Chapter 34
KORITHAX
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
Dying feels nothing like I expected.
There’s no flare of agony at first. Instead, it’s just an impossible, crushing weight that forces the air from my lungs as Calrix’s blade punches through my gut.
The way it slid through my armour, the way he ripped it free; it instantly had me dropping to my knees.
The way it felt all wrong. The first thought was, I shouldn’t be on my knees.
The only person I ever get on my knees for is her.
But my body knows. It knows that something is so very fucking wrong.
But nothing is more wrong than the way Daisy screams. The way the sound rips the world open.
I feel it more than I hear it—a raw, broken tear through the bond that hits something inside me far deeper than any blade ever could.
My vision blurs and all I see are flashes—her golden hair, her white flame flaring, her mouth forming my name—
“Korithax—”
I expected death to be silent. Instead, it’s screaming.
Not sound. Not voices. Magic. A roar of power that’s cold, endless, and ravenous.
It drags me down, down, down, swallowing the scene around me, swallowing Daisy, swallowing Hell itself.
There’s no up or down, no body, no breath—just a churning vortex of shadows that strip away everything that makes me me.
My name, history, flesh. All torn away in jagged strips.
Time fractures, memory splinters, and the world just… dissolves. There’s nothing. I am nothing. There is only The Void.
It has teeth. It digs into what’s left of me, pulling at the tattered shape of my soul, tearing, tasting, trying to dissolve me into nothing.
I don’t know if it’s minutes, days, years.
I only know I’m suspended in something that is not life, and not death.
Because death would mean rest. But I’m not alive, either.
I’m caught in the jaws of an endless beast. And only two things are keeping me from letting go entirely and sinking into oblivion: the echo of Daisy’s voice, and the memory of her hands on my skin.
I cling to them the way a drowning man clings to the last breath of air.
But The Void doesn’t care. It tears at me, rips the pieces of me apart, piece by fragile piece. Every time I try to form a thought, a darkness rips through it like claws. Every time I fight for a shape, a name, a self, it rakes me clean and leaves only raw, burning fragments behind.
But one thing it can’t quite eat, is the bond. Our bond is a torn thread, a frayed little ember where there used to be a roaring inferno. But it’s there. Thin and faint, buried under layers of nothingness. But it’s my only hope.
I grab it. It hurts. Every time I reach for it, black fire gnaws at me. But I hold on anyway. I follow it, hand over hand, crawling along an invisible line through the dark. For what feels like centuries, it leads nowhere. A dead end. Just a soft ache of what she used to be.
Until one day, it doesn’t.
The first time I feel her again, it knocks the breath I don’t have out of me.
A shock hits the tether: rage, grief, terror.
It slams into me like a lightning strike.
Suddenly, there she is. Her magic, her emotions, alive and blazing.
Not the soft warmth I remember. This is sharper, fractured, tainted.
A storm instead of sunlight. But it’s still her.
Daisy.
I run. It’s not running the way I remember, with legs and lungs and ground. It’s motion through nothingness, dragging myself along the bond towards a pinpoint of light in the endless dark. The closer I get, the brighter it grows, until I can see something taking shape at the centre.
Her.
She’s a distant figure in a circle of light, shoulders shaking, golden hair tangled around her face, her hands bright with flame as people crowd around her. My chest constricts.
I reach for the light. My hands—if they are hands—hit something solid.
Invisible, but unyielding. A wall, but not.
I snarl, pounding my fists against it. The Void shrieks in answer, black fire lashing up my arms. The barrier doesn’t even shudder.
It’s like a two-way mirror; I can see her, hear her, feel her… but she can’t feel me.
“Daisy,” I snarl, slamming my palm against the surface. “Little flower. Look at me.”
She doesn’t. She screams instead. A broken sound that shreds through my already ravaged soul. Her grief floods through the bond in jagged waves.
I thought being separated from her by death would be a cruel fate. But watching her break from the other side of an unbreakable wall, is so much fucking worse.
I don’t leave the mirror after that. There’s no point. There’s nowhere else to go. The Void surges around me, endless and hungry, but here, pressed against the barrier, there’s at least light. A sliver. Enough to see her.
I don’t sleep, I don’t eat. I sit on something that is and isn’t a floor, a pitch-black mist coiling around me, and I watch.
She can’t hear me. But sometimes, when the bond stutters, she pauses. Fingers twitching like she’s heard a whisper she can’t quite catch.
