Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Why couldn’t you stop him yourself?” I asked, and I hated how small my voice sounded.
Nymeria’s form seemed to sigh, the elements rippling outward. She drifted toward the stone throne and lowered herself onto it, and the simple act of sitting seemed to cost her something. The shifting slowed. The colours dimmed.
“Because I have nothing left to stop him with.” She looked down at her own hands. Translucent, flickering, barely there. “I wasn’t always like this. Once, I was… more.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again, her voice carried something different. Not the weight of a creator talking about her realm. Something more personal. More distant.
“I came from a place very far from here. A realm built for gods. Beings like me, vast and ancient and powerful beyond anything you could imagine.” The light around her shifted, and I caught glimpses of something in the swirling elements.
A sky that wasn’t Nymeria’s sky. Stars arranged in patterns I didn’t recognise.
“It was beautiful. And it was superficial. There was nothing to do. Nothing to build. Nothing to tend. Just eternity, stretching in every direction, and gods with too much power and too little purpose. When the backstabbing and the betrayal started, no one was safe.”
She paused, and the flowers at her edges bloomed and died three times before she continued.
“Bored gods create chaos, Alyssandra. I watched it begin. The games, the cruelty, the slow madness that sets in when immortal beings have nothing to occupy their hands. I could see where it was heading. The fractures forming between us. The darkness creeping into minds that had once held only light.” Her form contracted again, dimmer now.
“And then they turned against me. Blamed me for things I had nothing to do with. Even when they realised I was innocent they were too far into their own madness that I didn’t even get an apology.
They started turning on each other then, and I wanted no part of it. So I left.”
The chamber seemed to hold its breath. Even my mates were utterly still behind me.
“I found this place. Empty, formless, waiting. And I poured myself into it. Every scrap of what I was, I gave to this realm. I grew the forests, carved the rivers, raised the mountains. I breathed life into the soil and magic into the air. I created people and creatures and seasons. But with every act of creation, I bound myself tighter to what I’d made.
” She looked at me, and in those ancient eyes I saw something I never expected to see in a god.
Exhaustion.
“I can’t leave, Alyssandra. I can’t go back.
I don’t even know what’s become of the others.
Whether they tore each other apart or found peace.
For all I know they could still be circling each other in that gilded, vapid paradise.
I gave everything to build this realm, and now this.
..” She gestured at her flickering form, at the fading light, at the breathing walls that pulsed slower than before.
“This is all I have left. The last ember of what I was.”
I stared at her. At this god who wasn’t a god anymore. This mother who had never held her children. This creator who had run from chaos only to birth more of it, and who was now sitting on a crumbling throne watching the last of herself flicker out.
“You’re dying,” I said.
“I’m ending.” The correction was gentle.
“I’ve been ending for a very long time. This chamber, this seat of power, it’s the last thread that ties me to this plane.
When you fully claim this court, that final thread will break.
” She said it so calmly. So simply. Like she was telling me the weather. “And I will be gone.”
“You want that.” It wasn’t a question, because I could see it in her. The bone-deep weariness of someone who had been holding on for far, far too long.
“I am so tired, Alyssandra.” The words cracked something open in her voice.
The elements around her stilled, and for a moment she was almost solid, almost real.
She looked like a woman who hadn’t slept in a thousand years.
“And I am so sorry. For Arik. For what he’s done to this realm, to its people, to you.
I made mistakes that have cost lives beyond counting, and I have spent centuries too weak to fix any of it.
” The light in her eyes dimmed. “I hate that you have to fix it for me. You are my daughter, and I have given you nothing but an unbearable burden.”
The anger was gone. I didn’t know when it had left, but in its place was something worse.
Understanding. She wasn’t an all-powerful being who had chosen not to help.
She was someone who had spent herself creating and had almost nothing left.
The whispers in the wind, the gentle nudges.
That wasn’t indifference. That was a mother using the last of her breath to do what little she could.
Gods weren’t infallible. They were just people with more power and longer memories, and they made terrible choices born from exhaustion and loneliness just like the rest of us.
“I want to give you something,” Nymeria said, and her form flickered violently.
Light and shadow warring across her surface.
“Before I go. The last of what I am, the final spark of my power. I can use it for one act. One gift. For everything I have asked of you and everything I never should have, I can grant you one final request.”
The chamber went very still.
I immediately knew what I would ask for.
There was no question, or deliberation. I turned to look at Damon.
At the shadows under his eyes, at the way he stood apart from his brothers like he didn’t trust himself to get too close.
The nightmare had stolen everything from him.
It had used his body as a weapon against the people he loved.
And now a god was offering me the power to rip it out of his head forever.
“Remove the nightmare from...”
“No.”
The word cut through the chamber like a blade. Everyone went still. I turned, and Damon had stepped forward, the shackles clinked around his wrists, and the sound echoed off those breathing walls like a heartbeat.
“Damon...”
“No.” He said it again, quieter this time, but with an iron certainty that stopped me mid-sentence. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Nymeria. “Don’t waste it on me. Bring back Rhidian.”
Silence. The kind of silence that has weight to it, that presses against your skin and makes it hard to breathe.
“Damon, she can free you,” I said, and my voice broke on the word free because I wanted it so badly. I wanted to see him without this sentence hanging over him. I wanted to see the brother my mates talked about. The real Damon, the one the nightmare had buried.
But even as I said it, the torn feeling was already there.
Because Rhidian’s name was sitting in my chest too.
The boy I’d known since I was small. The friend who’d loved me with everything he had and never once made me feel guilty for not loving him back.
Who’d died with a sword in his chest and my name on his lips.
I wanted both. And there had to be a choice.
“This should be my decision,” Damon said, and his voice was steady.
Clear. The clearest I’d heard it since before the nightmare took hold.
“My nightmare. My sacrifice to make.” He straightened, chains pulling taut, and met my eyes.
“I’ll take the bite instead. Dean is an alpha.
He can give me the wolf. And the wolf can fight the nightmare. ”
Behind me, Dean made a sound. Low, rough, caught somewhere between protest and something else entirely. “We still don’t know if that will work. You wanted to wait to see if Alyssa was strong enough.”
“Not anymore,” Damon agreed. “We’re out of time and waiting is foolish. But I know that Rhidian died protecting this realm. I know he was a good man.” His voice faltered for the first time, and his eyes moved past me to land on Maddox. “And I know what killing him did to you.”
Maddox made a sound. Small, broken, barely there. But in the silence of that chamber, it was deafening.
“I’ve been watching.” Damon’s voice was barely above a whisper now, but it carried to every corner of the room.
“Through the fog, through the nightmare, through every moment that thing let me surface just to see what my body had done. I’ve been watching.
And I saw you, Maddox. I saw what it cost you. ”
Maddox was shaking. I could feel it through the bond. A tremor that started deep and worked its way out until his whole body was vibrating with it. His eyes were locked on his brother’s face, and whatever he saw there was undoing him.
“I couldn’t protect you from the nightmare,” Damon continued. “I couldn’t stop what it did to our family. But I can do this. I can take this weight off your shoulders, little brother.”
The words, little brother, broke something in the room.
I felt it crack through the bond like a fracture line, felt every one of my mates react to it.
Ryder’s breath hitched. Tank went utterly still.
Dean’s hand on my back pressed harder, and I could feel the war in him.
Wanting to argue, wanting to protect, and knowing that his brother had earned the right to make this choice.
And Maddox. Maddox, who felt everything, who carried every wound and every death like stones in his pockets. Maddox broke open. The tears came silently at first, then with a raw, gutting sound that I felt in my own chest like a physical blow.
“You can’t...” Maddox started.