Chapter 12 #3
“The pretor’s son has been a busy little bunny for years.” It replaced its hat and leaned on its cane, like it was posing for a portrait. “I decided to see if you were yet another misguided dream.”
Jesstin laughed. “I’m not so easily discarded.”
The Conductor straightened with an appraising look. It didn’t answer.
“But you didn’t just help me get to Elloven. You also traded me the map, the map that brought us to the spiral. The doors. The end.”
“I did.”
“Is it chaos you love? It cannot be order.” He shook his head. Asking about Elloven would expose himself too much. “You’re like the cat who can’t enjoy the mouse unless it’s toyed with it first.”
“You ask questions when time only allows for decisions.” The Conductor gestured toward the doors like they were prizes. “Will you save the dead? Yourself? Her? Only one is available to you. I think you’ve known that all along.”
Jesstin trusted neither the rules nor the gamemaster, but there’d been something telling in the creature’s face when he’d mentioned the cat and mouse. It did want to play. There were any number of ways it could have dealt with him otherwise.
“Well?”
The Conductor knew he was so hopelessly gone for Elloven that he’d choose her and only her, and always her, but any choice made in earnest was a loss for him and a win for it.
The trickster spun in a strange little circle, then tapped its cane on the snow, which was solid like the swamp had been solid for Fabrien. “Should you choose the first door—”
Jesstin palmed the blood-hued snow from his face and charged directly at and through the third door before it could finish its duplicitous spiel.
Elloven had been floating in the darkness for so long that when the cabin and the swamp materialized, even the muted light was unbearable.
Had it been hours or days since Jesstin had disappeared? She had only vague recollections of floating through the dark—his arm snug around the back of her legs, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades—wishing she could find her way back.
Then he’d just been... gone. She couldn’t even wonder where, because first she’d have had to grasp where she was, and until the cabin, until the swamp, the only thing she’d known was the timelessness of nothing.
A rotten stench stirred her eyes open once more, and as her vision adjusted, panic set in. Now she knew where she was. She knew it so well, her entire body reacted in a violent clench before her thoughts could come together.
It was the lodge where Fabrien and his friends had tortured her for years.
But there it was, brushed only by the assumption of time, dust, and disrepair.
None of it was real—it couldn’t be, but she shrank away from touching a single piece of furniture. She drew into herself as she walked through the tiny prison. Every scrap of wood, every cobweb, and every crack in the glass panes had been recreated.
Elloven’s fingers ticked against her leg, but she forgot how to count. She was fully conscious in every breath, enough to recognize where it was heading. No matter how far she thought she’d come, she’d always be the girl in the cabin.
But she couldn’t disassociate from this. She couldn’t reach for an escape unless she was ready to accept this had always been her fate.
Elloven stopped counting. She inhaled a shaky breath. But when she reached for the door, she froze.
Jesstin was outside. With Fabrien. Mere feet separated the men, but not for long, judging by the looks both men had fixed on each other.
“Looks like I’m breaking a promise.” Jesstin’s hand slipped into his pocket. No! she tried to scream, but she was rooted by her fear and helplessness, even as she watched him drop his precious talisman into the swamp. “Wouldn’t be the first fucking time.”
“She’s here.” Fabrien’s dead eyes flickered.
He could speak. Fabrien had been building to something over the months she’d been dead.
He hadn’t wanted her flame. He’d had plenty of opportunities.
Hitting her, spitting on her, assaulting her, those had never been enough for him either.
He was only satisfied when he’d crushed every speck of hope in her, and he wasn’t a man acquainted with losing.
With his sleeves half-rolled, Jesstin glanced up. He didn’t ask, but Fabrien answered just the same.
“Our Ellie.” Fabrien tilted his innocent expression. “Who else?”
Fragments of moments—big ones, inconsequential ones—flashed through Elloven as Jesstin turned.
His impertinent grin when he climbed into the carriage and needled Taven.
How he’d looked at her in Mythgarde when he’d seen how much she needed a friend.
Charging at the bounty hunters with his ridiculous broadsword.
The possessive, protective clench he thought she couldn’t see whenever Taven had his hands anywhere near her.
