Chapter Fifty-Four • Dread • Lillith
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When we finally make it to Bastion, he’s backed against a dead end.
The smell of stale blood and bile permeates the air in the compact space.
I can only see half of his face past the creature that towers in front of him.
It bobs and snaps its jaws toward Bastion, but falls short of actually attacking him.
Golden light flickers in front of Bash, guttering and sputtering over the palm of his hand. It looks like the light is the only thing keeping the creature from eating him alive.
“Oi!” Aemon shouts. “Remember me, you sack of shit?”
The creature lets out an unnerving chitter and turns to face us. I balk at Aemon. What the hell is he thinking? Neither of us has any magic. And it looks like Bastion’s is flagging in this weird non-place-dimension-thing.
I look back at the creature, and it lets out an excited trill before skittering toward us on amphibious-looking legs that move too fast to be normal. I yelp and leap closer to Aemon, who wraps his arms around me and gives the monster his back.
“Fuck!” Bash cries. “I don’t—it’s not working!”
“Aemon!” I cry.
But Aemon isn’t looking at me, he’s looking past me. He nods once and ducks low, holding me against him and kneeling just before a blast of glittering power bursts overhead.
The monster screams before crackling out of existence, smoldering like flying wish paper before fading out of existence.
When I drop my head back to find the source, Wren stands there. Her eyes like a wild horse’s, her skin covered in the same slime that made up the creature she just eviscerated.
“Good, you found us,” Aemon says, as he stands back up and rights the shoulder of my dress. “Sorry for being handsy,” he adds to me as an aside.
“Is Damien with you?” I ask, desperate.
She frowns and shakes her head. Her face is wan and sickly, even under her usual golden complexion. “I was... looking for him. I could feel him. Following your little sliver of magic you gave him.”
My stomach drops. “Was?” I ask. “Why did you stop?”
“It vanished,” she says. “It’s... It got weak for a few seconds, Lilipad. And then it was gone. Then I felt Bastion’s magic flagging, so I came this way and...”
It doesn’t make sense. Not at first. These words all strung together in this order. Why would my magic suddenly vanish? How could The Aberrant hide it with his magic flagging?
Bastion approaches my side, taking my hand in his and squeezing. I look up at him and see it then. The pity. The... hesitant tenderness. As if I’m something fragile.
“I’m so sorry, Lilipad.”
They think... they think he’s dead?
No.
He can’t be dead.
“I would have felt it,” I say, but my voice sounds far away. “He—we just have to head the direction you felt—”
“We will, Lilipad but... you might need to mentally prepare for—”
“I would have felt it. He isn’t—he didn’t—”
“You don’t have any of your magic left, Lillith,” Aemon says gently. “So, you wouldn’t have felt the severing of your connection like you did when he got in the accident.”
“Damien is not. Dead.”
Silence. Then the dread settles in. My skin tingles with the hot-cold sensation. That terrible wrongness of tragedy. I shake my head. “No.” I say, only distantly aware of the tears choking my words. “No. Fuck you. No.”
Then, I run. And run and run and run.
I hear my friends calling after me—or at least my brain takes in the auditory sensation of their calls—but I have only one place to be, and it’s next to Damien.
As I run, the labyrinth falls away. Walls collapsing, floor tiles vanishing from behind us as we sprint through the corridors. My side hurts. My chest is caving in—bisecting my heart with an unbridgeable chasm. But I don’t stop. I don’t dare stop.
Not until all that remains is one long marble runway, the darkness of the void, and the stench of stale blood.
It goes forever. It goes forever until it doesn’t. We reach the end of the path and find Damien collapsed in an inelegant, filthy heap. His lips are blue, where they aren’t smeared in the same viscous gore all over Wren.
Aside from that, he looks as if he could be sleeping.
Only, his chest isn’t rising and falling. His eyes aren’t flickering with visions of dreams I can’t see.
The mark I gave him is gone. The last sliver of my magic—the bit that was supposed to protect him... It’s the very thing that killed him. I know it somehow.
And it’s entirely my fault.
I drop to my knees in the bloody sludge, slipping as I get closer to him. This is wrong. It’s so wrong. I take his hand in mine and look at the ring on his thumb, smearing the fluid from it to look at the constellations inside of it. At the wrist bereft of my magic.
I don’t understand. Why has none of this magic worked?
Why would this have even happened? Why didn’t the portal close before he could get through?
Why would the sacrifice of going to him to heal his burns lead to this?
What was the point if my intuition wasn’t leading me somewhere that I’d find Damien, alive and well, at the end of the path?
My tears carve paths in the sticky black blood clinging to his skin.
I’m so full of rage, and every time I reach for the fire inside of me to do something, the embers don’t even stir. There is nothing but brittle ash inside of me. I am a walking ruin. A little disaster.
Is this really what’s supposed to happen? The wards on The Buried City are meant to break? Magic is about to die forever? Maybe even life as we know it?
A hand lights on my shoulder. It’s warm, but not comforting. It’s like bare thighs sticking to vinyl in the summer heat. Falling asleep with too many blankets on. A fever. The oppressive weight of Virginia humidity.
“Lilipad, we have to go.” Bastion says,
We all stand on an island of tiles quickly vanishing into the void that the Aberrant summoned. I shake my head. “I’m going to stay here,” I say.
“No,” Wren says. “You’re not.”
“Yes,” I say, glaring up at her. “I am.”
