Chapter 7
Nyssa
It hisses again. Not loud. Sharp. A little fuck-you sound that slices through post-orgasm haze like a scalpel. I grab my blade, but then nothing else happens. It’s like it woke up momentarily and then decided, nah, fuck this shit, and went back to sleep.
Great.
“I hear you, snakey,” I mutter and close my eyes.
“You’re just going to sleep?” Voren asks.
“Yep. I’m not staying awake to stare at some inanimate piece of metal when I could be in dreamland.”
Voren makes a noise that sounds like a sermon wrapped in a threat. I give him the finger under the duvet and let exhaustion drag me under.
The dream is immediate and rude. No easing in, no floaty shite. Just me lying on the black dais with a gaping chest wound with the steel snake curled over it like an expensive paperweight. It’s cold. Really, truly dead-cold.
“You’re a corpse,” I tell it.
“So are you.”
It doesn’t open a mouth. It opens a feeling. Old stones. Locked doors. An empty throne with my name carved wrong.
“Very funny,” I snap. “I’m the one currently breathing, thanks to a very grumpy Wraith God. What’s your excuse?”
The feeling shifts, turning from cold stone to the oily slickness of ancient secrets.
The snake on my chest uncoils, its metal scales rasping against my skin with the sound of a thousand whetstones.
It doesn’t move like a creature of flesh; it moves like a thought, fluid and inevitable.
It slithers up my throat, its weight pressing into my windpipe, and peers into my eyes with sockets that hold nothing but the void.
The warden is a lie. The line is a leash. You died and broke the chain, Nyssa Vale. Now, you belong to the light.
“I belong to me,” I growl, reaching up to snatch the bastard off my neck. My hand passes right through it. It’s an echo, a parasitic memory trying to find a home in my newly hollowed-out soul.
The dais beneath me cracks, weeping that same sluggish river of blood I saw in the ruins. The snake flares, its steel turning white-hot, and the agony in my chest returns, a phantom of Voren’s hand reaching in to save me.
Wake up, little goddess. The Devourer is hungry, and you’ve rung the dinner bell.
I bolt upright in bed, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
The room is dark, save for the faint, silvery glow of Dreven’s eyes at the foot of the bed.
I look at the bedside table. The crown is still there, silent and still as a grave.
But my palm—the one I used to seal the gate—is burning like I’ve held it to a furnace.
“Nightmare?” Dreven asks, his voice a low vibration in the gloom.
“More like a performance review,” I rasp, checking my chest. No wound, but the hum under my skin is louder now. “The snake talked. Well, it felt at me. It says I’m not a warden anymore.”
“What are you then?”
“Something that belongs to the light.”
Dreven’s gaze shoots to Voren, who sits upright, and Dastian nearly flies off the bed in agitation.
“What?” I say, suddenly feeling very self-conscious. Should one not talk about light in front of Shadow Gods?
“Nothing,” Dreven states and turns back to the window.
“Oh no!” I say, climbing off the bed, sticky, sweaty, and practically vibrating. “You don’t get to react like that and then shut down. Why does that freak you out?”
Voren stands slowly. “The light,” he repeats. “Radiant and Shadow. Aethel was the Light. Since she died, the throne of the Radiant Gods has been empty.”
“So?” I demand. “I’m a slayer. I’m mortal. Well, mostly. I’m not some celestial placeholder for a dead queen.”
Dastian lets out a short, sharp laugh that has zero humour in it. “If the crown is calling you a creature of the light, it means your little trip to the afterlife didn’t just stitch you back together. It rebooted the system.”
I look down at my hands. They look the same. But the hum beneath the skin is undeniable. It’s not just slayer power; it’s a dawn breaking in my marrow.
“You’re saying I’m the new Aethel?” The thought makes me want to vomit. “Do I need to stab myself in the face?”
Dreven turns from the window, his silver eyes reflecting a light that isn’t in the room. “No, you will not. But you don’t have a choice. The Devourer is coming, Nyssa, but now you are the one thing it needs rather than wants to eat.”
“Meaning?” I croak.
“You have the power of the light. Aethel’s power.”
“The power that killed it.”
“Bingo,” Dastian breathes.
Silence descends.
“How long have you known I’m a goddess in waiting?”
“Since you came back,” Dreven says, “Although we had our suspicions prior to that event.”
Event. My death and resurrection were an event.
“So how come the crown didn’t reject me? It let me pick it up.”
“Good question,” Voren says, staring at it. “It must want you.”
“Again, with the wanting. Can’t I just be me and go back to killing the bad guys?”
“The bad guys don’t stop because you’ve had a promotion, Nyssa,” Voren says, his voice like the crack of a frozen lake. “In fact, they tend to get a bit more enthusiastic when the target starts glowing.”
I scoff, scrubbing a hand over my face. My skin feels too tight. “I’m not glowing. I’m sweaty, I’m sore, and I’ve got a metal snake on my nightstand that won’t stop judging my life choices. This isn’t a promotion. It’s a cosmic stitch-up.”
