Chapter 44
Chapter Forty-Four
Alyssa
Ihad no idea what I was doing. But as I closed my eyes on the battlefield, trusting in the ones I loved to keep me safe, I let my consciousness sink into that well of power Nymeria had opened up inside of me.
I sank into the realm itself. Into the very magic that had created the fabric of the world she’d created. I could see the way she’d woven the strands together. Her the magic had separated to form the five courts of power where it was supposed to instead be woven into one glorious tapestry.
Nymeria had never been perfect, but she had come here with the intention of creating something better. Perhaps that was a naive ambition. Maybe better was just the same as usual as you lied to yourself, trying to see the world through different eyes.
There was nothing new here. All of the horror and the violence she’d tried to escape wherever it was that she’d come from had just formed here as well.
The same problems in a different place. Maybe it was all just inevitable when you filled a world with creatures who had the capacity to make decisions for themselves.
It would seem that existence was impossible without chaos.
And through chaos, darkness was always born.
“We could have it all, little sister,” Arik’s voice purred from somewhere, everywhere, I couldn’t even tell. “You see it now, don’t you? The mistakes she made. The flaws in her logic. Together we could tear it down, start again. Create perfection.”
“You and I have very different ideas about what this realm deserves, Arik.”
“Arik? Even now you refuse to call me brother?”
He was getting too much entertainment out of this, and I could already see that he was trying to buy time. To distract me enough for him to turn the tables on the battle raging outside.
But I refused to let myself get pulled into it. I wasn’t here for a chat. I had one purpose and he was trying to distract me from it. So I pushed his voice aside and took a centering breath as I searched for what I’d come here for.
From this place, all things had been created. That included the land. It included me, and more importantly, it included Arik. Here was the place I’d find his vulnerabilities and here was the place I’d find my way through those cracks to finally destroy him.
“Those are some very murderous thoughts you’re having, dear sister,” Arik mocked. “Anyone would think you didn’t like me very much.”
I looked around, searching harder. There had to be something. If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to distract me.
I was starting to panic that I’d miscalculated, but then I saw it. A smudge, a part of the fabric that felt wrong and when I pushed it aside I realised that it was because a second layer was hidden beneath. A layer trying to mask the vortex of power that surrounded Arik
It wasn’t difficult to latch hold of it.
And I wasn’t gentle as I found the gaps in the weave, the strands that hadn’t quite laid in the right place, and pushed my power into them to widen.
Once I started it was far easier than it should have been.
The magic inside could sense what I wanted and eagerly responded like it knew there was something here that was a danger to the rest, to the very fabric of Nymeria.
And then it was as simple as following that tendril of power that was working its way into Arik, and the hold he had on this world.
I pushed through the outer layers of his defences like swimming through tar, thick and resistant.
It burned with a cold that had nothing to do with temperature.
His magic fought me. Tried to push me out.
But the five courts were stronger than any single will, even his, and I pressed deeper until the resistance gave way and I fell into the centre of what he was.
The first thing I felt was hope.
It felt so out of place here that I almost thought that I’d fallen for another of his tricks.
But then I realised that this was Arik’s hope. An ancient hope, older than any emotion I had ever experienced, bright and clean and pure in a way that made my chest ache. The hope of a newborn consciousness opening its eyes for the first time and seeing a world that was beautiful.
This was a memory. A core memory that had shaped his existence.
I felt Nymeria’s love pouring into him, the warmth of a mother creating a child from the fabric of her own being, filling him with light and purpose and the desperate, tender wish that he would be everything she needed him to be.
He had been so wanted. That was the part that broke me first. He had not been an accident, or an afterthought. He had been a choice, made with love, and absolute intention of creating something wonderful.
And then the flaw.
I felt it appear like a crack in glass. Not something Arik had chosen.
Not something he had done. A fissure in the foundation of his being that had been there from the very first moment, baked into the structure of his creation like a fault line in the earth.
Hunger. Rage. Emptiness. A void at the centre of him that had no source and no cure, a place where something should have been and was not, and the awful, creeping awareness that something was wrong with him and he didn’t know why.