How feral he’d looked when he’d seen the branding scar for the first time, and each time after.
The distinction between their heated exchange the night she’d died and the way he’d charged across the room and swept her into his arms like his whole life had been one long buildup to that one single moment. It meant everything.
All these recollections, the story of her and him, streamed imperfectly across a moment. But a moment was all Fabrien needed to distract Jesstin, to reach for his flame, take it into his fist, and yank.
Elloven’s hesitation ended with Jesstin’s dawning outrage. A spray of dazzling, garish light exploded upward from the brackish water and into a force answering to her alone.
Chest full and shoulders hunched, Elloven called upon the chaos, and the chaos answered. In her charged palms was a tempest of her own doing, bursting with precision and clear intention. It was a weapon with no equal, and one finally hers to brandish.
The turbulence churned in impatience, for the first time waiting not for her panic but her order.
With a violent fling of her arms, she sent it hurtling toward a stunned Fabrien.
He went sprawling into a tree, his arms and legs flailing.
Light and chain tumbled through the dusk as Jesstin’s sacred flame flew from his fist. If it landed in the swamp, they’d never find it, and Jesstin could not, could not, become like Fabrien.
She commanded the water to rise once more, and it caught the diadem atop a geyser.
She reached for it and placed it carefully in her pocket.
Her next breath gathered the remainder of her courage, and she turned to finish what she’d started.
Elloven marched fearlessly through the muck toward her cowering ex-husband, who was still nursing his confusion.
“I’m going to show you how it feels to have something precious stolen from you.
The last words you’ll ever comprehend are these: this is mine now, and you will never, ever get this back.
” She ripped the vessel where his flame should be and crushed it inside her fist with a wailing scream stitched from every horrible, unconscionable act Fabrien Quinlanden had wrought upon her.
Blood seeped from her palm as she watched the scattered pieces of him fade and warp.
Her cries reverberated even after she’d stopped, and the power, the sound, was coming from her palm, where Fabrien’s flame had exploded.
Some shards fell into the swamp and disappeared.
Others clung to the blood on her hand like broken glass.
She shook them away and wiped them on her trousers.
When he looked her way, there was no recognition in his empty eyes.
He didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Jesstin. Elloven thrashed in the viscous water, searching for where he’d gone down, but he wasn’t there anymore, and now it would be too late. She’d prioritized vengeance over his life. She bent and screamed his name over and over, screamed it until her throat could only squeak.
Then the swamp was gone.
Nothing replaced it, only another endless void.
Elloven dropped to her knees and sobbed.
But then he was there. Jesstin was there.
She couldn’t see him, but she felt him near.
He’d come with her into the dark nothing, and she crawled toward him, crying in utter relief to find he was still the same man.
She latched his flame around his neck before he could become something unthinkable.
He looked down at the flame, up at her. His hand traveled to her face and whimpered in anguish when it connected.
With his flame secure, its light bold and strong, she could see he, too, was crying.
“He’s gone.” Jesstin brushed his thumb along her cheekbone. “I will be soon too.”
“No, no. You have to fight it. No, you can’t let it happen. Stay with me. Please stay.”
“I have to end this.”
“Please, Jess, no—” Her objections ended abruptly.
He was no longer there to hear them.
Jesstin was back on the crimson mountaintop. The three doors were back, but the stripes were still.
Rosy snowflakes liquefied on the backs of his hands. Icy wind pinched his airways. He hadn’t noticed the thinning air before, but his lungs felt the extra effort now.
The Conductor emerged without its hat or cane.
“You disrespect my rules, I make new ones. There’s no end to my patience.
Yours? How many living years will you give this place before you’ve given too much?
” Its hair had always been frightful but in an intentional way, not like it was now, breaking free of its pins.
“As many as it takes, bitch.” He was still reeling from the transitions yet ready for another at any moment. “What are years to someone like me?”
“And her?”
The doors winked away. Something round appeared in the air, as small as an apple, its edges rippling.
Blurry details formed within its uneven sphere as it expanded.
Jesstin couldn’t make out what was happening in front of him, but he couldn’t deny what he was looking at.
He felt the Conductor’s eyes boring him with gleeful anticipation.