CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVE
Verena
THE SCREAMING STOPPED, but the sound lived on in the cracks of my voice as grief became acquainted.
The world had taken him. The gods had ignored me.
So, I looked to the only thing still listening and whispered, Take them all.
The Viper rose, a shiver up my spine, a hiss in my skull, slick and venomous. Finally.
My vision stuttered, color draining until all that remained was red. Blood on the grass. Blood on my hands.
I felt Ronan through the bond, a distant roar of panic and power, trying to reach me, to anchor me. But it was too late.
Misery had already found its weapon.
Magic cracked like a whip through the air, tearing through Ford’s barrier as the ground quaked and two silhouettes emerged from the fume-drenched horizon.
At first, it felt like a fever dream.
Then it became a nightmare as Obrann stepped into view, his skin leached of life, oil-slick hair plastered to his skull and that same foul grin clinging to his hollow face.
Beside him, Reve.
They approached slowly, casually, as if time bowed to them alone. Reve lifted a hand and waved, actually waved, through the trembling shield. That smirk said it all. I see you. I’m coming.
Ronan was barely contained against me, smoke waiting at his feet, his jaw set in a lethal resolve as his eyes went dragon dark. I could taste the axis of his fury in my lungs.
Then Obrann lifted his hand where the three black rings still sat, pulsing with a violet haze.
It struck the air, and the world convulsed, magic recoiling, a live wire snapping as light and power collided.
The sour sting of nix metal choked the air before it settled.
Before all magic shattered and soldiers poured in from behind them.
Ronan was already moving, command cutting through the chaos. “Kanoa. Inessa—” A sift cracked open behind them as he placed his heirloom into Inessa’s hands, and hesitated, just long enough for me to see it. “Warn Aero,” he said.
Inessa nodded, and they vanished, gone in a blur.
The instant they disappeared, Ford’s shield collapsed. And hel came undone.
Ronan’s roar broke across the peaks, blades tearing through the first wave of soldiers. Elysian flickered between forms beside him, ivory fur flashing back to Fae as he carved a path through armored throats.
Callum’s fire sputtered, strangled by the nix, but the rage in his eyes was bright. Killian was a streak of motion as he laughed, cutting through the madness. And through it all, Reve weaved into the fray, his smile wide, unbothered, amused. Every strike they dealt only seemed to entertain him.
And me? I didn’t move.
Because Obrann wasn’t fighting. He stood perfectly still as shadows formed behind him. Darkness. Not the kind born of absence, but of intent. It rose, the air bending around its shape.
The bond went cold. Then Ronan stopped. Just…stopped. His blade dipped toward the ground, his chest heaving once as his stare locked beyond Obrann’s shoulder. I followed it, looking back to Obrann—
I saw her…and knew. The sickly, sunken skin. The black, hollow eyes. The scent of blood on her nails—fresh layered over old. There was no mistaking who she was.
Isolde moved through the carnage untouched, like the chaos had learned to fear her.
Ronan’s inhale broke the space between us. It moved down the bond. A pulse of disbelief. A flare of rage, what felt like regret, and something awfully close to terror.
Through that, a name drifted from a voice behind us. Nezra’s. “…Audra?”
She was still on the ground, her hand slick with blood as she clutched the arrow still lodged in her.
The wound glowed, but her magic faltered, snapping in weak sparks that died against her skin.
Her stare was fixed beyond the fighting, beyond Obrann and Isolde, on a figure standing at the field’s edge, where smoke and ash curled like incense.
A woman stood there, still as a thought not yet spoken. Her hair fell in ink-dark sheets, her skin holding the undertone of dusk. The curve of her mouth could’ve been fixed from sorrow, or delight.
Nezra whispered, “What the fuck—"
Isolde glided toward where I stood and a part of me shifted inside. Not fear, a knowing that wanted to bow or burn. A buried truth had heard its own name for the first time.
Obrann’s soldiers screamed and clashed, Reve’s laughter breaking through the noise, getting closer. But I couldn’t look away. Isolde kept moving, unhurried, a muted call coming off her lips. And that thing living inside me followed the sound of her.
Behind me, Ronan’s exhale was pure devastation as he said only one word. “Verena...”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The world had only constricted to her and the distance between us. Obrann faded to nothing; Reve’s laughter became distant.
My heart skipped a beat, falling into rhythm with another as a whistle moved through the space. Recognition stirring in instinct. The Viper uncoiled. And I let it devour me whole.
