Chapter 34 #2
The Void laps at my edges, tasting my regret. It likes that too.
Time becomes a series of blows. Daisy curled up in bed alone, knees to her chest, staring at nothing. Daisy in council meetings, jaw clenched, eyes ringed in shadows. Daisy waking up in a cold sweat, clutching at empty sheets whispering my name like a prayer.
Every time she breaks, rage floods me. Not at her. Never at her. It’s at the Six. At fate. At myself.
“I’m here,” I whisper into The Void around us. “I’m here, little flower. I never left. I just… I can’t get to you,” I murmur, my voice breaking with all the pain and sadness residing in my chest.
The Void just mocks me with silence.
Aurora’s Veil changes everything. I don’t see the drug in the drink. I just feel the sudden lurch in her magic, the way everything inside her stumbles and goes fuzzy.
Then the mirror sharpens, and I see her.
She’s half-conscious, staggering down a passageway in Kaelith’s palace, eyes glazed.
There’s chains around her wrists, yanking her arms high, her feet barely touching the stone flooring. Kaelith’s there, breaking her body and mind in all the cruel little ways gods favour when they’re too afraid to face you on the battlefield.
I can’t hear every word. Some are swallowed by The Void.
But I see enough. I see her shaking, her tears, her fury.
The nightmares he forces into her fucking head.
Seeing her like that… it fractures something so deep inside me that I swear I feel The Void enter me somehow.
Like it’s desperate to mix with my rage and make something so much worse.
I slam my fists into the mirror over and over and over. Watching as it ripples with the force of my fury. I watch as she sobs, her body hanging there, so broken, so defeated, and I do what I did before, forcing my words so violently down the bond, The Void has no choice but to bend.
“I am still here with you, little flower,” I speak. She’s so close, I swear I can feel her. I reach for the mirror, stroking at where her tear falls. “You just need to be my strong girl for a little while longer. You are going to be okay.”
“I wish you were here, Korithax. I need you,” she whispers into the empty dungeon.
“I am here,” I respond, desperate for her to feel me.
“No,” she whispers hoarsely, the words breaking in her throat. “You are a figment of my imagination caused by severe stress.”
I go still for a moment, but continue, desperately praying this isn’t a trick. “I am not a figment of your imagination, little flower. I’m here, I promise.”
I reach my fingers to where her hand is, right by the shackles and I swear she responds to my touch. “Just hold yourself together for a little while longer. Remember what I said on our wedding day?”
She shakes her head, more tears falling down her beautiful face.
I lean close to the image of her, whispering into her ear.
“I’ve lived twenty thousand years in darkness.
And never once did I crave the sun… until you.
You make me wish I had lived a gentle life, just so I had cleaner hands to hold you with.
But I promise to spend the rest of our lives keeping you safe, loved, and worshipped. ”
I recite the words to her, pushing memories of our wedding down the bond as harshly as I can. I watch her breath calm for a fraction before she responds.
“But you can’t keep me safe anymore,” she cries. And the words hit me straight in the chest, a sting in my eyes as if I was crying too.
“Maybe not with my hands,” I murmur, “but with my will, my power, my love? Always. Just stay strong for me.” I lean in, pressing my lips to her cheek on the mirrors surface. “I love you, Daisy. I am with you. And you are strong.”
“I love you too,” she whispers.
And then… nothing. The Void snaps the mirror shut with a shriek of rage.
No. No. I did it. I reached her. I touched her.
I spoke to her. I felt her. For one impossible, sacred moment, she was there, real beneath my touch instead of an impossible torment separated from me by time and space. I fucking did it.
I lunge forwards and slam my palms against the now blank surface. “Bring her back. brING HER FUCKING BACK.”
I hit it again, harder, my fists striking the dead mirror until something akin to pain splinters through my hands. The black glass gives me nothing. No flicker. No glimpses of her. No mercy.
But of course it doesn’t. The Void only knows cruelty.
It thrives on my agony. My strength leaves me all at once as I slide down against the edge of the mirror, falling to the ground.
My wife. My wife is tied up in a dungeon somewhere beyond this cursed place, and I was so close that I could feel her.
Close enough to smell her skin, to hear her voice in return to mine, to touch the warmth that still belongs to me.
And now she is gone again. Ripped away the second I reached her.
I bow my head, grief and rage twisting so violently inside me I can’t tell where one ends, and the other begins. Once again, this monstrous place has shown me exactly how far I am from her. Close enough to ache for her. Too far to save her.
Kaelith’s death is the first time I laugh in the dark.
Daisy stands over him, drenched in his violet blood. When his head hits the floor and rolls, when she drives it onto a spike on his own throne, something savage in me exhales.
“That’s it,” I whisper, grinning with my forehead pressed against the barrier. “That’s my queen. Put his fucking head up where everyone can see it.”
It’s another day, or week, I don’t even fucking know anymore, of me just staring at that godsdamned mirror. Hoping for a glimpse of her. But something’s changed. Something feels… strange. The Void feels almost like it’s distracted. It’s not as taunting today. Not as volatile.
The bond, still weak and frayed, suddenly tightens. Not to Daisy, but to me. To wherever my soul is hanging in this nothingness.
Another tether hooks into my chest, pulling from a different direction. This is an old, but familiar magic, one that feels written into my bones.
The Void growls. It doesn’t like the fact something is pulling me away. It doesn’t like the fact it feels like it’s losing its toy.
Light spears though the dark, harsh and gold.
For the first time since I died, I feel substance around me. Cold stone. The scent of incense and age-old magic filters through the black. The mirror that has shown me Daisy all this time warps, stretching like melting glass, then shatters into a thousand pieces that spiral away into The Void.
In its place, a temple coalesces. Pillars of obsidian, a ceiling lost in shadow, and runes burning along the floor. And there, on an altar at the centre—my body. Whole. Armoured. Chest still. Skin pale.
I stare. It’s like looking at a stranger and at myself all at once.
A figure stands beside the altar, radiant and shaking. Velentha. Her dark cropped hair sits around her clenched jaw. Cracks of light are running through her skin, like she’s made of living glass about to shatter.
“Velentha?” My voice comes out hoarse, echoing weirdly in this half-space. I don’t know if she can hear me. She looks at my body, a sadness in her silver eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I should have done this sooner.”
Light flares from the runes around us, bright enough to make even The Void recoil.
“Don’t,” I rasp as she steps closer to the altar, blood dripping from the cut in her palm. The magic in the temple thickens, as old as time itself, as ruthless as the gods who ruled long before I. “Velentha, don’t you fucking dare—”
She smiles sadly as light envelopes her. There’s love in it. For Aran. For Daisy. For all of us. “It was always meant to be me,” she whispers into the nothingness. “A life for a life.”
Images hit me like hammer blows. Aran looking at Velentha like the sun finally rose after eons of darkness. Velentha holding the fractured leyline together with her bare hands.
“Aran needs you,” I growl. “He can’t lose you. Not after everything.”
I don’t know why I’m saying this. She can’t hear me. I know I’m wasting my time, but I don’t want Aran to hurt the way I know I do, despite knowing this may be my chance to return to her.
The temple hums and The Void roars. Then Velentha begins to burn. Not like flame, but like pure starlight. The cracks in her skin blaze gold, spilling light that pours into my body, into me.
The Void tries to snap me back, claws raking at my spine. But the old magic latches onto my soul and pulls the other way. For a horrifying, exhilarating second, I’m stretched between them—oblivion on one side, life on the other.
The world explodes. Light. Darkness. Pain. Euphoria.