Chapter 80 The Nightmare
The Nightmare
The nightmare pulls me out of sleep before I understand why. I am already upright, my breath caught hard, the remnants of it still clinging. Mysin. The fire. The knife. The laughter. My hands tighten in the sheets. “I cannot do this here,” I say quietly.
Colsar is already awake. He shifts beside me without hesitation, his hand finding my arm as he studies me in the dim light, his attention moving over my face as though he can still see what I have not said. “Asharin—”
“I need to kill him.” The words come without strain. Knowing Mysin is here, alive beneath this palace, has changed something I cannot ignore.
He does not argue. Something in him pauses, weighing not whether I mean it but whether there is anything left to say that would matter. Then he rises, the decision made. “I am coming with you.”
The corridors are stripped of everything that fills them during the day.
No movement, no voices, only shadow stretching ahead as we move through it, our steps carrying further than they should in the quiet.
The palace feels different at this hour, as though it has stopped performing for anyone and is simply existing.
I do not look anywhere but forward.
By the time we reach the lower levels, whatever remained of the dream has burned itself into a clarity that is clean, cold and entirely mine. The guards step aside without question as we approach, though I feel their attention follow us as we pass.
Colsar slows just before the entrance, his hand catching mine, drawing me back just enough to make me turn to him. “You have killed creatures before,” he says, his voice low. “Killing your brother is not the same thing, Asharin—”
“I do not want you to do it for me,” I say, holding him there, not asking and not wavering. “I just want you to be there.”
He looks at me, something moving through his expression before it clears, and then he inclines his head. That is enough.
I step closer and close the distance between us, my hand sliding up along his neck as I bring my mouth to his.
The kiss is immediate and unrestrained in a way that has nothing to do with softness and everything to do with what waits beyond the door.
His hand comes to my waist and pulls me in as though he understands that this is not hesitation but preparation. We do not linger. There is no need.
When I pull back I rest my forehead briefly against his, my breath still uneven though not from fear. “I love you,” I murmur. “For being here. For being mine.”
His mouth finds mine once more before he draws back just enough to look at me. “Standing in a dungeon,” he says quietly, something darker running beneath the words, “while my wife prepares to kill someone is not helping my restraint.”
A brief laugh escapes me before I can stop it, real and unexpected. “Come on,” I say, pushing lightly at his chest.
The door opens and the air inside presses in, thick and wrong, carrying a sour edge that speaks of something designed to break a body slowly rather than end it.
I stop just inside the threshold and let my eyes adjust.
Mysin hangs inverted from the ceiling, his ankles bound in iron, suspended above a narrow well filled with a bubbling, green liquid.
A lever stands beside it, simple in design, built to lower and raise him in measured intervals.
The room is otherwise unremarkable. Dark walls.
A single torch. The smell of something chemical beneath the damp.
He does not move at first, and I wonder if he is already dead. I feel something complicated move through me at that thought, something I do not examine too closely.
Then his body jerks, as though something is forcing the movement through him, his limbs pulling tight as the mechanism lowers him and his head disappears beneath the surface before being drawn back up again.
When he emerges the sound that leaves him barely resembles anything human.
The liquid trails down his face and neck, clinging where it has already begun to alter the skin beneath it.
Colsar exhales quietly beside me. "Soraka."
I glance at him. "A poison?"
"Yes." His voice remains even. "It makes you feel as though pieces of your skin are being pulled free. Slowly. Repeatedly." A pause. "It does not stop between intervals."
I look back at Mysin. At the way his body hangs there, at the discoloration spreading across his skin, at the particular quality of his breathing when it comes.
"Still not good enough," I say.
We stand there in silence for a while, watching.
There is something in me that expected to feel more at the sight of him like this, something that expected satisfaction or grief or the particular relief of seeing consequence finally arrive.
What I feel instead is quieter than any of those things, and harder to name.
"Bring him down," I say.
Colsar reaches for the mechanism and releases it in a single motion. The chain slackens and Mysin drops hard to the ground, his body folding as he pulls for air that does not come cleanly. He does not try to rise. He does not have the strength for it.
I wait until his breathing has found something closer to a rhythm before I step forward.
I crouch down to his level. "Why did you always hate me?"
He does not answer immediately. Then he laughs. It is broken and uneven and rasping from his throat, but still unmistakably him, still carrying that particular quality I have known my entire life.
"Because you ruined everything."
