Nineteen
I am not awake.
Not quite asleep, either, but caught in the seam between. Something holds me here, some sticky membrane between worlds, as if I’m trapped within a wound that refuses to clot.
The ground is not solid. It is a sliding, infinite surface, shifting between solid, liquid and the all-devouring black of the void.
Every time I try to focus on it, it changes, like a lie trying to survive the questions it’s asked.
I stand. I float. I sink. None of it matters.
II can barely feel the edges of my own body, as though I’m being puppeteered by a bored child.
Three figures take shape on the horizon.
They are so large my brain tries to reject them, tries to shrink them down to a manageable size, but they only become more enormous.
They form a perfect triangle around me, at such a distance that their feet never seem to meet the surface I stand on.
Their faces are entirely obscured by the clouds and mist above.
The first is a man—a sculpture, really—made of a thousand shattered crystals barely held together. Each movement grinds one shard against another, forcing trickles of dark blue fluid out of the cracks. A wound in his chest glows with a familiar light. It is my own light. I hate it instantly.
The second is a woman, pink and pale, her hair curling down from the clouds like ropes of wet flesh. She has the same nurturing glow as the medics at the barracks, but the way her limbs move betrays something malevolent. Her hands are massive, soft and mothering, but they end in sharp points.
The third figure is the worst. It is wrapped in vines of purple-black with barbed thorns.
No skin shows. It is a bound shadow, sculpted by the absence of everything else.
Every so often it flickers, as if trying out new forms and hating each one.
I cannot look directly at it for long, nausea building in my stomach, but every time I glance back at it, I swear it has moved closer.
I don’t know what these things are. I don’t know whether I should run, or fight, or try to scream.
I do nothing.
Instead, I stand there, a pathetic dust mote, as the voices begin.
They are not voices, exactly. Some are distorted, like sound beneath the water’s surface, bubbling up from the deep.
Others are soft, hypnotising, laced with violence that twists itself so much it sounds like sweetness.
There are words, but none I recognise; sometimes they run backwards, sometimes they are only the sound of glass scraping on glass.
I try to speak, but my mouth fills with the black powder. I choke on it, sending clouds of midnight into the space. I try to claw it from my mouth, but it is unending. Tears run down my face as my life ebbs away.
But I do not die.
The powder is pulled from me by an unknown force, like life force being drawn into the Mother Shard.
I drag in a breath, gasping for air that doesn't feel real. The powder turns to liquid, a viscous black oil, and falls to the floor, burning me where it splashes against my skin.
The pink woman sinks to her knees, her face luminous with the glow of the sickest kind of infatuation. She raises a hand—so slow and heavy it makes the air warp around the motion—and points at me.
I feel it in my sternum before I see it. A pressure, hot and splitting, like a fever trying to possess me.
I want to move, but I can’t.
The pink woman shuffles closer. Her hands swell—splitting into smaller hands, and smaller again—converging around me without touching, compressing the space I stand in until no air remains.
A voice shouts my name: “LUCERIS,” but it sounds like an indictment.
I try to shut my eyes, but they won’t close.
The next instant, the pink woman lunges. Her arms elongate, fusing into a glistening blade that slices through my body, shearing me in half and throwing me backwards, away from myself.
Time stutters and doubles so that I see myself split in half and flung away a dozen times at once.
I hit something—and reality changes. I am pieced back together in the Light Dominion. In my room in the dorms. A place so ramshackle and empty—and impossibly safe compared to this.
I am lying on the floor. My wrists are shackled in gold bands—no, not gold. Inhibitium. Two of them, layered, and both covered in so many golden cracks, light leaking through like blood through a bandage. It’s my light, and it hurts to look at it.
The room is filled with the other Offerings. They line the walls, silent and watching. Their eyes are all wrong, each pair holding a different accusation. I do not know if they can see me. If they even truly exist.
Something moves in the circle of bodies.
A boy—Kael, no, the false Kael. He smiles like he knows me.
His body is too precise—assembled from my feverish memories rather than truth.
His eyes are black and endless but lack his warmth.
He steps forward, movements like liquid.
He doesn’t look at me, but at the bands on my wrists.
His mouth is a thin line of disappointment.
