Chapter 15
Dreven
Bad doesn’t quite cover this news, and I wish we’d known it before we let Nyssa loose on the innocents of BlackFen Edge.
“What?” she asks, eyes narrowed and definitely pissed off.
“That was meant for me,” I say slowly, gauging her reaction. “The God of Shadows.”
“Meaning?”
“You are now the God of Shadows.”
Her eyebrow goes up, sceptical, of course. “Explain.”
“It braided to you at the seam. Shadow lives in the between. That’s my domain. Your seam is in the in between.”
Nyssa folds her arms. “So the snake crawled into my soul and nicked your job?”
“It isn’t a theft.” I take a step closer, checking the set of her shoulders, the gold burn under her skin that shouldn’t make my teeth ache and yet does.
“It’s inheritance. Aethel’s light woke in you when you died.
The Crown recognised the gap and filled it.
Shadow is the hinge. Radiant and Wraith meet there. You’re holding both ends.”
“Which means what? I still don’t know what any of this means.”
“It means you’re the hinge,” I say, because plain words land faster than prophecy. “Light on one side, Wraith on the other. Shadow in between. You can choose what is seen. You can make two truths sit in the same chair and decide which gets a voice.”
She scowls. “Useful for parties. Less helpful for killing a world-eater.”
“Useful for not getting eaten on the way to it.” I lift my hand, palm up, not touching her.
“Basically, what he is saying is that you are doing what Aethel couldn’t and tried her entire lifetime to do,” Dastian says.
“You became the true Queen of the Gods,” I add quietly.
“Well, fuck,” she sighs. “I didn’t mean to. I don’t want this job. It’s yours, take it.”
I shake my head. “It’s not mine. It’s yours.”
She stares at me like I’ve offered her a dead rat. “Fantastic. Add it to the list of things I didn’t ask for.”
“You never do,” Dastian says, maddeningly fond. “It’s your best trait and your worst weapon.”
Voren is all frost and assessment. “She needs control, not compliments.”
He’s right. The air around her hums, a low-grade siren. It’s faint to mortal ears, deafening to anything older. She is a lighthouse in a storm, and every monster at sea has just seen home.
“Look at me,” I tell her.
She does, chin high. Defiant. Frightened. Divine. My domain ripples under my skin in recognition. It doesn’t kneel; it shows its throat.
“Shadow sits in truth and lie at once,” I say. “It doesn’t snuff the sun. It tells it where to fall.”
“Translation,” she says, voice flinty.
“Fold it.” I touch two fingers to my own sternum. “You. Your light. Your noise. Pull it into the seam. Decide what the room gets to see.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then the Devourer finds you in the next few seconds,” Dastian says, cheerful as arson. “No pressure.”
Nyssa flips him a gesture that would make a priest blush.
“Breathe,” I say.
“I am breathing,” she snaps.
“Not like a person who wants to punch me. Like a queen.” I let a sliver of shadow unfurl from my palm. It doesn’t touch her; it curls through the air like smoke that forgot how to rise. “On my mark. In. Hold. Pull.”
She rolls her eyes. She does it anyway. In. Hold. The light under her skin flares on the inhale, and I feel the exact moment her stubborn brain reaches for the seam.
“Now,” I murmur. “Pull.”
She grimaces, and the hum drops a fraction as a wave of pure destruction washes over the old house.
“It’s here,” Voren murmurs.
Nyssa’s eyes fly open as the dark wave breaks over the house like a black tide at midnight.
The windows don’t rattle; they forget how to exist. The stairs lose their numbers. The air goes grave-cold.
“Fold,” I snarl.
She drags the light inward in panic, on instinct, or in rage. It fights. Radiance wants a stage. Shadow wants a knife.
“Choose,” I bite out, closing the small distance, not touching, my power wrapping her like a circle drawn in soot. “What do we show?”
“Nothing,” she spits.
“Not an option. Lies need a spine.” I split a thread of shadow and feed it to her seam, a clean line between breath and bone. “Pick.”
“Quickly,” Dastian murmurs.
She flares, and the black ripple aims straight for her.
Then she catches herself and shoves the blaze down, halting the Devourer’s progress.
