Chapter 24
Nyssa
“It’s dominion. And he won’t ask politely.” Dreven’s cheery response after a few seconds is not great.
“He never did,” Voren adds.
We press on, leaving the gaggle of useless other gods behind us in the fog.
The Pantheon realm feels different now that I know it’s being fattened up for the slaughter.
The architecture looms like ribs in a chest cavity, white marble streaked with veins of black rot.
The ground feels spongy, like it’s thinking about dissolving under my boots.
The snake in my soul tightens, a cold coil of warning. It knows where we are going. It remembers the way even if I don’t.
“Are we there yet?” Dastian asks, kicking a loose stone that turns into a puff of smoke. He’s itching to fight, his chaos magic crackling faintly around his fingertips like static discharge.
“How are we meant to know?” Dreven snaps, as agitated as I’ve ever seen him. He stops abruptly at the mouth of a corridor that looks less like a hallway and more like a tunnel to nowhere. The air here vibrates with that low, subsonic chewing sound we heard before.
“This is it,” I say, grimacing as the sound grates against my skull. “The gap where I shed my skin.”
Voren moves to my side, the temperature dropping until my breath clouds in the gloom. “It’s louder than before.”
“Hungrier,” Dreven corrects. He looks like he wants to punch something, or perhaps everything. His shadows are tight to his body, no longer exploring but armouring him. “The other gods returning has stirred the pot. It knows dinner is being prepared.”
“And I’m the main course,” I mutter.
I step closer to the edge. The bridge I created—that strange, scar-tissue rope woven from my own discarded mortality—spans the void.
It looks fragile against the encroaching dark, a thin line of defiance over a mouth that wants to swallow history.
The pearl glow beyond the gap pulses in time with the chewing, a heartbeat of pure malice.
“Positions,” Dreven says, snapping into general mode. “Dastian, warm the edges but don’t ignite. Voren, bind the anchor points. I will fold the reality so it can’t see the cage until the door shuts.”
“And me?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“You sit on the scar,” Voren says, his voice devoid of its usual mockery. “You shine. You make it want you more than it wants the realm.”
“Right. Be shiny. Don’t get eaten.” I step onto the bridge. It feels slick and wrong under my boots, but it holds. I walk to the centre, sit down cross-legged, and rest my blade across my knees. “Come and have a go,” I whisper to the dark, “if you think you’re hard enough.”
My heart hammers against my ribs, but my hands are steady on the hilt of my blade. Beneath me, the bridge of shed mortality feels slick, like wet leather left out in the rain. It’s disgusting, but it holds.
“Do it,” Dreven orders from the dark.
I take a breath and drop the mental walls I’ve been holding up since we left BlackFen. I stop banking the fire in my chest and shove it outward.
The effect is instant. The golden light I’ve been suffocating flares, turning my skin translucent. I am a beacon in the grey fog, a flare sent up in the middle of the ocean. The heat of it makes the air shimmer, and the snake in my soul uncoils with a hiss of anticipation.
Dastian moves at the periphery, the air growing thick and static-charged as he lines the edges of our trap with chaotic potential.
Voren is a pillar of frost, his magic snapping into place like a steel trap, anchoring the reality we’re about to break.
Dreven weaves the shadows, stitching a lid for a box that doesn’t exist yet.
The chewing sound stops.
Silence slams into the corridor, heavy and absolute. The hair on my arms stands up. The pearl glow in the distance expands. A pressure builds against my eardrums, the kind you feel at the bottom of a deep dive.
“Here we go,” I murmur, tightening my grip on the steel.
Then, the void exhales. A cold, rot-scented wind blasts up from the depths, ruffling my hair. It smells like old graves and forgotten names.
Hello, little slayer, a voice slithers right into the base of my skull. It isn’t the snake. It’s the thing the snake used to serve.
I grip my blade until my knuckles turn white. “Hello, arsehole.”
The laughter that follows scrapes the inside of my skull like rusted wire.
Still so defiant. Still so mortal.
“Come up here and say that to my face,” I challenge with as much venom as I can muster.
The bridge beneath me shudders. The scar tissue of my old life feels slippery, sweating under the proximity of the void. Below, the darkness isn’t empty anymore. It swirls, thick and viscous, rising like floodwater in a blocked drain.
