35. Asha
Asha
Leith’s eyes are steady on mine, and I hold onto that because everything else is coming apart.
The witch body shudders around me, each breath a negotiation between what this shell can manage and what I am underneath it.
My fingers flicker again. I watch them do it with a distant, clinical interest, because if I give it any emotion at all, I’ll lose the thread of calm I’m holding by my teeth.
The courtyard lines burn blue beneath my feet.
Tobin’s ritual geometry pulses in the stone, alive and hungry, and I can feel the anchor beneath me like a bruise on the world. My arrival point. My landing scar. The place where I hit this realm hard enough to leave a mark it never recovered from.
Fitting that it ends here.
Leith steps closer. His magic moves ahead of him, dark and deliberate, pressing against the edges of my essence with recognition.
I don’t feel him move.
I feel the intention of it, the shift in the bond a half-second before his hand comes up, before the dark magic pours from his palm in a clean, cold wave that hits me like a verdict.
It doesn’t hurt.
I didn’t expect it to. This is Leith, and Leith knows exactly where the line is. He stands at it every day of his existence.
The witch body exhales.
That’s the only way to describe it. I don’t scream or collapse; it’s just a long, quiet release. The shell of this ridiculous, flat-chested, forced existence simply stops insisting I stay inside it.
And I fall sideways through something that has no direction, that has no walls or floor or sky. The bond stretches behind me like a thread pulled to its absolute limit, and I feel all three of them on the other end of it.
I don’t have a body anymore, but I feel them, and that’s enough to stop the panic before it starts.
The falling isn’t violent. It’s almost gentle, which is the strangest thing.
My exile was a tearing, a brutal subtraction, all screaming and stone and the cold press of daylight through my body.
This is nothing like that. This is more like being let go by something that was never supposed to hold me.
The darkness below isn’t empty. I feel it before I reach it. The Well’s awareness rises to meet me. I expected resistance. I expected Yseld, clawing up through the black with her borrowed power, her ancient hunger and her absolute refusal to accept that what she wants doesn’t belong to her.
Instead, there is just the dark.
No body, no real me floating in a basin like before.
Just nothing.
“Well, fuck,” I mutter in a ghostly voice. “That is just fucking typical.”
This entire surreal experience has just crashed down around me in a reality-inducing bitch slap.
I hover in the nothing and wait for something to happen.
Nothing fucking happens.
The Well is empty. Empty like a vessel that has been tipped over and left to dry out. My body, my real body, the divine flesh and bone and power that Yseld stripped from me, and SilverGate buried in its foundations, is simply not here.
The rage that rips through my essence is so enormous it has no edges. It doesn’t scatter. It doesn’t dissipate or lose itself in the black.
I hover in the empty dark of a Well that should hold the most important thing in any realm and contains nothing but the ghost of my own absence.
I think about Zether’s face when I tore Ramon’s heart out, about the exile, about every single moment I have spent in this ridiculous witch shell pretending to be something smaller than I am.
The bond pulls at me from above. I can feel Leith through it, his dark magic reaching down like a hand into the Well, searching.
I can feel Hale’s hellfire at the edge of it, hot and frantic, trying not to be frantic and failing.
Tobin’s silver threads snake through the stone layers between us, diagnostic and precise, mapping the absence where my body should be.
Then they are gone. Pushed out of the Well because they don’t belong here.
“Where is my body?” I say out loud even though there is no one here to respond. “Where the fuck is it?”
The dark doesn’t answer.
Of course it doesn’t. It’s the Well. It doesn’t owe me anything.
“Did Yseld move it?” I ask.
“No.”
The voice that responds makes me jump in my ghostly form.
I turn to look at the speaker. “You,” I growl. “I knew you were up to your neck in this.”
Verne purses her lips and gives me a look of sheer boredom. “Not exactly, fledgling.”
I gasp in shock. “Fledgling? How dare you—”
“I am older than you, your predecessor and theirs, child. I will call you whatever I want.”
“You know Yseld.”
“Know her, loathe her, trying to stop her… I’ll save you some time. All of the above.”
“So why all the cloak and dagger?”