My heart is thudding erratically. We’ve never been this close to the fucking thing.
It’s like walking on a knife-edge with a thousand other knives underneath, ready to slice you to shreds if you fall.
The gold under her skin dims, condenses to a hot knot low in her chest. The hum drops another notch.
The wave hits the walls. The house groans.
I pull the room tight, folding every edge into the same lie: empty, old, boring. The Devourer’s sense skates along it, sniffing. It wants the lighthouse. I hand it a ruin.
Nyssa’s jaw is a hard line. Sweat beads at her temple, and the invisible crown hisses against my senses, braiding tighter through the seam. She’s doing it. She’s choosing.
The light in her pulls in another inch, painful and precise. I feel the click when she sets the rules: damp air, dead house, no feast. Shadow wraps it like lacquer.
The pressure prowls the perimeter. A long, slow scrape of teeth along bone. It pauses over her heart. I don’t breathe. She doesn’t either. It presses, tasting for the flare it knows it felt. I brace the lie tighter, lacquer over rot.
Something old and greedy drags its tongue across the seam in her chest. The crown around her soul hisses through my senses and threads another loop. Nyssa doesn’t flinch. She holds the light exactly where I told her to put it: low, mean, deadly.
A heartbeat. Two. The pressure slides off the walls like oil down slate. It prowls once around the house, slow as a hearse, then drifts toward the lane and thins into the night, not ready to devour this realm.
Dastian exhales an obscenity like a prayer. Voren’s cold eases a fraction.
I don’t let go of the fold. Not yet. “Don’t move,” I murmur.
Another breath. The last scrape fades. The house remembers how to be a ruin again and sags with relief.
“Done,” I say, and loosen the shadow from her, thread by thread.
She sags into the wall, and I catch her wrist. Her pulse jackhammers, then settles under my thumb. Hot, stubborn, alive. The gold in her dims to a banked ember.
Dastian flops back on a half-collapsed chaise and drapes an arm dramatically over his eyes. “That was a near-death experience. Let’s never do it again.”
“You think?” Nyssa murmurs, her face pale. “Was it really here?”
“In part,” I reply. “It wasn’t the real thing, or the realm would be gone, including us.”
It brushed us. If the real thing had crossed the threshold, there’d be nothing left to argue with.
Nyssa swallows, throat working, the ember under her skin steady but mean. “How long before it tries again?”
“Hours,” I say. “Maybe less if you flare.”
“So I don’t flare,” she mutters, pushing off the wall. She wobbles. I catch her elbow. She lets me without complaint. Small victories.
“We need to move out,” I murmur. “The longer you stand here in this realm, the more likely it is to come back and eat it.”
She nods. “Pantheon it is then.”
I nod and move us to the old crypt where the fissure is still active. Nyssa pulls away from me and goes straight to it to bleed on it. She is growing less defensive and more accepting of her role. Only to be handed a bigger role that she neither wants nor knows anything about.
The fissure tastes her blood and opens like a sulk. The split widens with a sound like old bone grinding. The air beyond is black and thin, and it leans toward her like hunger pretending to be a welcome.
“Stay folded,” I murmur.
She nods once. The ember under her skin tightens, banked and mean. Good girl.
We step through.
The world flips its coins and forgets which side is which.
The Pantheon eats sound first, then colour, then the bit of you that insists gravity is a fact.
I bind our breaths together in a thin slip of shadow, so the realm doesn’t try to file us under miscellany.
Dastian flickers to my right, red-gold static gagged by the dark.
Voren is a steady knife of cold at my flank, marching a ribbon of wraith-light ahead one heartbeat before we’d fall into a hole that didn’t exist until we thought about it.
Nyssa moves like she’s memorised the rules and decided to ignore them anyway. The light inside her comes when called and not a blink before, which is the only reason the Devourer isn’t wearing us like a coat.
“This is different,” Nyssa murmurs.
“This is a reflection of the new queen,” I say, looking around at the gloom. She doesn’t need to know just yet that the shadows are winning, mainly because that is precisely what we need from her to keep the Devourer at bay until we are ready to strike.
Then, and only then, will she need to let loose the light to conquer the darkness.