Chapter 37
Nyssa
“Great pep talk,” I mutter, my voice sounding thin and small in the vastness. “Really feeling the confidence boost.”
My lungs struggle to draw a full breath.
The air here is thick, like breathing in honey and static.
The light from the impossible sky isn’t just light; it has weight, pressing down on my skin with a warmth that feels nothing like the sun.
I can feel the Firsts’ power stirring in my blood, a low vibration that resonates with the magic of this place.
It’s the only thing keeping my mortal brain from short-circuiting.
The gods beside me seem to expand in the ambient energy.
Dreven’s shadows are deeper, drinking the alien light.
Voren’s chill is a visible frost that hovers just above the marble at his feet, and Dastian crackles with a low hum, a faint shimmer of red-gold outlining his form.
They belong here. I am an intruder, a trespasser with borrowed power and a stolen book.
“So, where is this thing?” I ask.
“We don’t know,” Dreven replies. “You can track it.”
“Oh, can I?” I snap. “You might’ve told me about that before now.”
“Why? So, you could worry and drive yourself and us mad with it? No, thanks. You know now.”
“So, fetch,” Dastian adds with a wicked wink.
I give him a smile. “I mean this with all the hatred I have for you. Fuck. Off.”
“You don’t hate me. No one who hates me rides my cock like that.”
“Ever heard of hate sex?” I counter.
“Not like that,” he insists, like he is trying to convince himself more than me. It makes me feel kind of bad. I don’t hate him. If anything, I’m falling for him. For all of them. Bonds and tethers and history be damned. This isn’t fate. It’s… inevitable.
I shove the inconvenient thought into a box and slam the lid shut. Feelings are a no-go when death is waiting on the horizon. “How do I track it?”
“Focus,” Dreven says, unhelpfully.
“On?”
“The fact that you are the only one who can pick up the crown. It wants to be worn. It wants to be used. It wants a being to harness its power. That being is currently you in this realm where it is hidden.”
Why do I suddenly feel a bit sorry for it? I’m getting way too sentimental since hooking up with these gods. But I do as they say and close my eyes, breathing in through my nose slowly and exhaling out of my mouth. I try to picture it, but I have no idea what I’m looking for.
I turn without conscious thought to the left and start walking, seeing a path in my mind’s eyes that is crawling with snakes. I recoil and pull my blade out.
“What is it?” Dreven whispers, cautiously.
“Snakes,” I say with a shudder. “Thousands of them.”
“Where?” Voren asks.
“Right in front of us.”
“She is seeing something only she can,” Dreven mutters. “Open your eyes, slayer.”
I do and see that the path ahead of us is bright and free of snakes. “Weird.” I close my eyes again, and the snakes slither in their thousands. “It is this way. Mind your step.”
I move in the direction my mind is pulling me.
The snakes are coiling over one another, a river of silent, hissing despair, but they part before me as my boots hit the smooth marble.
“They’re moving out of my way,” I murmur, keeping my eyes closed as I walk forward.
It’s a strange sensation of knowing exactly where I’m going without the sense of sight.
“Just so we’re clear. I’m walking on a tightrope over a pit of vipers. So, no sudden movements.”
“There is nothing here but marble,” Dreven says, his voice close to my ear. His proximity is a solid, cold anchor in this disorienting place.
“Your marble is my slithering nightmare,” I retort. The path in my head curves, and I follow it without stumbling. My body moves with a certainty that my mind is giving it.
The air changes, growing heavier. A low hum starts up, vibrating through the soles of my feet.
“Anything I should know about?” I ask.
“The floor is cracking,” Voren observes, his tone laced with a morbid curiosity that does nothing for my nerves. “We’re entering a memory echo. A dead zone.”
“Lovely,” I say. I risk a peek, cracking one eye open.
The flawless pearl floor is now a shattered mosaic of grey stone, with gaping black chasms between the pieces.
The snakes in my mind are gone, replaced by a single, straight path of unbroken stone leading towards a crumbling archway that wasn’t there a moment ago.