“Hold,” Dreven commands from the shadows. His voice is tight, a wire pulled to snapping point.
I don’t move. I let the gold fire in my chest roar, feeding the beacon. The heat of it is blistering, searing my skin from the inside out. I burn like a lighthouse, and the monster navigates the rocks straight for me.
A shape coalesces in the pearl glow. It’s huge, formless, a shifting mass of teeth and hunger that defies geometry. It doesn’t look like a king. It looks like the end of everything.
I see you, Nyssa Vale, the voice purrs, vibrating through the soles of my boots. You wear my crown. You sit on my throne. You bleed my light.
“I’m keeping it,” I grit out.
The presence surges upward. A limb of pure negation lashes out, aiming for my ankle.
“Now!” Voren roars.
The trap springs. Dastian unleashes chaos, searing the edges of the corridor with white-hot instability. Voren slams the frost-shackles down, freezing the air into iron-hard bars. Dreven drops the ceiling of reality, folding the shadows inward to seal the box.
The impact is deafening. It isn’t a noise, but a pressure wave trying to liquefy my internal organs. The box slams shut. Dreven’s shadows stitch the ceiling to the floor, sealing the void in a pocket of non-existence, while Voren’s frost hardens into a cage that defies physics.
The limb of darkness flails, hitting Voren’s frost bars with a sizzle.
“Get off the bridge!” Dastian yells, his voice distorted by the chaos static rippling through the air.
I don’t need telling twice. The scar-tissue rope beneath me is dissolving, turning into grey slush under the assault of the trapped entity. I scramble backwards, crab-walking on the slick surface as the Devourer realises it’s been had.
It doesn’t like the box. It throws itself against the shadow-lid, bulging the fabric of the realm outward. My light is still blazing, and it wants me. It wants to tear the Crown right out of my soul and eat the leftovers.
A tendril shoots through a microscopic gap in Dastian’s chaos-fire, grabbing for my ankle.
I slash down with my blade. Steel meets shadow. It feels like hitting a brick wall, but the light in the metal burns through. The tendril dissolves against the skin above my boot.
I throw myself onto the solid stone of the corridor floor just as the bridge collapses completely, falling into the cage with the monster. Dreven clenches his fist, and the final shadow-seam snaps tight, sealing the Devourer inside.
I lie on the ground, panting. “That seemed too easy.”
“Too easy?” Dastian croaks.
I look up at him, and he looks frazzled. They all do.
“Yeah,” I say anyway. “Too easy. How do we know we got it all?”
Dreven stares at the seam where the shadow meets the stone. The dark ink of his power looks thin, stretched tight over the containment.
“We don’t,” he admits, his voice rough. “We trapped what came for the light. If it split itself, we caught the hungry part.”
Voren walks to the edge of the seal. He places a hand on the frost-barrier. “It feels heavy. Dense. We definitely caught something significant.”
I stand up, brushing grit from my leggings. My knees shake, but I lock them. “Significant isn’t ‘all’.”
“No, but it’s… significant,” Voren says. He keeps his gaze on the swirling darkness trapped under the ice and shadow.
Dastian shakes his hands out. The sparks are gone. He looks pale. “Well, we bought time. That was the point.”
I look at the box. It vibrates against the soles of my boots. A low hum comes from inside, angry and muffled. The snake in my soul settles down. It feels satisfied, which worries me more than the noise.
“Time to do what?” I ask. “Wait for Tabitha to stab us in the back? Wait for the ex-slayers to rebuild their syphon?”
“Time to fortify,” Dreven says. He turns to me. “You rule here now. You need to make sure this realm obeys you.”
“Delegating?”
“Not delegating,” Voren says, finally turning. His pale blue eyes fix on me. “Dominating. You trapped a god-eater, Nyssa. Act like it.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say. You are a god. I’m just me.”
“Dammit, Nyssa!” Dreven yells at me, making me jump. “When are you going to accept who you are?”
I glare at him. “Never if you keep shouting at me!”
“This has gone on long enough,” he growls. “Accept who you are and not just with words that are meaningless.”
“I have some words for you,” I growl back. “Fuck you.”
I spin on my heel and start walking. I have no idea where to, and I don’t care.
I’m done.