I felt him try to fix it. Felt the child reaching for his mother, confused, frightened, hoping she could explain the wrongness. Hoping she could fill the void.
And I felt Nymeria’s response.
Not cruelty. Not malice. Something worse. Fear. The dawning, horrible realisation that what she had made was not what she had intended, that this flaw was fundamental, and couldn’t be repaired. And beneath that fear, there was a terrible decision. Cold and and devastating in its finality.
She cast him out.
I lived through the moment. Felt it from the inside.
The child had grown into a man, but he was still a child in her eyes.
A child filled with confusion as the warmth withdrew.
The child’s panic as the light that had surrounded him since birth pulled away and left him in the dark.
Then the inevitable scream, not of rage but of abandonment, echoing through an empty world with no one left to hear it.
He had been discarded. Not punished. Not corrected. Discarded. Like a first draft torn up and thrown away.
The centuries unfolded around me in a cascade of anguish that I could not stop and could not control.
I felt every one of them. The slow, grinding loneliness of an immortal child with no parent and no purpose.
The search for connection that was met with fear, because the void inside him leaked outward and everything he touched recoiled from what it found.
The first time he hurt someone, not because he wanted to but because the emptiness was so vast that it consumed without asking.
Because of a desperate need to feel something.
Anything. But that all that came was the horror of realising what he was.
The rest was inevitable really. The gradual, exhausting erosion of hope as century after century passed and nothing changed and no one came.
Until the day he stopped trying.
I felt that too. The exact moment when the last ember of the first child of Nymeria had winked out and something harder took its place.
Not evil. Not yet. Just an absence. The acceptance that he would never be enough, had been designed to not be enough.
And if that was what he was, then he would be it completely.
If the world had decided he was a monster, he would give it a monster worth fearing.
The hatred had grown from there. Fed by centuries of rejection.
Sharpened by the knowledge that his mother had replaced him.
Had made another child, a better child, and poured into her all the love and purpose that she had ripped away from him.
Alyssa. The replacement. The do-over. The proof that he had been found wanting.
My heart broke for that boy. It even broke for the man he should have become. But it didn’t erase the things he’d done. A series of malicious decisions had brought us to this point. None of it could be undone, and more importantly it couldn’t be allowed to continue.
I could accept that it wasn’t Arik’s fault entirely that he had become this man. Nymeria had set him on the path and failed at every chance to steer him off it until it was too late. But that didn’t erase his culpability. It didn’t give him a pass.
And that left one final thing. I had come here to kill him, and it was time for Arik to die.
So I started to draw on everything I had.
The five courts. The Elements. The people linked to me through the most intimate of bonds.
I even dug deep into the fabric of Nymeria itself and I pulled it all into my core.
All the pain. The destruction. All of the death and the grief.
The wrongness of it all. Every terrible act that Arik had performed and the echoing consequences that was felt across the realm.
All of it turned into power, and I drew it all inside of me.
I knew he was continuing to goad me. That he taunted me for even thinking I could be strong enough to pull off something like this. But my mind was in a place that couldn’t hear his words anymore.
Pieces of my very existence shattered as the power built to unimaginable levels inside me. I felt them falling away like dust, scattering into the fabric of the universe.
And then, when I knew I couldn’t take anymore. When I felt that thread of my own existence stretching to almost the point of breaking, I let it go in a blaze of righteous fury aimed straight at that void that constituted the very essence of the man who’d spilt so much blood.
The magic slammed into the core of what made Arik who he was and then… it did nothing.
It didn’t deflect. Didn’t absorb. It just simply refused.
The way water refuses to flow uphill. The way light refuses to bend around a corner.
It was not a matter of power. It was a matter of nature.
You cannot kill what Nymeria made. Not with Nymeria’s own magic.
He was woven from the same fabric as the realm itself, and the realm could not unmake its own foundations through force.
The realisation settled into me with the weight of a falling mountain.
I couldn’t kill him. It simply wasn’t possible.
“Is it my turn now sister?” his voice sneered, and then every piece of my existence exploded with pain.