37. Asha
Asha
Snapping off the connection to Hale, I stare at Eirwen. “The guys will hold position. They won’t come looking for me.”
“Good,” she says.
“How do I get to my body?”
“The same way you do everything else,” she says.
“You claim it.” She moves, or she gives the impression of moving, and I track her through the nothing because there is nothing else to track.
“Your body is in the Well. The Well won’t let a dead consciousness through its threshold. So you don’t go to it.”
“I get it to come to me.”
“Precisely.”
Right. Get my body to come to me. That should be fairly easy.
My optimism is short-lived when I close my eyes and attempt to call it to me.
Nothing happens.
The dark holds. Absolute, indifferent, empty of everything—including me, including my name, including the body that carries it in every cell.
I open my eyes and look at Eirwen. “That didn’t work.”
“I noticed.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Several, but I want to see what you do first.”
I stare at her. “You are genuinely one of the most infuriating creatures I have ever encountered, and I once spent three hours negotiating with a war god who only communicated through interpretive violence.”
“And yet here you are.”
“And yet here I am,” I mutter. “Floating in the dark like a lost thought, trying to summon my own body from a Well that has decided it doesn’t recognise me.”
“It recognises you,” Eirwen says. “That isn’t the problem.”
“Then what is?”
“You are still asking.”
I go very still in the nothing.
She’s right.
I asked. I reached toward the Well with something polite and tentative, a request dressed up as a command, a demand with please tucked underneath it like a folded note.
Fuck. That.
“Give me my fucking body, or I swear to all the old gods, you will regret having ever been built.”
“Threats,” Eirwen mutters. “How very you.”
“Shut your cakehole, priestess,” I growl, feeling more like myself than I have in days. “You are not one to judge me.”
She smiles serenely, and I get her game. It’s fine. She played her part. Now I have to do mine.
The Well answers.
It answers in silence, in stillness. In a power that always answers genuine authority.
It yields.
The nothing beneath me shifts. The absence changes texture, less like empty space and more like a leviathan turning over, vast and slow and older than the academy built upon its back, recognising the voice that just told it what was going to happen next.
My body rises.
I feel it before I see it. A pull on my essence, a magnetic insistence that belongs to nothing created or temporary.
This is mine. Every atom of it, every fragment of divine architecture, every cell that was built to hold the specific frequency of what I am.
It knows me the way I know it, with a cold, exacting familiarity. A blade to its wielder’s grip.
Then it stops.
Three feet down, or maybe less. It’s suspended in the dark. My body hangs in the space between the Well and me. It stops with an ancient power that does not want me to have what’s mine.
“Give it back,” I command.
Nothing happens.
“You are fading,” Eirwen states.
“Fading how? I’m already a floating essence.”
“You are dying. Your essence needs to be housed.”
“In what?”
“The nearest vessel.”
I consider this, and then my gaze meets hers. She crosses her arms. I lift my chin.
“Really?”
“I’m here.”
“This is a disaster zone.”
“Would you rather fade away?”
“No,” I say flatly. “But… absolutely not.”
Eirwen gives me a look that strips back several centuries of patience. “You have approximately thirty seconds before your essence disperses beyond the point of recovery. I am offering you a vessel.”
“You are offering me your body. How would that even work?”
“Basic possession. Would you like to argue about it, or would you like to go home?”
I stare at her. At the cardigan, and the face she’s worn across this entire academy, the face that watched me stumble through corridors and raid libraries and fall asleep on books and fight undead in courtyards, the face that vanished into walls and let me think she was a puppet.
She was never a puppet.
She was the hand.
“If I possess you,” I say slowly, “I’m still not in my body. The guys can’t use the spears on Eirwen.”
“No,” she says. “But I can carry you to your body.”
I go quiet.
The nothing presses around us, and my body hangs three feet below like a promise being withheld. My essence pulls at the edges. I can feel it happening now that she’s pointed it out, a slow unravelling, the kind that doesn’t hurt because there isn’t enough left to register pain.
“And you didn’t mention this before because?”
“It’s not ideal,” she says. “It will hurt us both, weaken you and the extraction will be messy and will probably need your reaper.”
“Probably?”
“Probably,” Eirwen repeats, and somehow makes it sound reasonable.
“That’s not reassuring.”
“I’m not in the business of reassurance. I’m in the business of keeping you alive long enough to reclaim what’s yours.”
I feel myself thinning at the edges. It’s the only word for it. It’s like something held too long in an open hand, losing definition, losing weight, twenty seconds, maybe fifteen, as we stare at each other.
“Clock’s ticking, milady.”
“Right,” I say. “Right.”