Chapter 39
S?ren
Death dragged me kicking and screaming.
The moment the knife embedded itself in my stomach, I knew death had arrived to take me.
The pain was staggering. It lit through me like a fire, consuming everything it touched.
With every second my lungs had struggled for breath, my heartbeat soon stuttering to a stop.
I’d taken Revna in one last time, memorizing her features, twisted in anguish.
But when darkness swallowed me whole, I pushed against it.
“Revna!” I shouted so loud my voice cracked with the desperation of it. The suffocating nothingness encroached, unyielding. But in the distance, a pinprick of light shone through—dim and steadily disappearing. I ran to it, desperate to find my way back.
No matter how fast I sprinted, my breathing remained even. And the dim light ahead continued retreating, never drawing any closer. I clenched my jaw and forced myself onward. I knew I could outpace the darkness. I had to.
She was waiting for me.
The moment the thought crossed my mind, a glowing golden thread wrapped itself around my waist.
It tightened against my stomach, and I looked down at it, bewildered. I knew far more about dying than I should, a side effect of speaking to ghosts for most of my life. And this was not what any of them had described.
The thread pulled hard in the opposite direction, away from the light. Away from Revna. I scowled at it, but continued moving toward her. The knot in the thread tightened like a noose, but it wasn’t enough to halt me. I have to get back to her. I promised—
The next tug was sharper. When I glanced down again, the first thread was accompanied by many more. Dozens turned to hundreds, entire swaths of my skin bathed in glowing light.
It’s taking me from her.
Panic tightened my chest, sending a chill through me. Not even death would keep her from me—I refused to let it. My pace slowed, but I strained against my leash. I’d lied to so many people through the years, myself most of all—but never to Revna. She made me honest, made me good.
I told her I wouldn’t leave her.
Death tried to make me a liar.
Picturing her face gave me strength, and I resisted the pull with renewed vigor. “Revna!”
The next threads caught around my knees and I fell.
When my face slammed into the ground, I felt no pain.
My arms were covered in threads but not anchored to my sides.
Desperate, I scrabbled for purchase. If I still had fingernails, surely they would have broken against the onslaught I leveled. But the ground offered no hold.
The threads, now far stronger than me, pulled again. I slid backward. With a growl, I forced myself to my hands and knees. “I’m not leaving you,” I called. But dread sank its claws into the pit of my stomach. I heaved myself forward.
She needs me, I thought, the reminder carrying me through. I promised I would never leave her.
I fought the threads. Dug my nails into the nothingness, scrabbling for purchase as they dragged me away. “I WON’T LEAVE HER!”
My entire body was enveloped in gold. I screamed my rage to the darkness when death finally triumphed.
“You,” a voice somehow deep and high-pitched, ageless and all-knowing, solitary and a hundred voices at once, said, “are quite obstinate, Hellbringer.”
My eyes flew open, but immediately watered in the face of so much light. Still, I forced them wide, blinking away the tears and reaching for my sword.
No sheath rested at my hip. So instead, I scrambled backward, trying to put space between myself and my adversary. Slowly, my vision adjusted and the endless expanse of bright white dimmed to reveal a figure standing several yards from me.
They glowed golden—the exact same as the threads that had brought me here. I had seen the Tapestry several times in the past few days, meeting it in dreams with Revna as it showed us snippets of the past.
None of those times had I imagined seeing it while I was more furious than I’d ever been in my entire life.
“You,” I spat, adrenaline and anger fueling me to stand on unsteady feet. “You brought me here.”
They tilted their head, the humanoid figure somehow managing to radiate polite indifference despite its lack of features. When they spoke, the sound reverberated in my mind, absent any true pitch or accent. “Of course we did.”
My hands curled into fists. “Send me back. I’m needed on the other side.”
A chuckle. “We know, Hellbringer.”
“Stop calling me that.” The reminder of my many wrongs, offered so casually by an all-powerful being, sent an uncomfortable chill up my spine.
When Revna called me Hellbringer, it was an acknowledgment of everything we’d been through together.
When others did, it pointed out my monstrosity, my unforgivable crimes.
I waited for my head to throb, but then realized the intense struggle to bring me here hadn’t even left me sore.
