized and warped form.” Her lips curl in a small, almost sad smile. “Part of me does wish this could be different. But you’re a threat to the stability of the realms. Two forms of Aether cannot exist. You must return.”
In an amorphous blur of incredible speed, she rushes me, knocking the dagger aside. It flies into the grass as she plunges a hand into the center of my chest.
White hot pain and ice cold panic rip through my being as her fingers curl around my essence. A deafening scream—my deafening scream—rings through the night, leaving my throat bloodied. White wings unfurl behind her, stretching to their fullest.
Unforgiving eyes lock against mine as I struggle to keep the hand from pulling the very core of who I am from my chest. The way she stares—she doesn’t see me. She sees Netharis and everything he’s done.
And he… every time he looked at me… I was never truly seen. He saw her. Her and her terrifying and ancient power—the kind of power capable of creating realms.
“Please,” I manage through gritted teeth, my shoulder burning like absolute hellfire. “Do not do this.”
I’m about to be reaped by Aether.
My grip around her wrist tightens.
It cannot end this way. I will not simply be reclaimed and lost—not after everything I’ve endured. Not after everything I’ve done to get here. She cannot have Ryc, nor Eve, nor Cyran…
She cannot have my life.
A low, rumbling vibration ripples through my chest and I bear down on my grip with everything. Every ounce of desperate and pain-coated strength I have, I pour into my want, my need, to survive.
Bones crack and splinter and snap, and her scream replaces mine.
The ironclad grip on my essence releases, and I yank both her hand and myself away. She lifts a hand and vines shoot through the dirt, aimed for the center of my chest.
A vibration screams around my heart, and I grab hold, demanding obedience.
And the innate… it listens.
Bright blue veilflowers erupt along the same vines and they pitch away seconds before plunging through my breastplate. They instead find a different mark, the flesh of her arms. Sinking through her shoulders, her wings, and chest, they hoist her into the air as I fall to my knees in the dirt.
As I clutch at my chest with trembling fingers, silver streaks of her blood race toward the hells, tracing the vines into the ground. Veilflower buds appear, following the same path. They unfurl, bloom, and stretch to their fullest.
“You would damn the realms,” she breathes and my head snaps up.
Pinned and bound by vines, she’s rendered captive.
I stare for a moment. Her white wings splayed, thronged with green and stained with silver… the bold universe hangs behind her.
I was willing to mend. To assimilate. To heal.
I’m not willing to die.
To be lost.
“I… would live,” I groan the words as I force myself to my feet, snatching the bloodstone dagger from the grass.
“You are a lesser piece of me,” she hisses, writhing against her bindings and baring her fangs. “Lesser cannot kill the greater.”
I turn the dagger over in my hands, inspecting the void-like blade, and give a slow nod.
“If you’ve been truly watching me throughout these lifetimes,” I scoff a dry laugh, lifting my chin to meet her stare, “then you know you are not the first piece of myself I’ve killed to survive.”
In this lifetime alone, I spent centuries chipping away at myself to better fit the hells—to meet its demands.
When it wasn’t Netharis or Kassil leaving me broken and battered, it was me.
Because it was all I knew. A few short months among the living have shown I don’t have to break myself to find where I belong.
“You are tainted,” she says, her tone meant to belittle. “Touched by darkness. You will never reach the full extent of what I am—what Aether should be.”
I laugh. “I don’t want to.”
Her brows crease as if I’d spoken in a language she doesn’t understand.
“The realms have existed for eons without you,” I say as I approach. “And they’ll continue for eons still.”
“I should have ended you the moment the tether snapped,” she snarls and she pulls herself forward, the vines sinking deeper into her flesh. Silver surges around her wounds.
I offer her a weak smile. “I know what that’s like—hating parts of yourself. Feeling ashamed. Wanting to keep them hidden, hoping they’ll fail, trying to smother them.”
A truth I’ve carried for centuries and have never spoken.
“You wicked, selfish—”
Her words hitch as I sink the blade into the center of her chest.
“All these centuries watching,” I say, holding her stare as silver blood pours over my tightening grip upon the hilt, “and you’ve learned nothing about demons.”
Her entire body slumps against the vines and her silver eyes dilate, growing unfocused. Hellfire blazes around her, throwing me backward onto the ground as I shield my eyes with an arm. Dragging myself away from the heat and threat of scorching flame, I watch myself burn.
It’s somehow both cathartic and disturbing.
I’ve no idea what this means for my soul.
I may have just damned myself.
So be it.
Graying ashes rise, riding the heat and taking on a strange golden glow. As they fall in a slow drifting descent, I catch a piece and it absorbs into my palm. Glancing up expecting to find a sky filled with golden snow, I instead find a concentrated cloud hovering over me.
The ashes fall upon me and melt against my hands, my face, my hair.
Each strike sends a soft, tingling vibration along my spine, and it echoes in my chest. With the last of her body rendered ash, the vines vanish and one by one the stars snuff themselves out.
The color fades from the skies and the ground falls away.
As I sit in darkness, a violent rumble grows around my heart and a howling screams in my ears.