Chapter 25
Dastian
“Well done you,” I drawl, watching Nyssa stalk off into the darkness.
“Nyssa!” he roars, fully unhinged now as he storms after her.
Voren and I remain where we are, staring at each other. “He is a real idiot sometimes.”
“Sometimes?” Voren remarks with an eyeroll. “He is more like his fucking father than he thinks.”
“And his mother,” I add under my breath, a throwback from when Aethel had ears everywhere and took it upon herself to cull free speech when it was about her. Tyranny doesn’t really cover her reign.
“Dreven is terrified,” he states simply.
“He’s a control freak losing control,” I correct. “Nyssa isn’t a shadow he can direct. She’s the sun, and he’s afraid he’ll burn.”
“He pushes too hard.”
“He does. And she pushes back harder.”
“For now,” Voren says. He starts walking in the direction the others went. “We should ensure they haven’t destroyed the rest of the realm.”
“Or each other,” I mutter, jogging to catch up. “My money is on Nyssa.”
We walk in silence for a few moments, and then we both stop and look around. “Where did they go?”
The corridor doesn’t just end; it simply stops existing. One second, there is a path of marble and shadow; the next, there is a wall of impenetrable grey fog that looks like it would hold a grudge if I poked it.
“She’s slammed the door,” I say, staring at the nothingness. “Metaphorically speaking.”
Voren reaches out, his hand hovering inches from the mist. Frost blooms in the air, but the fog doesn’t retreat. It swallows the cold without flinching. “She is asserting control,” he states, his voice flat. “She wanted to be alone. The realm obeyed.”
“She wanted to be away from Dreven,” I say, turning to the left, but there is nothing there. “So where did he go? Did he end up in the same place as her?”
“Or did she send him somewhere else?”
“Good point,” I mutter, turning back to him, only to find a wall of fog instead. I sigh, eyes closed before opening them again with great effort. “I’m starting to feel like Nyssa. Fuck this.”
I poke the wall of grey. It yields slightly under my finger, dense and cold, then springs back into place.
“Voren?” I call out.
The silence is heavy. It presses against my eardrums. I spin in a circle, but the world is just a grey sphere now.
“Right,” I mutter. “Solitary confinement. My favourite.”
I conjure a sphere of chaotic energy in my palm. The red-gold sparks hiss, hungry for something to destabilise. I toss it casually at the barrier. Instead of blowing a hole through the mist, the energy sizzles and vanishes. The fog simply eats it.
“Okay,” I say, lowering my hand. “She blocked a god. That’s new.”
I start walking. Directions are useless here, but standing still makes me itch. The floor is smooth obsidian, reflecting nothing.
Dreven pushed her. He always pushes. He thinks control is the only way to survive. He forgets that Nyssa hates control. Now she has separated us with a thought.
I keep my pace steady, searching for a flaw in the construct. If Nyssa created this isolation to get space, there must be a way to break it. I am Chaos. I find the cracks. That is my nature.
A ripple disturbs the grey to my left. It isn’t Voren or Dreven. It’s a flicker of movement, low to the ground.
I summon a blade of crackling energy.
The fog parts.
It isn’t a monster.
It’s the God of Ambivalence, crouched on the obsidian floor like a toad.
“What are you doing down there?”
He looks up, eyes shifting from grey to beige. “Existing. Waiting. It seemed safer than standing up.”
“Where is everyone else?”
He shrugs. One shoulder goes up, then the other, then he gives up halfway through. “Gone. The Queen wanted silence. She made walls.”
“I noticed,” I mutter, glancing at the impenetrable mist. “How do I get to her?”
“You don’t. She is the realm now. Or the realm is her. It’s unclear.” He picks at a loose thread on his jumper. “She is very angry.”
“She is,” I agree. “Dreven has a talent for inciting that. Can you traverse this?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
I groan. Talking to him drains my patience faster than a syphon net. “Useful as ever. Look, if she walled us off, she walled off the Devourer’s prison too. I need to make sure she didn’t accidentally lock herself in a room with a view of the void.”
Ambivalence points a trembling finger into the grey. “She went that way. Or perhaps that way. The geometry is... emotional.”
“Emotional geometry,” I scoff. “Fantastic. Just what I need.”
I step past him. If Nyssa constructs walls based on anger, then I simply need to be more irritating than the fog. I shove a pulse of pure disorder into the mist. It doesn’t break, but it shudders.
“It hates that,” I say, watching the grey shudder.
Ambivalence covers his head with his arms. “Please stop. You’ll make it worse.”
“Worse is the goal,” I reply. “Order keeps walls standing. Chaos knocks them down.”
I gather more power and then stop with a grimace. Order. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, witch.”
Nothing happens for a solid ten seconds, which is nine seconds too long for my liking. Then, the grey soup to my right splits with the precision of a scalpel. Tabitha steps through, adjusting her cuffs like she hasn’t just been hiding in the metaphysical woodwork.
“You rang?” she asks, voice dry.
“Took you long enough,” I snap, dropping the chaos flare.
