Chapter 17
DAISY
Darkness.
I’m not sure if I’m asleep or dead. Maybe both. Something is dragging me down, deeper and deeper until even the sound of my own screams vanish into nothing. I try to move, but my limbs are heavy. I try to breathe, but my chest doesn’t rise. I’m suspended. Caught between one world and the next.
And then the voices come.
Whispers, too faint to make out, curling through the black like smoke. Some sound like Korithax. Some sound almost familiar. Some sound like children crying for their mothers. All of them slip just beyond my reach, no matter how desperately I try to claw my way toward them.
A throne flickers in the dark. White flame one second, obsidian the next.
“Little flower.”
I turn towards the sound. Korithax’s voice was usually smoke and sin, and wicked laughter.
But here, it’s something else entirely. It’s an anchor, steady and unyielding, grounding me in a way only he could.
It sounds the way it used to when he believed I could be more than what I was.
The sound brushes against my ribs, and every broken piece inside my chest rattles violently at the simple, impossible reality of seeing him again.
“Kori?” My voice doesn’t carry. It falls, like a pebble in a bottomless well.
The darkness ripples around me. A presence forms—him, almost. Not a him, so much, but the pressure of being held from behind, the ghost of heat at my throat where his mouth used to find me, the quiet he placed in my head when the world was loud.
I reach behind. My hand is light. My hand is lead.
He is near enough to touch, and yet a lifetime away.
The dark swings like a slow censor, and when it settles, someone else appears in front of me.
Marta. White braids. Flour on her cheek. She’s not dead here. Or maybe she is, and this is the part of her that refuses to stop being alive. Her hands are full. Of course they are. A box of emberfruit tarts glows in her palms. She opens it slowly, revealing an empty plate sitting inside.
“I couldn’t save you.” The sentence tears itself out of me. “I should have. I could have—”
Her eyes smile, even as silvery tears shine along their edges. “Sunshine,” she says, her voice as warm as her bakery, “you didn’t put the bomb to the building.”
“But I lit the fuse,” I choke. “I am the fuse.”
She leans in—not closer, exactly, but truer, clearer. “You’re the flame that warms and ruins and destroys and saves. Decide which you are.”
The darkness shakes again. Something shifts in the endless void around me, like the world itself is breathing too hard.
A small weight presses into my leg and I look down.
Bright orange horns bump gently against my leg, nudging me the way he did when he ran into me before everything went wrong.
Theodus looks up at me with those ridiculously large, radiant eyes, wide with something that almost looks like pride.
His mouth is sticky with sugar, crumbs clinging to his cheeks like he’s just raided Marta’s bakery.
In his tiny hands, he clutches a wooden sword.
He holds it upright like it’s Excalibur.
My throat tightens so sharply it almost hurts. “Theodus…” My voice barely makes it past my lips.
He grins, a little crooked, a little mischievous. Exactly the way he did when he thought he’d gotten away with something. Exactly the way he did when the teacher had caught him causing trouble when he bumped into me and Korithax.
“Are you… alright?” I ask, but I don’t know what answer I want. I don’t know if there’s one I could survive hearing. The question feels wrong the moment it leaves me. Too small. Too fragile for what sits between us now.
He tips his head slightly, as if he’s listening to a far-away thunder. “I was fast. I got to the game early.” His little chin lifts in defiance. “I’m not scared.”
My hands tremble. Because I am. Gods, I am so, so afraid. He looks too small standing there—barely reaching my hip, and clutching that ridiculous toy sword like he’s some great hero from a story. Like he believes he could protect anyone from anything. Like he believes the world is still kind.
He holds the wooden sword out to me. “You dropped this.”
For a moment, I can’t move. Because the way he’s looking at me—it isn’t with fear. It isn’t with confusion—it’s with trust. Complete and unwavering.
Slowly, my fingers close around the toy.
The moment my skin touches the wood, the weight of it changes.
The simple blade grows heavy in my hands.
The grain of the wood shifts beneath my fingers, hardening, sharpening.
Wood dries into bone. Bone fractures into glass.
Glass forges into iron. Then something older than names, something heavier than metal.
Something that feels like it has existed long before the world learned how to name things.
White flame ignites along the blade. It burns without heat, without smoke. It is not a sword at all, not really. It is a choice that has been sharpened. A promise that has been forged. And somehow, I know it’s mine.
The darkness breathes once more.
Flames bloom in the distance—pure white domes, moving like slow-tide lanterns. One glides closer until an enormous, scaled snout presses into my palm. Crimson, iridescent, eyes like embers swallowed by a night sea appear before me. Vesindiyah.
Her mind brushes mine, the way wind combs tall grass. Not words, but the words that would take if fire itself could speak: ride/rise/remember.
“I don’t know if I can be her,” I say, and the admission tastes foul here, like rotting blood. “I don’t know if I can be me without ruining everything I touch.”
Heat ghosts over my wrist where her breath would be. The meaning settles anyway: you are not asked to be her; you are asked to be whole.
The dark parts, just a little. Enough to make a corridor of shifting shadow.
Stone walls on either side, slick with something that might be time slipping away.
