Chapter 30 #2
Or the idea of her, made of night.
Dare took a step forward, voice rough. “Hanna?”
“Thorne.” My name sounded like a command and a plea at once. The voice wasn’t entirely hers, but it wasn’t not, either. It seemed to echo with magic. “Dare.”
She lifted a hand. The darkness around it rippled. “We need you.”
My heart lurched.
The shadow’s face didn’t change, but the air around it shivered, as if whatever wore Hanna’s shape was struggling to hold it. “Edric’s not gone. He found his way into Kaelan’s mind. His body is destroyed, but that’s not enough.”
Dare’s breath hitched.
My own pulse hammered in my throat. “What do we do?”
“The door is still open. Find them.”
Behind it, the battlefield roared with victory and pursuit and the dying screams of men who’d run too late. The lords were in control, leading them now; they didn’t need us to finish this war.
Then the Shadow Weaver—or Hanna—or the two of them, combined, turned, and the shadows parted like a door.
Hanna
The darkness around us shifted when they arrived. Dare’s presence was reckless warmth spreading across us both; Thorne’s was steadying, calming, a sudden certainty that we could win.
Kaelan had once been reluctant to let them in, but eventually, his mind had rearranged itself to accommodate the idea of them. He hadn’t believed in friends who would stand at his side, and they had shouldered their way into his mind anyway. They had changed who he was.
And his mind shifted around them now, making space for them once again.
Kaelan stood beside me when they appeared, his hand still tight in mine. He straightened as if something inside him had finally aligned, like bones set back into place.
Edric was still there, but he was far more distant, standing on the dark horizon. His face rippled with horror as if he had some sense of what had happened in the world outside, and then set into its familiar cruel lines.
“You’re here,” Kaelan’s voice was rough as he looked at the two of them.
“You think we’d let you have the fun of destroying this bastard all to yourself?” Thorne asked.
“He’s been the dagger hanging over my head for years,” Dare said. “I’d like to return the favor.”
Thorne’s eyes were already scanning the darkness, assessing threats that weren’t fully visible. “Where is he?”
He was gone. I scrubbed my hand over my face, feeling unanchored in the darkness except by Kaelan’s hand.
As if summoned by the question, the shadows at the edge of the world peeled back.
Edric emerged untouched by the ruin around him.
He wore no crown here, no armor—only immaculate control. He looked the way he always had in Kaelan’s memories: tall, composed, disappointed. As if Kaelan were still the failure he could correct.
“You always were sentimental. Letting them in.” Edric’s gaze flicked to Dare, dismissive. To Thorne, measuring. Then to me.
His eyes narrowed. “While you’re in here, who can watch over my son? My guards are creeping up to kill him even now. To gut you both while you sleep.”
“No,” I answered, smiling back at him, because I knew the Shadow Weaver was watching over our bodies.
They had disappeared in the shadows, and while Edric had sent his men, the Shadow Weaver had destroyed them all.
They had drunk shadows and violence until they had their fill, and they had never reached us at their center.
“You’ve lost outside, and you’ve already lost inside.
You just haven’t woken to that fact yet. ”
Edric sighed as if we were nothing but children he had to indulge for a moment.
“His mind is mine. I shaped it from that childish clay. I took a weak little boy and made him into a man, strong and cunning and cruel. I made him into the man who could have faced me and won today, if not for all the weakness you seeded.”
“No.” Thorne drew his sword. “Kaelan’s beaten you every day I’ve known him.”
Kaelan scoffed. “Well, that’s generous. But I appreciate your faith.”
He sounded like himself again. Cynical, but strong.
Edric turned his head slowly to study Thorne. “You were always a complication.”
Thorne didn’t flinch. “And you were always predictable.”
Edric’s smile thinned. “But you cannot kill me, Thorne. Only he can. And he won’t.”
The darkness dropped away beneath our feet, and for one sickening heartbeat there was nothing—no surface, no gravity, no direction—just the sensation of falling through Kaelan’s fear.
I gasped, tightening my grip on his hand as the world reformed around us in a violent rush.
Stone slammed back into existence. Cold, slick, familiar.
The throne room in the ice palace. But not quite a throne room, because the floor of the throne room was a stone bride, a narrow one that led to Edric, who was back on his throne now.
Kaelan’s chest hitched.
Scattered across the floor were boys and girls, curled in on themselves, some crying silently, some staring with empty eyes. Bruised. Bloody. Wearing noble colors, servant’s clothes, training leathers. Every child Edric had ever broken or discarded or used as an example.
Phantoms.
But the pain radiating off them was real enough to make my stomach twist.
Edric sat on his throne, arrogant as ever, calm restored like a mask snapped into place.
“Save them,” he said mildly, “or kill me. You can snap your fingers and destroy the throne, but the bridge will crumble. The choice is yours.”
Kaelan’s gaze swept over the room, his jaw hardening.
Edric had gotten to the core of Kaelan. Edric had tried to make him cruel, and Kaelan had rebelled by being kind in his own way.
By being the villain the world saw, when a villain was needed—like when he pushed his own friends away to protect them—and by carrying all this pain alone.
“This isn’t even real,” Dare snarled at Edric.
Edric smiled. “No, none of this is now. But it doesn’t have to be now to be real.”
Kaelan’s fingers tightened painfully around mine.
“Collapse the bridge between us, and you’ll destroy me,” Edric taunted again.
