Chapter 27
Her world was cold and aching. She wasn’t sure why, but her mind had fractured a long time ago.
It sometimes felt as though she bounced between multiple people.
Minds that weren’t hers, yet were. Thoughts that had deviated from who she once was.
Anger. Sadness. Hopelessness. Joy. All moments and memories that were so jumbled together, she couldn’t imagine what was right or normal or what even was supposed to be.
She told herself it wasn’t a terrible existence. After all, the real her floated among all of these thoughts and memories whenever she wished. Each version of herself had already experienced so much that she hadn’t experienced yet.
One part of her had been chased by the Huntress for hours on end.
Through the moors, through the swamp, into the rolling fields of wheat beyond.
She knew that was her fear, but that part of her had never been good at hiding.
It had always reared its ugly head when she didn’t want someone to know she was terrified, and she should have guessed that part of herself wouldn’t stay away from the Huntress long.
It had managed to hide eventually, because the Huntress hadn’t killed it. But now that part of her had experienced so much more than Jessamine as a whole had experienced, and she wasn’t sure it could be convinced to join with the others.
Not that any of them intended to join with each other again. It was safer to be apart. Fractured. Not entirely a whole being, because if one of them died, then the others would still survive.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
When she wasn’t snooping on what the other pieces of her were experiencing, Jessamine existed in golden light. But there was nothing here. No life. No conversation. No people. It was just Jessamine, lonely and tired and exhausted.
Sometimes she wondered if this was how Elric felt all those centuries alone. Her heart hurt for him, just as much as it cried out for him to save her.
At least, it did when she remembered he existed.
Sometimes her mind seemed to float through time and space.
She didn’t remember who she was, or perhaps who she used to be.
She only remembered the now. The golden light that bathed her mind in calm, and the quiet sensation that, for the time being, reminded her that she was safe.
Maybe she wouldn’t be safe forever. Maybe the Huntress would successfully hunt down all the pieces and parts of who Jessamine had once been, and then she would come looking for Jessamine’s core.
But that wasn’t right now. Fear had taken control over her entire being.
Until one day—or perhaps one hour; time seemed so meaningless here—she heard the faintest sound. It wasn’t quite the scrape of a claw on the ground, but it was something different from the silence she had luxuriated in for such a long time.
She sought it out. Following the strange sound until she found the smallest black smudge on the golden ground of her home.
It was a tiny blob about the size of her fist, with eight legs that propelled it forward. A spider, she remembered. But this one was larger than any spider she’d ever seen before. The bulbous body dragged on the ground, creeping toward her with obvious intent.
She crouched before it, tilting her head to the side. “What are you doing here?”
The spider seemed to pause. One leg lifted, gently stroking the air as though it might be able to feel her, before it continued the slow crawl forward.
She wasn’t sure what to do here. The spider shouldn’t be in this golden realm, that much she was certain of. But how had it gotten here? How was it walking toward her as though it knew where she was, even though she knew for certain that it didn’t?
Moving back, Jessamine tested to see if it would follow her. And it did. Strangely enough, the spider moved its direction the moment she shifted hers.
“How odd,” she muttered, standing and taking another few steps back. That didn’t seem to deter the little creature, as it was obviously still following her. As though no matter how far she tried to move away from it, it would always know where she was.
Jessamine felt the smallest spike of fear drive through her chest. Spiders had never been her favorite creature, although she had a healthy respect for them and knew to leave them alone when they were hanging from a windowsill.
They had their use, but that didn’t mean she had to endure being around them.
Then came another sound. This one of wings beating at the air and the wind rustling through feathers.
A raven landed on the ground only fifteen feet from her. It ruffled dark feathers, a third eye in between the other two blinking at her.
“Oh. I’m hallucinating now,” she said.
Except then a thud on her right side revealed itself to be a snake that had seemingly fallen out of the sky. This one lifted its head and stared at her as well, tongue flickering as it tasted her scent on the air.
