Chapter 16 Nyssa
Nyssa
“Great,” I mutter, kicking a loose stone that dissolves into mist before it skitters anywhere. “So, my inner psyche is basically a wet day in November. Good to know.”
The realm we navigated before is gone, replaced by rolling banks of grey fog and architecture that looks like it was built from solidified gloom. It’s not hostile, exactly, but it’s depressing as hell.
“It’s not just the weather, slayer,” Dastian says, popping up on my left with a grin that’s too bright for the décor. “It’s the vibe.”
“I’m folding the light,” I remind him through gritted teeth. “Remember? The thing keeping us from being eaten?”
“And doing a marvellous job,” Voren says, stepping out of the mist. “But the realm responds to the dominant frequency. Right now, that is Shadow.”
The snake braided into my soul gives a satisfied hiss, vibrating against my vertebrae.
It likes the dark. It feels stronger here, the heavy weight of it less like a burden and more like armour.
My palm throbs, the scar itching, but I keep the golden fire banked deep in my chest, a nuclear reactor running on standby.
“Where are we going?” I ask, trying to peer through the murk. “Because unless the Devourer is hiding in a fog bank, I can’t see anything.”
“Forward,” Dreven says, which is very helpful when forward looks like the inside of a cloud.
Voren tilts his head like he’s listening to static only he likes. “The dead tug left.”
“I vote right,” Dastian says cheerfully. “It smells like trouble.”
“It all smells like trouble,” I mutter, but I stop anyway. The fog presses in, waiting for someone to choose the wrong chapter.
The snake hums along my spine, smug. Between.
“Fine.” I plant my feet and raise my blade. “If shadow is in charge, then the hinge gets a say.” I point the tip into the murk and think the lie I want the world to be. Not safe. Not bright. Just visible.
Nothing happens for a heartbeat. Then the fog parts down the centre like someone drew a blade through silk. Two corridors open, twins that aren’t. One has ribbed vaulting and bone-pale floor. The other is a low, black tunnel that draws the eye.
“Pick,” Dreven says.
“Which one is the Devourer, and which is ‘oops, eternal labyrinth’?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dastian replies.
Voren steps to the bone-bright path and exhales. Frost blooms, clean and sharp. “Wraith-built,” he says. “Remembers law.”
I step to the black slit and feel the pull low in my ribs. Hunger hums back, patient and obscene. “That’s our boy,” I say.
“Left it is, then,” Dastian says, already moving toward the black. “When has ‘no’ ever been fun?”
We take the dark. The fog knits behind us with a quiet, satisfied sound that I hate.
The walls ripple between stone and not-stone, and the air is thin, like we’re walking through a room that forgot how to breathe and is pretending.
My ears pop. The floor isn’t a floor; it’s the idea of one, and it hates me. Each step steals a little balance and gives back a whisper that isn’t quite sound.
“Don’t listen,” Voren murmurs.
“To what?” Dastian asks.
“The thing pretending it’s quiet,” I say, because I hear it now. Chewing. Slow, patient chewing. It’s eating the gap between my heartbeat and the next.
The snake tightens in my bones, a low, satisfied coil. Between.
My blade hums.
The corridor kinks left, then right, then decides it’s done with straight lines.
Shadows haven’t got edges here; they’ve got appetites.
I pull my light in tighter, bank it hot and mean at my sternum.
Dreven’s shoulder brushes mine, not an accident, his power drawing a neat, vicious perimeter round us as if to say mine to the dark, and the dark listens.
“Do you feel that?” I ask.
Voren’s eyes flare pale, the way his power does when he’s reading an autopsy in a wall. “Old fear. Stacked. It feeds on repeats.”
“Like leftovers,” Dastian says.
We hit a widening. Not a room. A pause. The ceiling evaporates into a smear of nothing; the ground thinks about not existing and then decides to try it. The gap that opens is not far. It’s close and long at once, like it wants to be a mouth.
Beyond it, something glows a sickly pearl, pulsing like a baited heart.
“Don’t,” Voren and I say together, because Dastian takes one step like he’s going to see what happens if he falls.
He smirks and steps back. “Rude.”
A shape peels itself off the opposite wall. It’s me. Not a mirror. Not a neat twin. It’s me if I hadn’t died. No gold under the skin. No snake whispering between. Slayer, pure and mortal, blade up and mouth set. She looks at me with a stubborn disgust.
“Oh, that’s charming,” I mutter. “This place has a sense of humour.”