Dastian’s energy flickers like a faulty lightbulb. “Look on the bright side, Slayer. If you’re the Light, and we’re the Shadows, Wraiths, and Chaos, we’re basically the ultimate power set. We’re a full deck. We can’t lose.”
“Unless the deck is rigged,” I mutter. I reach out and poke the crown.
It remains cold, but a spark of static jumps from the metal to my finger, stinging.
I hiss and pull back. “Why did it let me take it if it’s supposed to be for a mortal warden?
If I’m... whatever you say I am, shouldn’t I have melted or exploded? ”
Dreven moves closer and takes my hand. “You are still mortal, Nyssa. At least for now. You aren’t displaying overt godly powers, do you feel godly?”
I shake my head. “So, you could be wrong.”
“We are not wrong.”
“We know our queen when we are in her presence,” Voren adds.
“This is giving me massive creepy vibes about you and Aethel,” I mutter, and then remember she was Dreven’s mother. “Okay, eww. Forget I said that.”
“Please do,” Dreven says stiffly, looking like he is trying to hold onto the last thing he ate.
“But still…” I say, pulling away from him and crossing over to the other side of the room. “This doesn’t really make sense to me. How does the Goddess of Light be queen of the light and also of the whole Pantheon realm? Shouldn’t that tip the scales in favour of the light?”
“Light and Dark don’t work the same as they do here, slayer,” Dastian says. “They are not two sides of the same coin. They are the same side.”
“Good versus evil isn’t a concept where we are from,” Voren adds in plainer English.
“So, what is the difference then?”
“Not much,” Dreven says, “in respect of how you are looking at it. Everything has a god; some are created in the darkness, the night, some are created under the sun.”
“Oh.” I guess it makes sense, in some weird, very basic way.
“Morality is a human concept,” Voren explains further. “This whole light versus dark thing you’ve had going on forever is banal.”
“Banal. You are saying my entire existence is banal? Thank you for that.” I grimace and then storm off down the hallway to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me.
“He didn’t mean it like that!” Dastian shouts after me.
“Too fucking late. Words matter,” I mumble and stare at myself in the mirror, leaning heavily on the sink. “Banal.”
I splash water on my face until the sting in my palm stops feeling like a brand and more like a bad idea. My reflection doesn’t glow. I don’t sprout a halo. I look like a sleep-deprived woman who just got railed into a religious experience and then told her entire philosophical outlook was a meme.
The burn in my palm spikes. The cut I opened in the crypt pulses under my skin like a heartbeat trying to escape. A thin thread of light skims along the scar. It’s not bright. It’s not dramatic. It’s worse. It’s familiar.
The snake shimmers into view on the little shelf under the medicine cabinet, and I glare at it.
“You don’t want them. You don’t even want them knowing you’re awake.”
It doesn’t answer. It tilts its head. If a metal snake can look disappointed, it manages it. Then it uncoils, slow as a threat, and curls up my arm like some goth bracelet.
I don’t move.
“You want a master?” My voice comes out flat. “Bad news. I don’t do collars.”
The snake climbs my arm, weightless and heavy in the same way a promise is heavy. It pauses at my shoulder, waiting for a second before it slips around my neck.
“Funny. Fucking funny how you just made yourself into a collar.”
“Nyssa.” Dreven’s voice is outside the door.
“I’m fine,” I call, which is a lie dressed as a reassurance. “Just annoyed with dead boy.”
“He apologises.”
“Through you? Coward,” I scoff.
Dreven chuckles. “Okay, that was me trying to create peace. He isn’t sorry. He is right. Gods and mortals are different. It’s the way it has always been and will always be.”
“Unless the Devourer comes and eats us all.”
“Facts,” Dastian pipes up.
I open the door a crack, just enough for Dreven’s silver eyes to cut through the gap. “He’s still wrong,” I say, because I’m petty and tired and wearing a homicidal necklace.
Dreven’s gaze drops to my neck, and I put my hand up, feeling skin. But I know the snake is there. Dreven looks back at my face with a sigh.
Okay, can he not see it?
“Where is the crown?” I ask, stiffly.
“On the bedside table,” he says.
“Nope,” Dastian says, hovering behind Dreven. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?” I ask slowly.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Who knows?” Voren says, marching down the hallway.
“I am sorry I hurt your mortal feelings, slayer. But put these on and accept that shit has changed.” He throws my granniest of knickers at me.
I catch them and stare at them in horror.
They are the saggy ones that are a last resort if I’m behind on laundry. Which newsflash, I never am.
Except that one time I had the flu.
I bunch them up in my fist. “Do you always use props to make your point?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do not go through my underwear drawer again,” I said haughtily.
He snorts indelicately. “My cock has been in your arse, in your cunt, and I’ve dumped more cum inside you than a mere mortal can handle, and you are concerned about me going through your knicker drawer?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask, eyes wide.
“Gods and mortals are not supposed to procreate,” Dreven says with a world-weary sigh. “But you aren’t mortal, Nyssa. You never were.”
Never was.
My whole life has been one big lie.