Chapter 11
Nyssa
“When does absolute look like?” I ask because my voice only breaks when it’s something really important. Like impending annihilation.
“Soon,” Voren says. “Days, maybe.”
“Brilliant.” I scrub a hand over my face. My palm throbs, the faint light under the scar winking like a dodgy fairy light. “Then we stop waiting for it to bite and we bait it on our terms.”
Dastian brightens. “Road trip?”
“Ruin,” I correct. “Radiant kind. If the light woke in me, there will be echoes. Places it remembers.”
Dreven tips his chin. “There’s an abbey on the headland. Fell into the sea in the eighteenth century. The bones still hum when the sun hits them.”
“Field trip,” Dastian crows, already crackling.
“We do this quietly,” Voren says. “No Order. No witnesses. If the Devourer tastes you in the open, there will be nothing left of any of us.”
“Motivating,” I mutter. “Let’s go charge my invisible jewellery before something ancient decides to eat me for kicks.”
The shift from Marrow House to the headland is a cold slap. Wind howls off the Atlantic and slams into me like it has a grudge. The abbey isn’t even ruins anymore; it’s scars. Black teeth of stone jut from the grass, and the cliff’s edge shows fresh bites where the sea keeps trying to eat history.
I walk between the broken foundations. The air smells sharp. Clean. It stings the cuts I’ve collected today, yesterday, and the day before that.
Dastian whistles. “Moody. I like it.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Voren says.
I head for the broken apse, the suggestion of an altar now just a slab with lichen like old lace. The wind tears at my hair. My palm burns under the scar, a steady throb that syncs with the distant smash of waves.
“Do it,” Dreven says quietly at my shoulder. Not a command. Permission. Which is worse.
I plant my palm on the stone.
The light in my blood answers. It surges up, impatient and certain, and the world does that tilt I’m starting to loathe.
The abbey wakes beneath my hand. Not to me.
To itself. Sun that isn’t here presses against my skin.
The stone remembers heat. It remembers a voice like bells. I am not bells. I am knives.
“Steady,” Voren murmurs, cold slipping over my spine to keep the surge from chewing through me.
The snake coils off my neck and drops onto the slab, metal striking stone with a sound like a note struck true. It’s small. It’s enormous. It’s a problem.
The wind shuts up.
“Right,” I say, to the snake, to the stone, to fate. “Terms.”
It lifts its head. It doesn’t have a mouth, but the thought lands anyway.
Mortality.
I take a step back.
“What did it say?” Voren murmurs.
I consider lying. I consider telling them that I heard nothing, but they will know I’m not telling the truth. “Mortality,” I croak.
“Yours?” Dastian asks.
“Are you mortal, Chaos Kid?”
He narrows his eyes. “Are you?”
His question lands like a punch to the head. Am I mortal? “Yes,” I rasp. “I can die. I did die.”
“But you came back changed.” It’s Dreven’s voice that says these words. Calmly. No fuss, just fact.
“I’m not willing to test that theory,” I grit out. “Are you?”
“Dying once was not enough.”
“Oh no!” I snap at the snake. “You don’t get to start talking, and especially about killing me.”
“Nyssa?” Voren asks, moving closer slowly. “Who is threatening you?”
“The snake. Didn’t you hear it?”
“I can’t even see it.”
“It said dying once wasn’t enough.”
“Shed your mortal coil,” Dreven murmurs.
“I did that,” I spit out. “I’m not doing it again!
” I turn on my heel and march across the damp grass, shoving my hands into my hoodie pockets as the wind whips up around me.
No. Just no. Been there, done that. Not doing it again.
Not giving the slayer line a chance to get its hooks into Rynna. Not today, arseholes.
Voren ghosts into my path, and I shoulder past him. He doesn’t stop me; he never forces, he freezes. Dastian keeps pace on my other side, humming under his breath like a live wire trying to be polite. Dreven is a pressure at my back, a storm held on a leash.
“Nyssa.” Dreven’s tone is the one mortals would kneel for.
“Don’t,” I snap without looking.
The wind grabs my words and flings them at the cliff. The sea takes them and pretends it didn’t.