One life for many.
Always his.
“Kaelan,” I said softly, stepping closer, forcing him to look at me. “These aren’t real.”
Edric’s eyes flashed. “They are to him.”
The shadows along the walls writhed, responding to my anger, but I held them back. This wasn’t about overpowering Edric. It never had been.
It was about breaking the lie.
Thorne sheathed his sword. The sound rang loud in the throne room.
Edric frowned. “What are you doing?”
Kaelan knelt in front of the boy who looked like him.
The phantom flinched.
Kaelan held out a hand anyway.
“I see you,” he said. “I remember you. I remember all of you.”
The throne room trembled.
Cracks spread through the stone floor, light bleeding through from beneath, not shadow, but cold white light, like frost under moonlight.
Edric’s smile vanished. “Stop.”
Kaelan rose to face his father, not as a son, not as a weapon, but as a king who understood his enemy.
“You taught me that suffering was currency,” Kaelan said. “That pain bought survival. Loyalty. Strength.”
The children around us began to fade. not screaming, not vanishing in fear, but dissolving into light, their wounds closing as they went.
“You were wrong,” Kaelan continued. “Pain just makes more pain.”
Edric rose from his throne. “You can’t erase what I did.”
“I don’t need to,” Kaelan said. “I just need to stop carrying it.”
The bridge disintegrated between us and Edric.
But Edric lashed out. The darkness twisted, forming chains that shot toward Kaelan.
Thorne moved instantly, stepping into their path, blade flashing as he severed them one by one. Dare leapt across the divide, slamming into Edric, tackling him. The two of them stumbled together, slamming into Edric’s throne.
The Shadow Weaver rose around me, no longer hungry—focused.
“Now,” she whispered. “Together.”
Kaelan lifted his hand.
Ice bloomed outward. It froze over the throne, and Dare threw himself back. He landed on solid ground where the abyss had been a moment before, Kaelan’s ice catching his friend.
Edric screamed as frost crawled up his limbs, locking him where he stood.
“You need me!” Edric shouted, voice cracking. “You are nothing without what I made you!”
Kaelan walked toward him, each step steady, ice crackling beneath his feet with each step as he made a bridge.
“I am everything you failed to be.” He placed his palm against Edric’s chest. “Just. Merciful. Good. And I am done with you.”
The ice shattered—not outward, but inward—collapsing Edric’s presence into nothingness, peeling him out of Kaelan’s mind like rot cut clean from bone.
Edric’s scream cut off mid-breath.
The throne room dissolved around us, stone melting into mist, darkness thinning into something soft and endless. Kaelan sagged, and Dare caught him with a laugh that was half a sob.
“You did it,” Dare said.
Thorne exhaled slowly, resting a hand on Kaelan’s shoulder. “Welcome back.”
Kaelan looked at all of us, eyes bright, exhausted, free.
I stepped into him, pressing my forehead to his. “You’re safe. You’re here.”
He nodded once, breath shaky. “So are you.”
Soft and golden, like dawn spilling through frost-laced windows. The scars in the world smoothed over. The last echoes of pain faded into something distant and survivable.
Ahead of us, a door stood open.
It wasn’t carved from bone or shadow or ice—but from light itself, rimmed with darkness like a memory finally at rest. Beyond it stretched the world we were fighting for: blue sky and white stone and banners lifting in a clean wind.
I could hear it—the sound of life continuing.
Of laughter somewhere. Of a kingdom exhaling after holding its breath too long.
Kaelan stepped toward it.
Dare followed, grinning like he didn’t quite trust the miracle but would take it anyway. Thorne paused just long enough to look back at me, his eyes sharp, searching—then nodded, as if sealing a promise.
We’ll see you on the other side.
I took a step after them.
The light didn’t welcome me.
It slid around my ankles like water around stone. The ground beneath my feet held fast, unyielding. I frowned, tried again—harder this time.
Nothing.
“Hanna?” Dare called, confusion edging his voice.
“I’m coming,” I said automatically.
I wasn’t.
The shadows at the edge of the door stirred, thickening, coiling—not hostile, not yet—but possessive. A familiar pressure wrapped around my ribs, my spine, my breath.
I looked down at my feet, which were unmoving. I couldn’t force them to follow my men, no matter how hard I tried.
I was rooted in the dark I had carried with me into this place.
The door remained open. The light remained beautiful.
My heart began to pound, slow and heavy.
“Go,” I said, forcing the word past the tightness in my chest.
Kaelan turned back fully, alarm flashing across his face. “Hanna—”
“I’ll be right behind you,” I lied.
The shadows curled closer, sealing that lie into my bones.
Kaelan hesitated for one agonizing heartbeat.
Then the light pulled him through.
The door began to close.
I stood alone in the thinning glow, the darkness settling around me like a crown and a cloak and a shroud.
Deep down, I had known it all along. I had opened the door, but I wasn’t meant to leave through it.
I had slain Edric in the outside world. I had given the Shadow Weaver the power to watch over Dare and Thorne as they lay in the blood-streaked, trodden snow, their eyes moving frantically beneath their lids as they fought in this world.
I had raised the shadows around Kaelan and myself as we lay on that stage, a crown abandoned between us, our fingers twined together. I had protected us all.
This was the cost of being the Shadow Queen.
The light vanished.
The shadows breathed in.