17. Asha
Asha
Istare at the black door. It isn’t a hole. It’s a void waiting to swallow us. My fingers itch for my lost power, but I’ve got enough spite to bridge the gap.
I reach out and touch the black surface. The cold doesn’t just bite; it claims. My skin prickles with gold heat as Hale steps close enough to breathe down my neck. He’s a walking furnace. Right now, I need every degree he’s offering.
“Ready?” I ask, glancing back at the three of them.
Nobody answers. They don’t need to. We’re bound in this mess. I ignore the pull of the bond.
“Don’t look so miserable,” I say to Leith. “You found the secret entrance. Own the victory.”
He doesn’t smile. He never does. He holds a card against the black gap. The door doesn’t swing open. It dissolves. One moment there’s a wall. The next there’s an endless descent of stone stairs. They are older than I am.
“Ladies first,” I mutter and step into the dark.
The air feels heavy. It makes it difficult to breathe. Every step echoes with the weight of things SilverGate tried to forget. My new sight flickers. Purple and gold sparks dance in the shadows.
The silence presses in like it’s trying to find a way inside me.
I keep my hand on the wall, feeling the ancient vibrations of SilverGate’s secrets.
This is congealed memory built into the stone.
Hale’s heat remains a constant at my back, a furnace that keeps the encroaching shadows from settling on my skin.
I hear Leith’s quiet footfalls behind him, his death magic a chilling frequency that matches the stairs.
Tobin is too quiet. I glance back. He looks at the darkness below. My sight picks up the grey threads of the storm magic again, woven into the steps.
The stairs end in a chamber with three exits. Each one looks identical, but my gut pulls toward the left. It’s a loud silence. Gold marks flash across my arms, responding to the pressure of the Foundations. This place wants me to fail. It wants me to forget I was ever a goddess.
I won’t give it the satisfaction. I’m reclaiming my throne even if I burn this entire academy to the ground. I move toward the left archway, the gold on my skin pulsing with every heartbeat.
“Are you sure?” Hale murmurs.
“It’s pulling me this way.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s a thing. That’s all I’ve got.”
I lead them through the archway, on stone that feels less like rock and more like frozen time. The passage narrows until Hale has to turn his shoulders. The grey threads in the walls thicken, twisting into shapes that mimic reaching hands.
“The air is changing,” Tobin says, his voice flat. “It’s not just the depth. The magic is turning inside out.”
“I really don’t like the sound of that,” I mutter, but take his word for it.
We hit a circular room where the floor is made of obsidian. In the centre, a pool of liquid shadow ripples without a breeze.
It doesn’t reflect the light from Hale’s fire. It just eats it. I stand at the edge, staring into the blackness.
“I have to go in,” I whisper.
“We go with you,” Leith says.
“You don’t even know what this is or what is down there,” I argue.
“Neither do you,” Leith points out.
“I’ll take a wild guess and say the Shadow Well.”
“Do you really think it’s that easy to find?” Tobin asks.
That makes me pause. He’s right, of course. This was too easy.
“Fucking hell, Tobin, don’t ruin the moment with logic.” I step closer to the edge, the liquid dark absorbing the light from Hale’s skin. “If it’s not the Well, it’s a very convincing trap.”
Leith moves to my other side, his death magic reaching out. “It’s a threshold. Not the destination.”
Hale growls, his heat flaring until the air shimmers. “I don’t care what it’s called. I’m not letting you dive into a pit of unknown sludge alone.”
I reach down, my fingers hovering inches above the ripples. The grey threads in the walls vibrate, a low frequency that rattles my teeth. My gold marks burn in a frantic warning. I feel a surge of wrath. It’s familiar. It’s mine. It’s…
“Anaxandra,” I murmur, my blood spiking as I say my name.
“Huh?” Hale mutters.
“Anaxandra,” I say louder. “It’s my fucking name.”
“Okay, that’s pretty and useful,” Leith murmurs.
“Thanks for the validation, reaper. Can you say it? Do you remember it?”
“Anaxandra,” Leith repeats. His voice doesn’t crack, and the air doesn’t turn to ash.
I grin, a sharp, vicious thing. “Finally. SilverGate’s gag order just expired.”
“Anaxandra,” Hale says, testing the weight of it. “Sounds like trouble.”
I give him a wicked smile. “The best kind.”
Tobin doesn’t say it. He’s staring at the liquid shadow, his silver eyes tracking movements I can only half-perceive.
“The pool is a mirror of what’s been lost,” Tobin whispers.
“I haven’t lost anything I don’t intend to take back,” I say and don’t wait for a consensus. I step off the obsidian edge.
“Ash—”
Hale’s voice is cut off.