His eyes find mine, and something ugly and familiar moves through them, the same expression I have seen across tables and in corridors and in the moments just before the worst things happened.
As though the years between us have never existed.
As though we are back at the beginning and nothing that has happened since has changed anything that matters to him.
“You ruined everything,” he repeats. "But you were always doomed," he adds, quieter now, something almost satisfied threading through it. "Which is why it was easy. Your life has always meant little. Because it will not last long."
He spits at me.
Something in me breaks open.
The power answers before I decide what to do with it and then I am on him before the thought finishes, my foot connecting hard enough to force him back, then again and again, each strike landing without restraint or precision, driven by something that has waited a very long time to be released.
I hear the sounds it makes. I do not stop.
He barely fights back. Perhaps he cannot.
Perhaps it does not matter to me either way.
Colsar does not stop me. He does not interfere.
He simply stands where he is and lets me exhaust what needs to be exhausted, and when I finally slow it is not because he has asked me to but because the thing driving me has spent itself.
I straighten. My breath comes unevenly.
Colsar steps forward then, and only then, and presses something into my hand.
I look down.
A knife.
"I can do it," he says quietly. "If you do not want to."
I look at him. At the way he offers this without pressure, without expectation. He understands the choice is the only part of any of this that has ever truly belonged to me.
My fingers close around the handle. "I want to."
I turn back to Mysin and crouch beside him again, and this time I take my time. I look at his face, at the face I have known my entire life, and I let myself feel all of it before I do anything else.
Then I drive the blade into his chest. Through flesh and bone, straight into his heart, with a force that leaves no room for survival and no question about intent.
Everything goes quiet. I remain there, my hand pressed against the hilt, my breath coming in slow, careful pulls as something begins to move through me that I was not entirely prepared for.
"Do you know," I say finally, my voice quieter now, "that day in the garden before the wedding, when he was beating me?"
Colsar does not move. "Yes."
“I could have fought back. Destroyed him, even. That time and many times before it. I had the power. I always had the power.” The words come slowly, pulled from somewhere I do not visit often.
"I told myself it was because I did not want them to know what I was capable of.
That they could use it against me." My throat tightens around what comes next. "And part of that was true."
A tear slips free before I can stop it. I wipe it away though it does nothing to help.
"But there is another truth, Colsar."
My voice breaks on his name and I let it.
"I never hurt him because I thought I deserved it.
" The silence that follows is the heaviest thing in the room.
"I took it because I believed somewhere beneath everything that if I was patient enough, if I was quiet enough, if I absorbed enough of what they gave me without breaking, maybe one day they would look at me differently.
" I draw in a breath that does not fully steady me. "Maybe one day they would love me."
The words pull something completely loose. Whatever control I have been holding gives way all at once, and I feel it happen, the weight of it breaking through, the tears coming harder now, beyond anything I have ever managed to contain. The kind that come from somewhere too deep to control.
I do not try to stop it this time. I let it move through me entirely, the grief and the fury and the particular exhaustion of having carried something this heavy for this long, and I stay where I am until it has passed through me as much as it is going to.
Then I pull myself back together. I am not ready, but I have to be.
I stand slowly, wipe my face, and breathe.
Colsar watches me, his presence asking nothing of me, offering nothing I have not asked for, simply there.
"Are you done with him?" he asks.
I look at what is left of Mysin. "Yes."
"Then step out, if you want."
I look at Colsar and understand what he is offering. I pull the blade free and set it down, then turn and walk toward the door without looking back. The door closes behind me. I stand in the corridor and breathe.
At first there is nothing. Then I hear it.
The shift first, the particular sound of Colsar moving through the change, something that no longer resembles anything human.
Then the roar, tearing through the air behind the door and filling the corridor around me, followed by the sounds of something being taken apart without restraint or mercy.
Something strikes the far wall hard enough that I feel it through the floor beneath my feet. Then another impact. Then another.
Then silence.
I wait. I lean against the wall and close my eyes and I wait, and I do not try to measure the time.
When the door opens again Colsar stands inside, just returned to himself, covered in blood that is not his.
What remains of Mysin is scattered across the room without order, pieces of him distributed in a way that leaves no question about the intention behind it.
His face is unrecognizable. His head floats in the well.
I look at Colsar for a long moment.
"Feel better?" I ask quietly.
"Much," he says. He does not elaborate.
I reach for his hand and he takes it, and we leave the room together.
Neither of us looks back.