He raises a hand and shadows pour from his fingertips. They gurgle and spit until they settle into the form of a blade, like the pink woman’s.
I want to speak. I want to tell him I forgive him. That I—
That I’m falling in love with him. That none of this is real.
But my tongue is a dead thing, and my lungs have no air.
The false Kael plunges the shadow blade into my chest. Not my heart—just below it. Precise. Clinical. Like a medic cutting toward something hidden. The blade slides in without resistance. My veins fill with fire. My nerves combust. I would scream if I could.
In the silence, a voice—a real one, not warped or underwater, but clear, almost gentle—whispers in my ear:
“You need to die.”
Then everything stops.
I come to upside down, swinging from a vine with the taste of blood in my mouth. My head is pounding, my skull ready to split. For a moment, I don’t know who or where I am. There is only pressure, throbbing and vicious, like my brain is about to drain out of my nose.
Then I remember: the dorm, the blade, his voice telling me I needed to die.
But I didn’t. Not yet.
I blink, and the world makes no sense. A blue-black forest. Night air dense and pulsing with Mana. Trees crowd in every direction—old, gnarled roots crawl over the ground, the foliage thick and alive. The canopy blocks out the sky but glows faintly, as if the stars are dripping onto the branches.
Thousands of glittering sprites flit through the air, a sickly yellow. Each one the size of a teardrop, drifting without purpose, giving the night a surreal, almost underwater quality. The air hums with their presence. Every breath fills my lungs with a mixture of sweet nectar cut with rot.
My ankles are bound tight by a living, throbbing vine. My hands are free, but the rest of me is trapped, swinging gently like bait.
My first thought is Kael.
The warmth he left behind when we fell asleep together is already distant. Already gone. He is not here. My chest lurches, and I bite my tongue to keep from screaming his name into the dark.
My next thought is Marissa.
I scan the trees, but the darkness is dense, and the sprites’ glow only bends the world out of shape. I see nothing.
I twist, but that only makes the vine bite deeper into my skin.
I reach for my Mana, and it’s there, waiting, refreshed and untethered after the Embrace.
My hands glow faintly, illuminating the rough skin at my wrists where my bands always chafed.
I was shackled again in the dream. As if they ever had any real hold over me.
I gather the light in my palms, focusing it into my fingertips. There is no one around, so I aim a beam of searing light at the vine. It sizzles, then pops, and I fall hard, landing on my shoulder and rolling to a stop against the base of a massive tree.
A few feet above me, a Shadowborn is staring at me.
I freeze, ready to die.
But he doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.
Just watches.
Nyxen.
He is perched on a thick branch, knees bent, arms hanging loose. His face is unreadable. Shadows flicker around his eyes, making them look hollow and deep. He is so still I think he might be dead.
He drops from the branch, landing in front of me with the barest whisper of sound. Neither of us moves.
I sit up, groaning, my head a mess of pounding blood and old threats.
He speaks first. “How are you able to focus it like that?” he asks, voice accusing.
“What do you mean?” I answer, quietly, trying to sound unassuming. Unthreatening.
“Now is not the time for games,” he says sharply. “Your Mana. How did you make it cut? It is impossible for a Lightborn.”
Of course he saw me. Fuck.
“You must be seeing things,” I say, bracing myself for his response.
He surveys me, eyes scanning for threat. Finding none, he circles me, then inspects the vine and the scorch marks where I burned through it.
“I thought you were supposed to be intelligent,” he says.
“What gave you that impression?” I reply.
He chuckles and crouches before me, close enough that I can see the individual hairs of his stubble and the scars on his knuckles.
He grabs me by the chin, rough enough that the callouses on his fingertips scratch my skin.
I grunt in surprise, but lock eyes with him. He looks older in the semi-dark.
“Perhaps I’ll kill you right now,” he says.
My eyes go wide. He wouldn’t. Kael wouldn't forgive him. I’m sure of it.
An Overseer floats through a nearby copse of trees. It hums low and deep before disappearing again. Only its glittering blue trail remains.
“Kael would never forgive you,” I try, fear spiking in my chest.
“Kael will never know.”
He’s right.
The thought lands harder than the threat.