The shadow doesn’t splash. It swallows.
The cold is absolute. It’s a subtraction of life. I’m falling through a pressurised void that tries to squeeze the breath from my lungs and the identity from my soul. My gold marks flare, fighting the erasure.
Hands grab me. One is burning hot—Hale. The other is a freezing anchor that tastes like the grave—Leith.
Between them, a silver current winds around my waist, keeping my mind from fracturing into a thousand glittering pieces.
Tobin’s magic is the only thing stopping the pressure from turning my brain into mush.
We hit a solid floor with a jarring impact that should have broken every bone in this fragile body. Instead, the obsidian beneath us yields like soft leather.
I scramble to my feet, gasping as the air returns. It smells like old copper and stagnant water. “Everybody still in one piece?” I cough, wiping black sludge from my face.
Hale is already standing, his fire a low, flickering ember that seems to struggle against the heavy dark. “I’m going to kill whoever designed this basement from hell,” he growls, his green-gold eyes searching the gloom.
Leith is a shadow among shadows, his black magic bleeding into the floor. “We aren’t in a basement anymore.”
We’re in a cathedral of bone and jagged glass.
The walls curve upward into a vaulted ceiling that disappears into a violet haze. In the centre sits a massive, circular basin filled with a swirling, iridescent mist. I step towards it. The bone walls swallow the sound of my footsteps, making the silence feel heavy enough to bruise.
Hale moves with me, his heat a dull throb against the oppressive chill. “Don’t touch it yet,” he says.
I ignore the command. I didn’t fall through a void to wait for permission from a hellhound.
Leith watches the mist, his magic reaching for the light.
Tobin stands behind us, his silver eyes tracking the flow. “The resonance is horrifying,” he says.
“Are you saying I’m horrifying?” I ask with a slow smile. It’s the best thing any of them have ever said to me.
“Who said the resonance was yours?” he says, returning the smile.
“Rude,” I fire back and reach out. The mist isn’t cold.
It’s nothing. It’s the absolute absence of existence.
“Give it back,” I demand. A shadow shifts within the cloud, with a purple and gold power that makes my current blue magic feel pathetic.
My body is suspended in the dark, waiting for the spark of chaos to return.
I’m taking it. Then I’ll make Yseld regret every fucking second she spent thinking she could contain me.
“Is that you?” Hale asks, peering closer.
“I think so,” I answer honestly, because at this point, who knows?
SilverGate enjoys fucking with me. I reach into the iridescent soup, my hand trembling from a hunger that has been gnawing at my insides since I first woke up on SilverGate’s courtyard.
The moment my fingers break the surface of the mist, the chamber screams with a psychic backlash that nearly drops me to my knees.
“Ana, wait!” Tobin’s voice is a sharp command, but he’s too late.
I notice the name, and it pleases me.
The mist coils around my wrist. Gold and purple lightning arcs from the basin, striking my chest and throwing my head back.
It’s the memory of every soul I ever judged and every crown I ever broke.
The fragile witch-shell I’ve been inhabiting groans under the pressure, the bones in my arm feeling like they’re about to turn to glass.
Hale’s hands are on my waist, trying to yank me back, but I’m anchored to the void. “Be fucking careful, Ana,” he growls.
“My body,” I growl back.
“Cannot exist at SilverGate!” His growl turns to a vicious snarl. “I’m not losing you!”
The figure in the mist shifts. A hand—my hand, the real one, with long, elegant fingers—presses against the underside of the veil.
The veil bows upwards.
The chamber answers with a pulse that slams into my knees. Hale keeps me upright. Leith’s magic hooks around my arm, holding me together while Tobin’s silver power wraps the basin in a lattice that flickers under the strain.
The hand beneath the mist presses harder.
A laugh breaks out of me, wild and breathless. “Oh, fuck. Look at her.”
“Ana,” Tobin says. “If you pull too hard, you’ll tear the bridge.”
“I’m not pulling. She’s reaching.”
“That’s worse.”
The mist thins around the shape beneath it. I see my arm first. Then the curve of a cheek, the sweep of light blonde hair suspended in darkness, eyes still closed.
My old body rests in the basin, not dead, not living. Waiting.
Every part of me strains towards it. This body wants to break open. My chaos wants to abandon the witch-shell and hurl itself into the form that belongs to it.
The bond flares behind me.
Hale’s hands tighten at my waist. “Stay with us. You won’t survive it. SilverGate won’t let you.”
“I hate you,” I growl because I know he’s right.
The pain I feel is ricocheting from him. I feel guilty for all of a second before I push it aside and slump to the ground, tears bubbling over as I know I can’t take my body back. Not yet.