“We didn’t come here just to leave you here to die.”
“You shouldn’t have come at all,” I snap. “If you’d never come, Damien would still be alive.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she sneers. “That was his fault. We told him to stay back, Lillith. You can’t just—”
“I don’t care whose fault it is,” I sob. “Goddamnit, Wren. Even if Damien wasn’t dead, my magic is gone. What point is there in living anymore? I have nothing. I thought I had nothing before and now I’m here with even less.
“And I’m going to go back to—to do what?
Sit around and wait for that monster to devour each of you one by one?
Steal the rest of the magic from the world?
Destroy the fae? Devour the life left in this planet?
No. I’m not doing that. Fuck that. I’m going out the way I choose to.
On my terms. I’m done with this bullshit.
I’m done deluding myself into thinking that I ever get to be happy. ”
“And what about us?” Wren snarls. “Just fuck your best friends because your fuck buddy died?”
“Wren,” Bastion says. “That’s enough.”
“Fuck buddy?!” I shout. “Gods, who even are you right now? Maybe you like to play with your food, but this is the realest thing I’ve ever experienced, Wren.”
“Well—”
“Shut it!” Bastion shouts. I’ve never heard him yell like that. He’s chronically unbothered. “Wren. You’re not helping.”
Wren glowers before shaking her head and turning away from both of us. Bastion sighs and kneels down next to me, taking my face in his soft hands.
I feel such anger, but tears pour out of my eyes anyway. And before long, the anger gives way to grief. And sorrow. I’ve lost... everything. And the only thing that remains before me is the gaping maw of despair.
“Bash, I—c-can’t,” I hiccup.
He nods, thumbs swiping wetness away from my face. A futile act, because another stream of tears takes its place. “I know,” he says, choked. “I know, Lilipad.”
“Some loss is too great,” I sob.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Are you fucking serious?” Wren seethes.
Bastion glares up at her. “What the fuck happened to your empathy?” he snaps. “Did all that extra power take up the space you had for it?”
“I’m not going to cosign her killing herself!”
Bastion rolls his eyes and mutters something under his breath. The next time Wren inhales to speak, nothing comes out. Bastion stares at me, his eyes searching mine.
“Are you certain, Lilipad?” he asks, sniffling. “There may be a way to get your magic back. And there will be more men and women—things we can’t even see right now, you know?”
I think about it, looking back down at Damien’s lifeless face.
I think about the road ahead as the marble continues falling away around us.
No wider than a corridor, now. Waking up every day without Damien, and having to negotiate myself out of bed.
Having to face every day alone, as only half of myself.
“I’m so tired,” I sob.
Bastion nods, his own tears falling. “I know.”
“If we’re going to get out of here, it has to be now,” Aemon says.
Bastion looks up at Aemon, then back at me. “Come back with us,” he says. “Please.”
But I can’t see the other side of this grief. Even if my magic returned to me tomorrow, I can’t see the end of my suffering knowing that Damien died because of me.
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
Bastion’s lips press together and he heaves out a hitching breath before pulling me into a crushing embrace.
“I’m so sorry we failed you, Lilipad,” he says into my hair. “I’m so sorry.”
I can’t even speak anymore. I just wrap my arms around him and squeeze back, nodding. Wren doesn’t look at me. All I see is the tangled waves of her dark hair. I know she’s furious with me. I know she won’t ever forgive me.
But I’m so tired of living my life for everyone but myself. Wherever Damien is now, I want to be there. I don’t want to wait until some monster devours my soul. I know a curtain call when I see it, and I don’t need an encore of this devastation.
Bastion sighs as he separates from me. He wipes my tears one last time then gives a single, firm nod. As if trying to steel himself. “Alright,” he says, then stands.
I look at Wren, but she still doesn’t look at me. She only holds her hand out for Bastion. He takes it, then Aemon takes Bastion’s. Yes. She’ll never forgive me. But fine. I won’t care. I’ll be dead.
Aemon looks at me, his expression bleak. “It’s been an honor to know you, Miss Nightingale.”
“Thank you for trying,” I make myself say.
And then they’re gone. Blinked out of existence, leaving me with the body of the man I have loved more than anything else in my life.
I tilt his face toward me, finding it even more pale, if that’s even possible.
I make a futile effort to clean the blood sludge stains off of his face, but they’re dried on.
They don’t budge. I slide down into the slime still left on the floor.
Settling into the nook between his arm and his torso, fresh tears spring to my eyes as images of laughing next to him in my bed, on the floor, in the car in this exact position play in my mind’s eye.
I wrap his slackened arm around my waist and sob at how cold it already is. How heavy and unresponsive.
“I love you, Damien,” I say. “I’m coming to get you.”
The marble vanishes from beneath our feet.
I wrap myself more tightly around him and hold on.
But we don’t fall when the floors vanish.
We just drift in the endless void. For a moment, a spike of panic seizes me.
I might just have to lie here next to him as I slowly starve to death. That really would be hell.
But just as quickly as the panic comes, it ebbs away, replaced with a bone-deep exhaustion that hangs from my eyelids.
The last thing I see before I lose consciousness is Damien’s face, peaceful in its lifelessness. I didn’t see it before, but I think I see it now. The barest upward tilt of the corners of his mouth.
Maybe... maybe he was smiling when he died.
Maybe he was thinking of me.
“I’m coming, Damien,” I whisper again as I drift into the cradle of deepest sleep.