Tabitha glances at Ambivalence, who is currently trying to merge with the floor tiles. She ignores him and turns her clinical gaze to the wall of fog. “She is exercising divine will fuelled by rage.”
“Why are you lurking in the walls of the Pantheon Realm?” I ask, eyes narrowed, trusting her even less than I did before I suspected she was possessed by the Devourer.
“Someone has to bring order to your absolutely horrendous brand of chaos. And I don’t mean just you, but all four of you. Together you…” She waggles her fingers. “… rile each other up.”
“And?” I press, stepping into her personal space. She doesn’t flinch. She never does. It makes me want to set her coat on fire just to see if she screams.
She glares at me and pushes me back slowly. “I am not your enemy, Chaos.”
“No? I get the feeling that you are not all you appear to be.”
“Meaning?” she snaps.
“Meaning you are attempting to get close to Nyssa. You followed her here. Why?”
“We’ve been over this. I don’t want to be devoured. Do you? Won’t you stop at nothing to prevent it?”
“Are you possessed?” I ask bluntly, growing bored with these games.
She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t flinch. She just stares at me with that infuriatingly blank expression that makes me want to unravel her knitting.
“That is a crude question, even for you,” she replies, smoothing her sleeve. “If I were possessed by an entity that consumes worlds, do you think I would still be standing here arguing with a god who behaves like a toddler?”
“Maybe,” I say, stepping closer until I invade her personal space completely. “The Devourer learns. Maybe it learned that being boring is the best camouflage.”
I reach out, not to strangle her this time, but to test. I place my palm flat against her chest. She stiffens, but she doesn’t retreat. I push a pulse of chaos into her—just a little jolt, enough to rattle a soul.
If she is the void, she will drink it. If she is Tabitha, she will hate it.
Her eyes flash. A barrier of pure, rigid order snaps into place against my skin, shoving my hand away with a force that jars my shoulder.
“Do not touch me,” she hisses.
I shake my hand out. “Solid. Rigid. Definitely Order.”
“Are you quite finished?” she asks, adjusting her coat.
“For now.” I glance at Ambivalence, who is currently hugging his knees.
“So, if you aren’t the bad guy, help me get to Nyssa.
If she has separated herself from Dreven and us, she is in danger.
She won’t accept who she is, so her true power lies dormant.
She won’t be able to access it if something goes wrong. ”
Tabitha stares at the grey barrier. “She is rejecting control,” she states. “We cannot use force. We must align with the intent.”
“Align with rage?” I ask. “That is my speciality.”
“No. Align with the need for solitude.” She clasps her hands. A geometric pattern glows blue in the air before her. It presses against the fog. It does not break the mist; it slides into the texture of it.
The grey parts. It opens a corridor.
“After you,” she says.
“In your dreams,” I say with an eyeroll. “Ladies first.”
She smiles wickedly and steps through.
I follow. The ground is solid here. The air feels thin against my skin. Ambivalence scuttles after us, keeping his head down and muttering about the structural integrity of emotional constructs.
We walk for a few minutes, but it’s a path to nowhere.
“Okay, this is getting frustrating,” I muse when we walk past the same dent in the fog wall for the second time. “We are repeating the same course. Your geometry is broken.” I stop dead.
Tabitha frowns at the glowing blue lines fading into the mist. “It is precise. The variable is the environment.”
“The variable is a slayer who hates being told what to do,” I correct. “You tried to use logic on a refusal. That never works.”
Ambivalence sighs, sitting on the floor again. “Maybe we should just stay here. It is consistent.”
“Get up, Melvin,” I snap. I look at the grey wall. It is smooth, featureless, and incredibly boring. Nyssa isn’t boring. This isn’t her; this is her barrier. And barriers are meant to be breached.
“She keeps walking away,” Tabitha says. “The path loops because she is rejecting arrival.”
“She is trying to get out. We need to find the way out and wait for her to find it. Either that or we will be in this loop forever,” Melvin pipes up.
“Melvin,” I say, staring at the beige lump of a god. “That is the most sensible thing anyone has said all night. It’s disgusting.”
Tabitha purses her lips. “He is correct. If she is rejecting arrival, she is seeking departure.”
“Exactly. We stop chasing the girl. We chase the door.” I turn my back on the looping path. The fog swirls, thick and stubborn. It expects us to walk forward. I decide to walk sideways.
“What are you doing?” Tabitha demands as I step off the obsidian path and straight into the grey soup.
“Breaking the narrative,” I reply. “Coming?”
I don’t wait for an answer. The chaos inside me purrs. The fog hates the lack of structure. It tries to push me back onto the path, but I push back with sheer, unadulterated nonsense. I project the feeling of being late for a reckoning with Aethel—pure, frantic desire to be elsewhere.
The grey thins. The obsidian floor cracks, revealing jagged stone beneath.
“It’s working,” Melvin squeaks from right behind me.
“Of course it is.” I grin at the shifting mist. “Nyssa wants space. I’m giving her the biggest exit sign in the realm.”
A shape looms ahead. Not a wall. A fissure. The same one we came through, or a reflection of it. “Oh, look,” I say with a smile. “We found it.”