Days pass. Weeks. Time leaks away like blood from a wound.
But I watch her train with Maelkar, white flame lighting up the arena.
His shadows coil, taunting, goading her into striking harder.
I hate him more than I have ever hated anyone.
The first time he calls her ‘little flower’, something inside me snaps.
“I’ll gut you myself,” I roar, smashing my fist into the barrier. Black fire erupts around my knuckles, eating at whatever passes from my skin. “That’s her name for only me!”
The mirror trembles for the first time. A thin fracture spiders out from under my fist. The Void shrieks in utter delight. It likes it when I break.
Maelkar just smirks in the vision beyond the glass—that infuriating, lazy grin on his lips. Daisy snarls at him, cheeks flushed, sweat coating her brow. And for all my anger, I can’t deny it… he’s making her stronger. He’s honing her into the weapon she needs to be.
When she finally knocks him back, chest heaving, my pride is a physical ache. “Good,” I tell the darkness surrounding me. “Burn him. Burn them all.”
I don’t know how long I sit at the edge of the nothing, my back against the cold invisible barrier, watching her train. Time isn’t real here. There’s only her.
But suddenly, the scene shifts, the arena melts away and stone bleeds into stone, only darker, colder. Torches flare to life in iron brackets, stretching long shadows down a narrow corridor. The wards here hum against my bones with old, heavy magic I recognise from the palace dungeons.
I can tell from the sensations I’m feeling, this isn’t a memory or a flashback of Daisy’s… this is happening now.
Daisy is storming down into the dungeon, Maelkar at her shoulder, with Elyistria and Sariya already ahead, standing outside a cell. Inside, on the floor, huddled against the bars of the neighbouring cell, is Velentha beside him.
The sight hits like another blade in my gut.
What the fuck did you do, Aran?
I press my palms to the barrier, the surface rippling slightly, like I’m looking through smoked glass.
“You better have a godsdamn explanation,” I growl. “Or so help me, I will claw my way back just to put you in the ground myself, Aran.”
Of course, no one hears me. No one ever does. But the way Aran is looking at Daisy, the way I can see he’s genuine, he’s my brother in every way but blood. And I know he’s no traitor.
“Hear him out little flower,” I say, pushing the words down that tether with everything I have. I don’t just say it, I shove it, like I’m trying to ram my voice straight into her chest.
The void buckles around me, and for a heartbeat, the barrier hums. My fingertips tingle when they touch it, like some current is finally, finally, flowing both ways.
Daisy’s eyes are closed and she takes a deep breath. I swear her head tilts, the smallest movement, like she heard something just over her shoulder.
Her eyes peel open. “Korithax would want to hear you out,” she says quietly.
Everything inside me goes very, very still.
For a moment, the dungeon vanishes as my head swims. There’s only that sentence, hanging in the air between us, vibrating down the bond like a plucked string.
She said it in her own voice, her own cadence—but it’s the exact phrasing that just tore out of me.
“Again,” I breathe into the dark, moving closer to the barrier until my chest presses to nothing. “Say something else. Daisy, say anything. Please.”
She doesn’t though. She just stands there, staring at Aran, jaw clenched, eyes wet, like she’s not entirely sure why she said that either.
I don’t see everything. The mirror is fickle—sometimes it shows me fragments, sometimes entire days slip past and I feel only echoes through the bond: her terror, her numbness, her brief flickers of joy when she laughs with someone, her grief when she’s alone.
I don’t see the very beginning of Cinderspine’s destruction. I only feel the jolt when the screams start. The bond flares sharp and hot. There’s fire, smoke, panic. I claw at the barrier, and the mirror finally opens to show me.
My village. My home. It’s burning. I see Daisy on her knees by the bakery, brushing soot from…
“No.” The shock slams through me.
I know how much Marta meant to her. Gods, she meant everything to me. She was like the mother I always needed. Always there, always listening. Her tarts. Her warmth. Fuck.
The mirror stutters and the images jump by frantically. Until yet again, Daisy appears, strolling through the wreckage, strolling with a tiny body in her arms. I recognise the little horns… the little boy that ran into us the first time I showed her around Cinderspine.
I sink to my knees in The Void as she lowers to hers, passing the boy’s lifeless body to his mother. We are reflected, broken, separated by an inch and an eternity.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I tell her, voice shredded. “I should be there. I should’ve stopped all of this.”