Chapter 3
Voren
“Easy is a word that doesn’t exist here,” I say, my voice flat in the oppressive silence.
The chamber is dead. Utterly, profoundly dead. Not even the faintest whisper of a soul lingers, which is unsettling when you are used to a legion of ghosts surrounding you. It’s a vacuum, and my power recoils from it.
Nyssa takes a step forward. Dreven’s shadow twitches, ready to haul her back. Dastian’s hand crackles with contained energy. I watch her. The life I pulled back into her feels fragile, a thread stretched taut over a blade. She’s walking toward the very thing that could snap it for good.
“Don’t,” I command, the word cracking like ice.
She ignores me, of course. She’s running on pure, suicidal momentum. She stops a few feet from the dais, her shoulders set. The snake doesn’t move.
“It’s just a crown,” she says, her voice trying for casual but landing on strained as she stares at it.
We are primed, ready to strike, but nothing happens.
“It’s dead,” she says flatly.
“Dead,” I murmur and move closer.
Up close, I feel nothing. No echo. No grief. No hunger. Just a cold absence that sucks at the edges of my power like a drought.
“Dead isn’t the same as gone,” I say, circling the dais. The snake of steel doesn’t track me. It doesn’t react to Nyssa either, which I hate more. “Dormant. Starved.”
“Starved of what?” she asks, eyes on the thing like she’s daring it to twitch.
I shrug. “Who knows? No one has ever worn this thing since the Wraith King died and became the Devourer.”
Nyssa reaches for it and snatches up the snake before I can stop her. “Is this it? The Crown?” She places it on her head, and I lunge forward, but nothing happens.
The snake remains impassive; it doesn’t turn into anything, and the realm doesn’t quiver in her presence.
I hate it immediately.
Nyssa stands there with a metal snake on her head, defiant and ridiculous, and my power recoils at the emptiness coiled on her head.
“Off,” I say, because the idea of a starved artefact of my domain latched onto her skull makes something primal in me bare its teeth.
She arches a brow at me and doesn’t move. Dreven’s shadows tighten; Dastian cracks his knuckles like he’s trying to make patience out of noise.
I circle the dais once more and extend a hand, letting a thin veil of wraith-light unfurl from my palm. It kisses the metal.
Nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a sigh. The Crown of Wraiths is a corpse.
“Dormant,” I repeat, more to myself than to them. “It needs a tithe.”
“Blood?” Nyssa offers, because of course she does.
“Everyone always starts with blood,” Dastian mutters, rolling his eyes. “Have we considered trying a good time? Bit of music? A sexy threat?”
Dreven ignores him. “What does it want?” he asks me, silver eyes like knives.
“A master.”
Nyssa snorts. “Hard pass on the master.”
“Warden, then,” I correct, stepping close enough that the dead crown is within arm’s reach. Up close, the craftsmanship is obscene—scales etched with runes so old they make my eyes ache. “It was forged to command my legions and contain what we could not destroy. It will not wake for a thief.”
“I’m not a thief,” she counters, chin up, eyes bright with that stubborn heat that got her killed. “I’m the only one who can wear it.”
“She’s right,” Dastian says, because agreement sounds more like trouble on his tongue than dissent ever did. “It wants her.”
I nod slowly, wondering what will wake it, when the earth rumbles under our feet.
“Okay,” she says, taking it off her head quickly. “That was more in line with how I thought this would go.”
“We’re leaving,” I state, and grab her hand. “Now.”
For once, she doesn’t argue.
I don’t waste the warning. The floor groans like a dying leviathan, and the dead air tries to drink my power dry. Dreven folds the shadows into a corridor.
The chamber unravels. Edges fray. Depth tilts. I lay a ribbon of wraith-light ahead, a pale track that clings to reality when reality forgets how. Nyssa stumbles once, twice, but her grip on me is iron.
Behind us, something like a tide whispers in hunger.
This room wants to keep what enters. It can choke.
We hit the obsidian threshold, and the runes breathe against my skin, recognising the blade at Nyssa’s hip, tolerating me.
I push through first, drag her after, Dreven’s storm closing like a lid, Dastian’s heat snapping at our heels.
The corridor of doors tries to wake up. A dozen memories rattle their hinges, sniffing for leaks. I drop the temperature. Frost skims the handles. They go quiet. Nyssa’s shoulders tense under my hand, but she doesn’t look.
We reach a split seam, the first gate. I coil my power around her waist and jump. The realm tries to take my footing; I nail it to the floor with a spike of light that screams like a choir dying and doesn’t move.
The chamber shudders again. Hairline seams zip up the walls, opening into thin, hungry mouths. Whispering starts—faint, needling.
Nyssa tenses at my side. She’s still raw from the crossing; I feel it in the way her pulse flutters under my hold, too fast, too human. “Move,” I order, dragging her with me.
We run.
It’s not graceful. Dastian blasts a path; Dreven blankets the whispers.
I lay a road as we go, strips of wraith-bridge over gaps that shouldn’t exist, silver ribbons appearing under our feet a heartbeat before we fall.
Nyssa keeps pace, jaw set, breathing roughly, eyes on the dark like she means to pick a fight with it for inconveniencing her.
A seam splits ahead. The way we came is wrong—longer, bent out of true. Trick of the realm. I taste it sour in the air.
“Left,” I say.
“There is no left,” Dreven grinds out.
“There is.” I pull us into the wall and through it. The doorway remembers me. The memory hall snaps into place around us, doors trembling like they want to be brave.
Behind, the dead chamber howls.
“Don’t stop,” I tell Nyssa, because she’s about to. She wants to glare back at the thing that tried to keep her. “It can’t follow us if we don’t invite it.”
“You hope,” she grits out.
The obsidian threshold spits us back into the shattered spire. The river of blood is gone; in its place is a field of stone that thinks it’s ice. I don’t test it.
The stone groans under our feet, a sound like grinding teeth.
The path we took to get here is gone, replaced by this endless field of fractured stone.
She stumbles, and the ground where her foot was a second ago shatters into a thousand pieces, falling away into a silent, lightless void. Dreven is a whip of shadow, catching her around the waist, pulling her back from the edge.
“This is getting tedious,” Dastian observes, his hands alight with crackling, red-gold energy.
“We make a path,” I say, scanning the shifting landscape. The air is thin, tasting of finality. I can feel the realm trying to erase our footprints, trying to forget we were ever here.
“Or,” Dastian says with a manic grin, “we don’t use a path at all.”
Before I can object, a wave of heat rolls from him. The stone beneath our feet warms, then glows, seams of molten gold spreading out like a spiderweb. “Walk on the cracks,” he orders. “It’s hotter, but it’s solid.”
It’s insane. It’s Dastian.
Nyssa doesn’t hesitate. She steps onto a glowing line, the soles of her boots smoking faintly. “Better than falling,” she grunts, and starts moving.
I follow her now, the heat dry against the usual cold of my power. The dormant crown is a dead weight in Nyssa’s hand, a silent question mark in the middle of our retreat. Bringing her back was one thing. Keeping her alive is turning out to be a full-time fucking job.