This wasn’t good. She had no idea who these creatures had been sent by, but she had a suspicion it could be the Huntress.
“No, Jessamine,” she told herself as she backed away from the creatures. “She can’t find you here. That’s the point of all this. She would have to find all the other parts of you, and she couldn’t have done all that. Not yet.”
But maybe, just maybe, she had. Fear turned her stomach sour, and her heart thundered in her chest. Something inside of her screamed that she needed to get somewhere safe.
Jessamine turned, and she ran.
This world was not so kind as to allow her to flee easily, though.
Her feet pounded on the golden ground, and all she could hear were the howls of wolves.
Black wolves, all of them made up of dark shadows with blood dripping from their jaws, hunting her across the never-ending nothingness of this realm.
They called out their glee at having to chase their prey, and she did not know what to do.
So she kept running, her breath sawing in and out of her lungs as she pumped her arms and forced her legs to keep going even when they cramped. She would not fall to the Huntress. She would not die for real.
There was still time for someone to find her here. If only she could keep moving. Keep running. Keep hiding.
But her magic wasn’t even here. She couldn’t use it in this realm. In Elric’s shadowy realm, she could have conjured so many things to keep her safe. She would have had a barrier, a city, a wall that would have been impossible to get inside, but here?
Nothing could protect her from what hunted her down.
She might have continued running or gotten away, if there wasn’t the distraction of the swarm of bats that attacked her next. They tangled in her hair, their high-pitched shrieks filling her ears with sharp staccato sounds.
Terror made her scream a little, stuttering in her run until she was standing still, frantically running her hands through her hair and untangling the soft bodies that were biting at her fingers. She could feel the blood slicking between the digits as she ripped them out, one by one.
By then, the wolves had caught up.
The first one caught her in the chest, knocking her down onto the ground as it bit her arm. Pain lanced through her as another wolf grabbed her other arm. Pinned by twin beasts, she was stuck there, terrified but unable to move as she stared up at the raven that hovered in the air above her.
“Is this my death?” she croaked. “Will it be so easy for you to kill me, after all?”
A low quiet filled the air. The wolves’ growls died down. The sound of the wings became less of a buffeting ache. And then, all that filled the clearing with noise was the soft sound of a toad croaking.
A toad?
She couldn’t quite pay attention to the oddity of that, because the raven was sinking in the air.
Talons grew closer and closer to her face until all she could see was the darkness of the feathers.
They raked across her face, sinking closer until those feathers caressed her cheeks.
The thundering sound of her heart stuttered, as it felt as though she had…
absorbed it. The raven was sucked into her body; those talons become her own, stretching her fingers into claws that suddenly tore through the thin gold beneath her.
She listened to the rattle of her lungs as her body shifted and changed.
Writhing on the ground now, she struggled to get away from the creatures pinning her down.
Already she could feel the slithering of the snake as it coiled around her bare leg, sinking into her skin as scales fluttered down her entire body.
She could feel them growing underneath her skin, then popping out in a wave of texture that wasn’t normal. Wasn’t right.
Then the toad, it hopped onto her chest and crawled its way to her mouth.
Tiny clawed hands dug at her face, scrabbling at her lips as it shoved itself beyond her teeth.
She tried to shriek around it, but the beast seemed impossible to harm.
She even tried to bite through it, but that got her nowhere as it crawled down her throat and made a nest in her stomach.
The wolves slowly dissolved into her, their anger burning throughout her entire body. She wanted to hunt. She wanted to kill. She wanted to find each and every part of herself until she was finally whole again. Jessamine was tired of waiting.
But these weren’t her thoughts. At least, she didn’t think they were. She lay there on the ground, gasping and trying to make sense of the madness that rolled through her body. Fur sprouted on her arms, trailing down her legs until she was wholly a beast, and then the spider walked up her chest.
She could feel each individual leg as it touched her skin.
The abrasive fibers on the legs of the spider made her itch and burn.