Dreven’s shadows tense like wolves. “It’s not humour. It’s leverage.”
Voren listens to her with those cold eyes that don’t blink when they should. “She’s not alive.”
“I am,” Not-Me says, and her voice is mine. Better. Cleaner. “You’re the ghost.”
I bark a laugh that doesn’t sound friendly. “Get in line.”
She points her blade at the gap. “Cross.”
“That requires a bridge.” I raise a brow at Voren, who obliges with a ribbon of wraith-light.
It touches the gap and recoils like he tried to pet a furnace.
“Hungry,” he says. “It wants a toll.”
“What do we give it?” Dastian asks, peering into the mouth-not-mouth. “Upgrade to Premium?”
“Light,” Not-Me says, too fast. “Give it the noise.”
“No,” Dreven and Voren growl together.
The Devourer hum purrs underfoot. It heard that. It liked it.
“Try again,” I tell my neat little pre-dead version. “What does it actually need?”
Her mouth sets in the line that means she’s about to start lecturing me on proper slayer conduct. “You give it the thing you shouldn’t. You give it you.”
“Hard pass,” I say, because apparently today’s theme is ‘self-sacrifice, again.’
The gap purrs, pleased by the idea of me making terrible choices.
“It feeds on repeats,” Voren murmurs, eyes on the dark mouth. “Patterns. History done again.”
“Then we break the pattern,” Dastian says, bright with mischief. “Or fake it. I can do fake. I am fake’s patron saint.”
Not-Me doesn’t blink. “You’ve made everything complicated. You dragged gods into our bed. You forgot what we are.” She tilts her chin at the gap. “Give it back. Cross clean.”
“I don’t do clean,” I say, stepping toward her. Up close, she smells like oilstones and chapel floors. I hate her a bit for how simple she is. I love her a bit for the same thing. “And you’re not me. You’re the bit that thinks if I make my bed square enough, I won’t bleed on it.”
Her mouth twitches. Insult lands. Truth lands harder.
Dreven’s shadow curls around my ankles in a warning I don’t need. “Choose your currency,” he says quietly. “Not theirs.”
I stare at my cleaner, sadder self and pick my currency.
“Keep your lecture,” I tell her. “I’m done paying in me.”
I turn to my gods. “I want a lie with bones.”
Dreven’s mouth curves like I’ve just suggested arson. “Spine coming up.”
“Salt it with endings,” I say to Voren.
He nods once. “I’ll lace it enough to taste true.”
I jab a finger at Dastian. “And you? Crisp the edges. Not fireworks. Heat.”
He grins. “Disrespectful. I like it.”
I plant my feet over the mouth-not-mouth, lift my blade, and nick the inside of my forearm. Not deep. Enough for the light to flare under my skin in a hot pulse. It wants the stage; I give it a slit curtain. “You want an old skin?” I say to the hungry gap. “Have at it.”
Dreven lays shadow along my cut, thin and sharp as a scribe’s line, partitioning the light from the blood.
Voren threads a wraith-filament through that seam, cold biting clean.
Dastian warms it, just enough to set it, no theatrics.
Between the three of them and the hinge of me, a thing curls out of my arm.
It’s not flesh. It’s not light. It’s the layer I peeled off in small, obedient strips for years—the bit that flinched, the bit that saluted, the bit that thought dying neat was better than living messy. It sloughs into my palm like a translucent glove.
Not-Me goes still. “Don’t,” she warns, like she has a say.
“Watch me.”
I hold the moulting over the gap. It leans up like a dog for a treat. “Take this,” I tell it, voice flat. “Not my life. Not my light. My leash.”
The mouth opens without opening. I drop the shed skin.
The gap chews, slow and greedy. The corridor shudders, then goes quiet in that way that means something awful is happy. A strip of bridge knits itself from the edges: not wraith-light, not shadow, but a tight rope of both, lacquered in heat. It looks like a scar.
“Cross,” Not-Me says again, but it lacks bite now. She looks smaller. Mortal. Honest. I almost pity her.
“Keep the blade sharp,” I tell her, because I can be generous when it costs me nothing. Then I put my foot on the scar.
It holds.
Dreven ghosts at my shoulder, shadows hemming the line so the realm can’t rethink it. Voren follows, frost threading along the underside to keep the chew instinct from waking back up. Dastian brings a low hum that tells the bridge to stop being dramatic and just exist.
We move. The gap breathes under us like a throat swallowing. I don’t look down. I keep my eyes on the sick pearl glow beyond, on the steady pulse like a metronome.