Chapter 12
Nyssa
Istart walking again back to BlackFen Edge, even as the snake hooks itself around my wrist and slithers up my arm.
“Even if you hadn’t, it would still be you. Only you would simply be a mortal with extraordinary power,” it says eventually.
“And why is that so secretive that you had to wait five minutes to tell me?”
If snakes could shrug… yeah.
“Look, snakey, is wearing you my destiny? No bullshit, no pauses, no mysterious arseholing riddles. Straight up. Can you do that?”
“The Wraith Crown is your destiny.”
“Well, it doesn’t come much plainer than that, now, does it?” I mutter.
“Killing Aethel simply accelerated the timeline. Both yours and the Devourers.”
“Your former boss, you mean.”
“If you wish.”
“I don’t wish! I don’t wish any of this! I’m a slayer. Not a goddess, not some Devourer killer.”
“A slayer kills those who threaten humanity.”
I grimace. “Okay, smart arse. I hear you.”
Silence.
The sea has gone wrong. The waves don’t smash so much as count. One, two, three. Pause. One, two, three.
“What is happening?” I murmur.
“Tidewraith,” Dreven’s voice replies, appearing next to me. “Sorry to disturb your need for solitude, slayer, but you are needed.”
“Just as things were getting interesting,” I mutter.
“The Harbinger,” the snake hisses and curls up on top of my head.
“Harbinger?” I snap, causing Dreven to tilt his head.
“Tidewraiths appear only when there is something larger coming.”
“You mean the Devourer,” I gulp.
“Not here. Not yet.”
“What is it saying?” Dreven asks, gesturing to the top of my head.
“You can see it?”
He nods.
“It says Tidewraiths are Harbingers. They only appear when something larger is coming.”
Dastian sprints past us, with Voren hot on his heels, making me frown. “Move it or lose it, slayer! Our powers have vanished, and we are about to become part of the ocean.”
“What?” I croak as Dreven frowns and holds out his hand.
His face says it all. “Move!”
He lunges for me, gripping my arm tightly as he hauls us after the other gods.
Dreven yanks me into a dead sprint. The cliff path is a slit of mud and gorse; the wind shoves at my back like it’s helping propel me away from the rising wave. Ahead, Dastian and Voren are running like mortals—no gliding, no vanishing, no smug. It’s wrong enough to make my skin crawl.
The sea counts. One, two, three. Pause. One, two—
It hits.
A wall of bone-cold brine crashes over the headland, dragging, grasping, screaming without sound.
Dastian throws his hand out on reflex. Nothing happens. His expression goes from cocky to human in a single heartbeat. “Oh, that’s rude.”
Voren reaches for the cold and gets… air. He looks almost insulted. Dreven tries to fold shadow, and the wind laughs in his face.
“Behind me!” I bark, because instincts don’t vanish when magic does. I shove them towards a dip in the ground where the foundation ridge cuts a shallow trench. Not much, but it’s a line. The wave rears at least ten feet high.
The snake tightens around my skull. Between. Command.
“On what power?” I snap, planting my feet. My blade feels like the only honest thing left in Ireland. The ruins hum, even from this distance. My palm burns like I stole fire.
The snake’s scales tighten against my scalp. “Light,” it hisses, its forked tongue flickering against my ear.
“Oh, that’s extremely helpful,” I grit out.
My blade whistles through the salt-heavy air as I slash at the towering wall of water.
The wave looms twenty feet high now, a sheer black mountain curling over me, blocking out the sky.
Foam spits from its crest. I’m about to drown in this thing, but maybe that’s the idea. Drown, not die.
I lower my arm, feeling the weight of the blade swing loosely in my hand, water already soaking through my boots and jeans, tugging at my ankles.
“What are you doing?” Dastian’s voice verges on the edge of absolute annihilation—if only he had his powers.
“Hoping one of you knows CPR,” I manage to get out before the wave crashes over me with all the force of the ocean. The cold is shocking, paralysing. My lungs seize as I’m yanked forwards, my body nothing but a rag doll in the merciless grip of the current dragging me out to sea.
I fight the instinct to struggle to the surface, to breathe. I close my eyes and let it take me.
Why? Why am I doing this again?
Because it’s the only way.
You shut the fuck up.
The snake chuckles again. It’s creepy, it’s distracting.
Ascend! It suddenly shouts in my head so loud, I convulse in the freezing water.
I have no choice. There is no way out for me. It’s drown and ascend or fight in a futile attempt to get myself out of this ridiculous situation I threw myself into.
Cold eats thought first. Sound goes next. The counting wave becomes a single, endless note, and I let it take me because I am tired of bargaining with air.
Everything slows.
The snake tightens around my skull. A prick at the base of my neck—two bright stings punch through a vein. Heat floods down my spine in a ribbon, then flips cold at my sternum, ice on fire on bone.
I don’t move. I let myself drown.
It’s not pretty. It’s not divine. It’s me peeling something stubborn off something raw.
The snake laughs in my bones, becomes part of my blood, my soul, as consciousness slips away for the second time in two days.