Those legs crawled over her face. Jessamine wished she could close her eyes, but all she could do was lie there in horror, staring up at the twin fangs that came out from the spider’s mouth.
It could take her eyes if it wanted. Bite down on her cheek and inject her with venom that would melt through flesh and skin.
Instead, it moved all the way to her forehead and melted where her third eye should be.
Lightning struck through her body, seizing her muscles until she was arched upward with her eyes wide. She was flooded with emotion all at once.
Hope, fear, love, sadness, guilt, all of it surging through her entire body. She had missed this. She had been so terrified of it all coming back. This was who she was, and it was as terrifying as it was magical.
Padding footsteps approached. Her breath came in sharp little pants as she turned her head to see a black cat walking toward her. Those familiar dark whiskers flicked at the sight of her, and Nyx sat down just out of reach.
“Hello, friend,” Jessamine whispered, her voice shuddering with each word. “Have you come to take me home?”
Nyx reached out with a single paw and touched her forehead. Those warm pads filled her with a sense of relief and understanding, and suddenly she knew this wasn’t a punishment.
All the parts of herself had to come back. She had to pull herself together because this wasn’t the end. Not for her. Not for all that she needed to return for.
And these creatures, they were who she was. They were witchcraft and magic. They were the pieces of her that she had greatly missed, and they were the purpose she had nearly forgotten.
All of her pieces were not done fighting yet.
A voice came to her then, whispering in her ear, “Come on, nightmare. Come back to me. Fight, Jessamine. I need you to fight because we are running out of time.”
Of course they were. She was being hunted by a goddess who had no right in the slightest to take what wasn’t hers.
She allowed her eyes to close, and Nyx curled up over her heart.
Her familiar seemed to be the last part to weave her shards all together, until finally, finally, she opened her eyes to stare up at Elric, who was holding her in his arms. He curved his body over hers, his lips whispering in something almost like a prayer.
But the pain was back. The same pain that made her shatter into pieces before. It had brought her here, and then she had broken herself even further.
His dark eyes snapped up to hers, and his lips twisted in a pained grin. “Welcome back, love.”
“Something is still wrong.”
“You aren’t entirely whole. Not yet.” He lifted his hand. Broken pieces of glass were collected there. If she looked a little closer, though, it wasn’t her reflection she saw in them.
She saw herself as a child, learning how to play the violin. Another shard showed the first moment she had met Leon. The next, a quiet moment with her mother in the garden. All memories that had deep meaning to her, memories that she still held dear.
“My soul?” she asked.
“I can’t keep you safe anymore,” he replied, laying the shards on her chest and allowing the glass to turn liquid against her and then seep through her skin. “Keeping your soul for myself is only hurting you more.”
She gasped. A little sound that made every part of her ache, but then the pain disappeared. It settled, as though her body had been seeking that soul for a very long time. And finally, she could feel like she wasn’t going mad any longer.
She was herself.
She was more than that.
She was everything that her magic had bid her to become. She was witchcraft and rage. She was a woman screaming into the night that she would be listened to, and the world would bow before her.
Mouth open in shock, she stared at Elric and asked, “What now?”
“Now you finish the spell, or you return as you were.”
“What spell?”
“Ajax’s spell,” he murmured. “The Huntress wants your body, Jessamine, because every god needs a vessel. But she can’t steal it if it is not empty.”
Oh.
So that was what had happened. His spell hadn’t just been about bringing the Huntress into her body; it had been about ejecting Jessamine entirely. He hadn’t wanted the goddess to share her form like he had to suffer through with Leon. He’d wanted an empty vessel to bring his sister into.
She told herself that she was well and whole and that nothing would change that except… everything had changed. For the better. For the worse. For the unraveling of everything she had known before.
A sharp voice shouted from a distance, “Don’t you dare!”
The Huntress was coming. She’d found them. She’d hunted them down just as she was good at doing, but…
Jessamine cupped Elric’s jaw and brought him closer to her lips. “She should be terrified of me.” She pressed against his mouth. “And I will show her why.”