I hear dripping. Footsteps. Chains dragging over tile.
As I move—if this is moving—I realise the walls aren’t stone at all.
They’re book spines. Stacks and stacks of them, reaching into the dark.
Sovarith. The spires, as dreams remember them.
The titles rearranged when I try to read them: WAKING THE— then the rest blurs; GODB— then the letters scatter like startled birds.
TRAITORS WITHIN bleeds across the spines before vanishing.
My hand trembles as I reach for one. The moment my fingers brush the leather, it bites me.
Hot, sharp, like a snake’s fang. Blood wells up, bright against the dark.
The book laughs. Pages flutter open, and the sound that escapes is like children screaming.
“No,” I whisper, cradling my injured hand to my chest. “Stop.”
But the shadows slither down, twisting around my ankles, forming chains. They rattle, pull, drag me down onto my knees. I try to fight, but I’m weak here. A voice drips into my skull like poison.
“Little queen.” Lucifer’s voice. Smug. Velvet. Cruel.
“No—” I shake my head. “Shut up.”
“The tiniest amount of kindness from a monster,” the voice purrs. “And you called it salvation. Now you’re our damnation.”
The chains cinch tighter. Tighter. Tighter. Tighter.
I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating. I’m dying.
Another voice cuts through the dark—softer, with a hint of a tremble. “Daisy?”
My heart lurches at the familiarity of it. “Talia?”
And there she is—just out of reach, standing barefoot in the shadows. Her navy cheer outfit is torn, stained with filth, her dark hair limp with blood. She looks so small, so breakable.
“You left me,” she whispers. Her honey-brown eyes shining with tears. “You said we’d go together. You promised.”
“No. No, I tried. I tried to save you—” My voice shatters. I claw against the chains, desperate to reach her.
She tilts her head, almost childlike, almost cruel. “Then why am I burning?” Her skin begins smoking, ember cracks crawling up her arms. Her screams echo through the void as fire devours her.
“STOP!” I scream, yanking so hard against the chains my wrists split open. Crimson, hot blood spills down my hands, drip, drip, dripping down my fingertips.
Flame erupts at my wrists—white and searing—and the shadows recoil, hissing in fear and disgust. The sword blazes in my hand again, carved of light and fury as Talia’s figure dissolves in the blaze, her scream still ringing in my skull.
I stagger upright. “I am not your prisoner,” I snarl into the dark. “Not anymore.”
The walls split like open wounds, bleeding light so fierce I have to shield my eyes.
The brightness pours through the factures in blinding streams, white and violent, swallowing the darkness that had wrapped around me moments before.
I raise an arm over my face, squinting through my fingers as the glow spills across the ground in jagged rivers.
Something moves within it. At first, it’s only a shadow, tall and unmoving, its outline blurred by the glare.
The light bends strangely around the figure, as though it can’t decide whether to reveal him or hide him.
My breath catches. The shape sharpens slowly, piece by piece, like a long-forgotten memory forcing its way back into focus.
Broad shoulders. A towering frame that cuts through the light like a blade through silk. Then something darker crowns the silhouette. Two curved shapes rising above his head, sharp against the brilliance behind him. Horns.
My heart stutters violently in my chest. The figure shifts, stepping forwards through the blinding glow, and the light finally catches his face. Eyes like obsidian ruin meet mine. And suddenly—I know exactly who stands before me.
“Korithax?” My voice breaks on his name.
But before I can take a step, the ground cracks beneath me. A violent fracture splits the stone at my feet, racing outward like lightning tearing through the earth.
“No—”
I plummet. Falling, falling, falling. The light above me fractures into shards and I drop through the darkness. Wind tears past my ears, ripping the breath from my lungs. The sword slips from my hand, spinning away into the abyss. I reach upward instinctively. And he moves.
Korithax lunges forwards, his hand shooting out towards me, fingers stretched desperately through the widening gulf between us.
The light behind him flares wildly, outlining the sharp angles of his wings, the dark curve of his horns.
When I hit the bottom, the world goes silent again.
His face… gods, his face. Gone is the wicked amusement, the cruel confidence that so often danced there.
Instead, there is something raw and frantic carved into his expression. Desperation.
His mouth moves. He’s shouting something. I can see the words forming, see the tension in his jaw, the strain in his throat as he calls to me. But I can’t hear him. The roar of the void swallows everything.
“Korithax!” I scream, reaching for him. My fingers stretch towards his outstretched hand, the distance between us shrinking to mere inches.
So close. Close enough that I swear I can feel the heat of him, the faint brush of air stirred by his movement.
But the darkness pulls harder. His fingers scrape against mine for the briefest moment.
Impossible. I have been falling for what feels like hours.
Yet he’s always out of grasp. Just inches too far.
And then, the abyss takes me. I fall faster than ever.
The light above shrinks to a distant star before disappearing entirely.
When I hit the bottom, the world goes silent again.
The dark wraps around me, softer this time.
Heavy like a deep sleep. The visions scatter like ash caught on the wind, drifting farther and farther from my reach until nothing remains.
I am nothing again, just suspended. Waiting.