I doubted I could feel pain at all right now. “My name is S?ren, and you know it.”
“Of course,” it said with a nod.
“Why am I here?” I asked, running a hand through my hair. It did little to quell my nerves. “This is not a typical death. My ghost should be back in my world, unable to leave the castle in Bhorglid.”
“The circumstances of your life—and therefore your death—are different than most,” the Tapestry said. “We chose to bring you here to impress upon you the importance of the responsibility you’ve been given.”
“Responsibility.” I let the word settle on my tongue, heavier than usual. “You mean sending souls on to the next life.”
It nodded. “Allow us to show you.”
It waved a hand and more threads appeared behind it, stretching up farther than I could see. Did they go on forever? The threads swirled together, beginning to form shapes.
“Wait.”
The Tapestry paused. I gathered all the courage necessary to demand something of a being far older and more powerful than I could know. While I didn’t believe in gods, I wasn’t stupid enough to look at the Tapestry and not recognize just how much it had control over.
“You can only show me if you tell me whether she made it to safety.”
A heartbeat of pause. The Tapestry’s fingers twitched slightly at its sides, like it hadn’t expected the demand. But I had to know. Mira had planned to return for Revna, but had she made it in time? Or had the prison break taken too long?
Despite whatever misgivings it had about my request, the Tapestry nodded. “Yes. Revna lives on, safe.”
Relief rushed through me, a waterfall of emotion strong enough to bring the sting of tears to my eyes. But I held them back and stepped forward to stand next to the Tapestry. “Then I will see what you have to offer me.”
The weaving in front of us moved, taking the shape of a sphere surrounding me on all sides.
When I looked toward the Tapestry to gauge whether I should be worried, it was gone.
And then, all the golden threads changed color, the image so seamless, it was as if I stood in the wastelands themselves. Only I felt none of the cold.
A woman with long red hair stood before me, frowning. She had a long walking stick in one hand, and she wore layer upon layer of fur. Around her waist was a belt and a sheath, which held a familiar blade: the Soulcleaver.
“Aloisa,” I breathed.
But she looked past me. I turned to follow her gaze, inhaling sharply when I saw what she did.
Next to a tall pine was the body of a young boy. He was no more than sixteen, his eyes staring sightlessly. There wasn’t a single mark on him. A bow and arrow lay discarded and half buried in the snow next to him.
I knew exactly how this boy had died. Because I’d been the one to kill him.
Aloisa stepped briskly over to the body, surveying his military uniform. Red and white and gold—the colors of Bhorglid—adorned him. My palm moved to rub against my throat as the guilt threatened to choke me.
When Revna had been my prisoner, I’d desperately needed her to trust me.
I’d given her what I’d thought was a gift: the chance for her to escape if she truly wanted, but really the chance to speak to her brother Frode, since she missed him so much.
The entire time she was gone, I’d paced through the forest, wondering if she would come back to me.
Even then, she’d been brighter than the sun in the sky to me.
She did choose to come back, and in my relief, I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings. The boy, still so young, had been on sentry duty. He’d managed to shoot me with an arrow.
I’d known the danger of being so close to Bhorglid’s main camp. But I’d been naive to expect the danger to come in the form of a seasoned, expert soldier.
If anyone had seen me with Revna, our mission would have been for naught.
I had no other choice. It was what I’d been trying to convince myself of since the day it happened. I had to kill him.
I hadn’t realized he’d been left in the snow and not given a proper burial.
Aloisa examined the body, then reached out to close his eyes gently. She, however, chose to follow the thread of his soul. A single golden string stretching around the body and disappearing into the trees.
Aloisa’s face grew determined, and she began to step carefully in the direction of the waiting ghost. It wasn’t long before the trees parted to reveal the boy’s spirit, the other end of the thread disappearing into his nearly translucent form.
He huddled behind a trunk, starting when Aloisa looked directly at him and said, “Hello.”
“You can see me?” His voice was timid, still high-pitched. Another wave of guilt wracked me, but I pushed it aside. There was something in this memory I needed to witness, and I hadn’t yet figured out what it was. “No one else can see me.”
The boy seemed relieved when Aloisa nodded. “Do you know what happened?”
“I died.” He swallowed. “The Hellbringer…he killed me.”