Ahead, the sky is no longer shifting colours; it’s a flat, dead grey.
Closing my eye again, I try to bring back the vision, but the snakes don’t return. It is gone, leaving me with just the grim reality and no second sight.
Opening my eyes, I look around. The atmosphere has shifted to one of gloom, from the resplendence of the place where we arrived.
“This is our home,” Dreven murmurs before I can comment.
“Makes sense,” I say. “It’s very Eeyore.”
He cocks an eyebrow at me in question.
“Doom and gloom.”
Dastian chuckles. “You mean to say that this entire time, we have been coming and going down a path of snakes to reach the other parts of the realms?”
“I can’t say that for sure. I know we came down a path of snakes now.”
He nods slowly. “The crown is in our neck of the woods, then. It tracks.”
“It could also be a trap,” I murmur, but move forward as it is the only way to go.
The archway up ahead is made of something that looks like fused bone and obsidian. It swallows the light, pulling us into a courtyard of ruins. Towers that claw at the grey sky are crumbling, their silhouettes jagged and sharp against the oppressive gloom.
I feel a pull, a faint, insistent tug from deep within the ruins.
It’s not a vision of snakes this time, but a cold spot in my gut, a magnetic north calling me home.
I ignore the precarious-looking bridges of cracked stone and the chasms that drop away into absolute blackness. I just follow the feeling.
My hand tightens on my blade. The pull leads us towards the most ruined structure of all: a central spire that looks like it was shattered by a titan’s fist.
“Home, sweet home,” Dreven murmurs.
“Your place?” I ask archly. “How apt.”
He gives me a slow smile that does things to me it shouldn’t. Not here. Not now. But then it vanishes. “I don’t think the Wraith Crown is here. I would know.”
“You didn’t know about the snakes,” I point out.
“It is hiding in plain sight. The question is where?” I close my eyes, fully invested in this hunt now.
It has a danger to it that I find slightly intoxicating, even though I know I could die at any second.
I am not equipped to fight gods on their turf.
As much as I can tell myself I’m the Slayer of Demons, and I can kick anyone’s arse. That is not true. Not here.
My second sight kicks into gear again, but this time, it’s not a vision.
It’s a sound. A low, mournful hum that resonates in my bones, like a thousand ghosts sighing in unison.
It pulls me forward, a siren song for the slayer part of my soul.
The whispers from the journal echo in my head: a realm that feeds on memory.
This place isn’t just ruined; it’s haunted by its own past.
“Down,” I say, my voice raspy. The hum leads me towards a gaping maw in the base of the shattered spire, a dark staircase spiralling into the guts of the mountain.
“There is no down,” Voren says.
“Oh, but there is,” I say, and my boot hits the top step.
“Well, fuck,” Dastian says. “Does anyone else feel like we’ve been living a lie for centuries?”
“Just a tad,” Voren replies, his cold body right at my back. “I don’t like you going in there first.”
“She has to,” Dreven says. “We can’t see shit.”
I take the first step, my boot landing on a solid bit of stone that shows a sheer drop into blackness after it. It feels like walking on air, and not in a fun, magical way. The air turns colder, peaking my nipples under my hoodie.
Whispers slither at the edge of my hearing, fragments of memory caught in the stagnant air. Betrayal… Power… He will consume…
A heavy hand lands on my shoulder, and I nearly jump out of my skin. It’s Dreven, his touch an unwelcome but necessary anchor. “We’re right behind you,” he murmurs, his voice a low rumble that does little to soothe my frayed nerves.
“I can feel you breathing down my neck,” I mutter, taking another step into the void. “Literally.”
The spiralling descent feels endless, each step taking me deeper into the oppressive silence. The hum I heard before grows stronger, a resonant thrum that vibrates right through my bones, pulling me forward. Finally, my foot touches level ground.
I open my eyes and frown. “What do you see?”
“A river of blood,” Dreven says. “What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
I turn to face them and realise I’m alone.