It began with the sound of splitting air. Then shadow burst from my flesh, thick and writhing, pouring over me like liquid night, swallowing skin and light alike until there was nothing left but shape and hunger.
Prowling forward toward the whistle, I realized this was what I was meant to be. Not a curse. Not a cage. A catastrophe.
Soldiers dropped where I passed, nix metal shattering, its poison dissolving to dust before it could even touch me. I didn’t feel the pain anymore. Or fear. Only purpose.
The sound cut through again. Soft and hauntingly perfect. Reaching through me, winding around my ribs, threading through every black vein. It wasn’t a request, but a summons.
The Viper stilled inside me and when we blinked, there she was, Isolde, only feet away, whispering a dark lullaby in a tongue my soul remembered. My shadow bent toward her before I even moved, obedient to her will.
Every instinct screamed to fight, to strike, to end her, but my muscles refused. Everything refused. I was still burning, but not by my own spark.
Then she smiled, slow and terrible, her lips parting to reveal fangs too sharp to belong to anything with a soul.
Her power reached for me and instead of clashing with mine—it mirrored it. A twisted reflection winding tighter until my pulse beat with hers. The world around us dimmed. The battlefield, the screaming, even Ronan’s voice through the bond, all gone. There was only her.
“Tick. Tick. Tick.” Her words came from a tongue split down the middle. “I’ve found you.”
She wasn’t just darkness dressed as reign; she was the echo that came before me. The one history had warned, had buried.
The first Viper. The real nightmare.
My mask fractured.
The black veneer that had swallowed my face peeled away in shreds that dissolved against the wind. Beneath it, my skin trembled with the effort of holding shape, light wavering behind my eyes like a candle fighting to stay lit.
Isolde was unmaking me. Thread by thread.
The corruption still clung to my hands, black winding over bone, climbing higher, coiling around my throat. I couldn’t dispel it. Couldn’t glamour it. Couldn’t even lift my own damn hand. Because it wasn’t mine to control anymore.
Laughter unraveled inside my skull, a ringing that snuck into every thought. The curse obeyed her call, and my knees hit the ground before I even realized I’d fallen. Power bled from me to her like ink through water, beautiful, unstoppable, and wholly hers.
Ronan’s voice charged down the bond, terrified and begging. Move, he demanded. Verena, move—
My body didn’t answer him, only Isolde as she held the full influence of my curse. Of me.
In a single shiver of time, we were no longer fighting. The battle had slipped from our hands as nix winked our magic out fully one by one. But not the soldiers, they had stopped pushing and started surging. There were too many blades as the wall of bodies locked us in.
Ronan tore through, breaking the ranks, screams cutting short under his wrath.
Nothing mattered but the distance between him and me.
Reve’s dagger came from the side, meant to cripple.
Ronan caught it barehanded. But the blade cut deep, nix burning into his blood and he staggered as the ground gave way, my body jerking as invisible hands caught me.
Ancient wards screamed as they broke, their shattering resonating as my vision went dark.
And then the world flipped as I was dragged through the tear, and into the fallen kingdom of Nyctom.
I came back to myself in fragments. A breath. A pulse. A weight.
Reve carried me, hands rough where my skin recoiled beneath them. I wanted to spit, to burn him from my flesh, but nothing moved. My limbs were statues, my tongue lead.
Isolde’s whistle still rang through my mind, a command I couldn’t disobey. And the world swayed in slow, dreamlike pulls as he walked on, carrying me toward what waited ahead.
The shift began in the air, the atmosphere shivering before anything else did as it became thick and stale with centuries of stagnancy. The scent wasn’t death. It was after death, whatever clings once the soul has fled.
The ground splintered gray green, every step revealing strains of dull orbs squeezed between the cracks. Trees leaned and twisted, bark slick with damp, their roots split open to expose pale strands like nerves.
And above it all, the sky stretched endlessly.
Wrong in its splendor. Indigo and violet tangled together, streaked with soft mauve that rippled in a living exhale.
Stars were scattered across it in careless collections, each one beating, each one alive.
But its full moon ruled it all, leaving nowhere to hide as it fed the dark.
Exactly how I’d imagined it. Only crueler.
My stomach lurched when Reve dug his fingers tighter, when a void opened before us. I looked to the stars for comfort, right before he sifted us away.