The snake scrapes along the slab behind us. Metal on stone, a tolling note that rings right up my spine. It’s not loud. It’s decisive. The air thins. My palm flares like I’ve pressed it to the sun.
“You can’t escape this,” the snake hisses.
“No? Watch me.” I keep walking.
The gods are speechless behind me. They didn’t expect this, but it’s tough shit. I died. I sacrificed myself to save them, to save the world, because we all know if they had fallen, that beast would’ve breached the veil and swallowed BlackFen Edge whole before moving on to the next hapless village.
Tears prick my eyes.
I can’t do it again.
Not now. Not because some fucking snake tells me to. If I die fighting evil and saving people, that’s the job. Willingly giving up my life for a second time in two days is more than my mental state can handle.
“Leave me alone,” I shout and break out into a run. It’s miles back to BlackFen, but fuck me, I will run it twice to outrun this snake.
The first fifty metres feel righteous. The next ten feel stupid. The headland is open, the wind a blade, and I’m running from a steel snake.
Shadows slide over the grass ahead. Dreven steps out of them like he’s always been there. He doesn’t touch me; he just exists exactly where I want to be.
“Move,” I warn.
“No,” he says. “Breathe.”
I skid to a halt because ploughing straight through a god of shadows feels like a bad idea even for me. Dastian arrives a beat later, crackling with weather that forgot the forecast, and Voren is just suddenly there, cold pushing back the Atlantic.
“Out of my way,” I snap.
“Negotiate,” Voren says. “Ancient things love terms.”
“It wants my mortality. Terms start at ‘no’ and end at ‘fuck you.’”
Dastian grimaces. “Strong opener. Needs finesse.”
A wave smashes the cliff below with a sound like a spine snapping. The air changes. Pressure drops. Every hair on my arms lifts. It’s the same wrong hush I felt when the beast built itself out of my sins.
“Tough shit,” I say and duck around Dreven to run again.
“Let her go,” I hear him say on the wind. “We can’t force her.”
Too fucking right, they can’t. At least someone realises this. Too bad it isn’t the snake, and it would slither off back to where it came from, never to be seen or heard from again.
But that’s the kicker, right?
The snake is somehow the Wraith Crown. And the Wraith Crown needs a wearer. Someone who isn’t a god. And yet I’m being told I am one, just not fully realised yet. These contradictions are making my head spin, and then it all becomes clear, even though it was in front of me the entire time.
To shed your mortal coil.
I have to die to ascend.
I scoff, shaking my head as I pick up pace. “Why wasn’t once enough?” I pant to no one.
Because the universe loves a punchline.
I slow to a jog, but I don’t stop. I am not negotiating with that thing. Not now. Not when it has tripped me up by demanding my mortality. Blood, truth, fear… any of those things would’ve been fine. But no. It wants the one thing I can’t give.
“Are you there?” I pant out loud.
The snake’s voice echoes in my head. Always. You can’t escape me.
“If I give you what you want, how does that make me able to stop the Devourer?”
Silence that isn’t silence answers. Then the thought threads through my bones like wire.
A mortal cannot command the dead. A god cannot wear the leash. Become neither.
“I’m already neither,” I bite out. “Newsflash. Complicated bitch here.”
Not neither. Between. Shed. Moult. One death for the crown. All deaths for the Devourer.
I slow to a walk, lungs burning, eyes stinging from the wind. Moult. Of course the bastard would use snake metaphors.
“What does that even mean?” I ask, glad that the gods have decided to give me my space.
It takes its time answering. Of course it does. Ancient things never use one word when a riddle will do.
The old skin must split, it breathes into my bones. Leave it on the stone. Step out between.
“You want me to… moult my humanity like a snake?” I ask. “Do you hear yourself?”
Silence. Then: Yes.
I roll my eyes, and I stop dead, chest heaving as I place my hands on my knees to catch my breath. The wind skates over my damp skin like knives. “I thought gods couldn’t touch you.”
It chuckles. Most cannot.
“Who can?”
You.
I nod grimly with a sigh. “Of course. Why me?”
I jump when it slithers around my ankle and makes its way up my leg. “You killed Aethel.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
It doesn’t answer me.