Her face shifts into one I recognise all too well.
“Eirwen.”
“Milady.”
“Oh, now you find your respect. Bitch,” I say, crossing my transparent arms. “What in the name of the seven hells is going on here?”
Verne—Eirwen—whoever she is, doesn’t move. She stands in the nothing of the empty Well like she belongs here, which, given everything, maybe she does. She’s wearing the same cardigan. That strikes me as either deeply committed or profoundly unhinged.
“You aren’t in the Well,” she states. “You don’t have access to it.”
“We were in it earlier. I saw my body,” I point out.
“Yes, but now you aren’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have access to it. I literally just said that.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I growl.
Eirwen gives me a look that could strip a soul from a body. “You are not even a ghost, Anaxandra. You are a nothing in that form. The Well doesn’t let in nothing.”
“Then what am I?” I ask, because that seems like the most pressing question in a situation full of pressing questions.
“A goddess between states.” Eirwen tilts her head, studying me with a performance I completely underestimated. “Your body is in the Well… you are just not allowed near it in that state.”
“Why not? It’s my fucking body.”
“Language, child.”
“Don’t patronise me,” I snap. “Tell me how to get back inside my body if I can’t do it this way. And please do bear in mind that the witch shell upstairs is probably gone by now.”
“Probably,” she says.
“Probably,” I echo. “You are really pushing the limits of my self-control.”
“You have self-control?”
“I used to have a throne room half full of corpses that said I did.”
“A throne room half full of corpses says the opposite.”
“It was half full because of my self-control, you fucking idiot,” I say.
Eirwen’s expression stays flat. “Quite. Listen carefully, Anaxandra. Your body is in the Well. Your essence cannot enter it from death because you weren’t supposed to die in the shell.”
I stare at her. “Excuse me?”
“The reaper understands death. He does not understand what Yseld did to you.”
Cold spreads through the place where my stomach would be if I had one. “Then explain it before I start screaming.”
“You weren’t killed and transferred. You were split. Your divinity remained bound to your real body. Your consciousness was shoved into a manufactured vessel with enough of your power to keep you aware, angry and useful.”
“Useful to whom?”
“To Yseld.”
“Of course. Where is that bitch?”
“Still dispersed. Your prince’s magic is powerful and outside of her remit. It did serious damage to her. He is useful.”
I smile smugly on his behalf. “He is. They all are. But apparently not useful enough if I’m stuck in the spiritual equivalent of a broom cupboard while my body is apparently behind a velvet rope.”
“You are not stuck.”
“Feels fucking stuck.”
“You are suspended. Your body won’t accept a dead consciousness,” she says. “It needs the missing half of itself to be reattached through dominion.”
“Dominion,” I repeat. “Fine. I like that word. How?”
“You must command it.”
“I’ve been commanding everything since I got here.”
“You have been raging at everything since you got here.”
“Same family.”
“No.” Her eyes sharpen. “Rage is fuel. Dominion is law. You have forgotten the difference in a few short days.”
It’s a truth so sharp and sudden it carves through the emptiness where I should be. Pain, without flesh to hold it. “I didn’t forget,” I snap. “The gods who exiled me took it.”
“Not really. You allowed them to make you smaller. Stand tall, milady. This is not who you are. Do not forget the fires you have walked through.”
We lock gazes, and I see her for who she really is.
An ally.
She has always been, and always will be, on my side.
Or rather, on the side of chaos. But same thing right now.
Chaos.
The word settles through me.
The kind with weight behind it. Fury that thinks before it moves. Destruction that chooses its moment. The real thing. The old thing. The first fracture in perfect order. The law that says nothing static survives contact with will.
Mine.
I stop hovering.
The nothing around me doesn’t change, but I do. My outline steadies. The flickering edges of this not-body pull into shape, that is not flesh or spirit, but more definite than both. I have no weight, yet the space beneath me recognises pressure.
Eirwen’s expression shifts by a fraction. Approval, maybe. Or relief. It’s gone too fast to pin down.
“Better,” she says.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You stopped asking permission.”
That hits me exactly where she needed it to.
Anaxandra doesn’t ask permission for anything, least of all to exist.