Chapter 27
Dreven
Pissed doesn’t even begin to cover how she makes me feel.
She walked away from me, shrouded me in fog and then vanished.
So did the other two fuckers. Although I can hardly blame them.
This is all Nyssa. It smells like her shampoo.
It is a petty touch. A reminder that she exists everywhere in this mist. I reach out and close my hand around the fog.
It feels cold and damp against my palm. She walled me out.
I stand still and let my shadows extend into the floor. If I cannot walk through her wall, I will slide under it.
“Show me the cracks,” I command the darkness beneath the obsidian.
The shadows jitter. They don’t obey. They vibrate against the stone. Her authority overrides mine here. She holds the command. It irritates me at the same time I feel a sense of pride in her. If she would only accept who she is. What she is.
“Too stubborn,” I mutter.
I start walking. If the realm reacts to intent, then I am feeding the barrier.
I stop and force my shadows to retract, pulling them back under my skin until I am nothing but a man standing in a grey void. It goes against every instinct I possess. I want to tear this construct apart until I find her, but that desire is exactly what keeps me trapped.
Nyssa wants space. She wants to be alone. If I chase her, the realm interprets me as an intruder and thickens the walls.
I turn my back on the direction I feel she went.
The grey mist shudders. It thins, revealing a patch of black floor ahead.
“Finally,” I mutter.
I take a step, and the fog parts further. A figure sits on the ground a few metres away, weeping into a puddle of their own making.
“Pool,” I say, stepping closer. “Get up.”
The goddess of Water looks up, eyes rimmed with red. “It’s endless. There is no way out.”
“There is always a way out. You just lack the spine to find it.”
I grab Pool by the arm and haul her to her feet. She is damp and trembling.
“Walk,” I order. “Don’t think about the Queen. Think about anything else.”
She sniffs but obeys. We walk. The fog retreats. Nyssa’s anger is a formidable thing, but my patience is older. There has to be a way to find her without thinking about her.
We walk in silence. Pool sniffs every few seconds. It irritates me, but I stay silent, trying not to think about Nyssa.
The fog hates my indifference. It tries to throw images of Nyssa at me, but I push them away and turn adjacent at random to where it is trying to make me go.
“You are a fucking arsehole,” I grit out.
“Hey,” Pool snaps. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Not you,” I groan, shaking my head.
“What is going on here?” she asks after a beat. “Why were we called back? Why is there a new Wraith Queen? Why is there a new goddess of the realm? Who is she, really, this slayer? Why are we walking around in this fog?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Why are you asking so many questions?”
“I want to know what is going on.”
Okay, well, that’s fair, I suppose.
From the top. “Aethel is dead,” I state, keeping my strides long and purposeful. “She finally managed to get herself killed, leaving the throne empty.”
Pool gasps, nearly tripping over her own feet. “But she was...”
“Tyrannical? Yes. Immortal? Clearly not.” I step over a fracture in the obsidian floor. “The slayer, Nyssa Vale, killed her. But instead of just ending the reign, it… passed on. She was chosen by the Radiant power. To add to that, the Wraith Crown chose her. It braided itself into her soul.”
“This is crazy,” Pool whispers, hurrying to keep up with me.
“Quite. Now she holds the light and the shadow. She is the true ruler of the Pantheon.” I glance at the grey mist swirling to my left. It looks less dense now, responding to my detachment. “With Aethel gone, the Devourer saw an opportunity to finally complete its mission to consume the universe.”
“And us?”
“You are necessary,” I state flatly. “It called you back because this realm is incomplete without you. More will return if they answer the call. In the meantime, I believe we are safe from consumption.”
She stops dead. I grab her arm and yank her forward before the fog can solidify around her again.
“Keep moving,” I snap.
“So we are just... food?”
“That’s one way to look at it. Unless Nyssa wins. If she masters the powers she is denying, she rules. If she fails, we all get eaten.”
Pool looks horrified. Good. Fear motivates where logic fails.
“Then we must find her,” she says, actually picking up the pace.
“No!” I roar as the fog turns to a solid wall of spite. “Dammit, Pool!” I punch the wall, but it doesn’t shift.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I forgot.”
I rein in my temper. “It’s fine. Who else is here apart from Fire, Air, Lust and Ambivalence?”
“Earth,” she replies, wringing her hands until her knuckles turn white. “And Despair. He was weeping near the entrance when we arrived.”
“Of course he was,” I mutter. Despair is useless in a fight, but Earth has uses. If we survive this.
I grab Pool’s upper arm and physically turn her away from the solid wall of fog she summoned. “Forget them. Forget Nyssa. Look at your feet. One step, then another.”
“But where are we going?”
“Let me concentrate,” I grit out and march in a zig-zag pattern that I will kill Nyssa for making me look like an idiot when I find her.
My shoulders sag. I can’t stop thinking about her. Even when she makes me so fucking angry. She is… everything.
I stop, and Pool stops next to me, staring up at me in hope. She sees me as the leader, and I was supposed to be. Having that taken away is baggage I haven’t unpacked yet. Not that I resent Nyssa. Not at all. But I spent five hundred years working towards one goal.
And now that goal is gone.
It has left me a bit at loose ends.
I close my eyes and then sigh. “Despair, do show your face and stop making me this maudlin creature with no hope.”
A patch of grey separates itself from the rest of the gloom and solidifies into a figure. Despair looks exactly as I remember him: pale, draped in robes that look like they haven’t seen an iron in half a millennium, and wearing an expression that suggests he just lost the will to live.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he mumbles, staring at his knees.
“No one accused you of hiding. Your aura is leaking. Pull it in.”
He sighs, a long, rattling sound that makes Pool flinch. “What’s the point? We’re stuck in a grey, foggy maze.”
“The point,” I snap, looming over him until he shrinks back into his oversized robes, “is that I refuse to end my existence in a cloud because you cannot regulate your own mood.”
I grab Despair by the scruff of his neck. He feels cold and damp, like a wet sponge left in a sink. “Walk. And stop projecting. You are making the walls thicker.”
He stumbles forward, dragging his feet. “It’s just so heavy.”
“It is heavy because you are holding onto it. Drop it.”
Pool hurries to my other side, looking between the miserable god and me with wide eyes. “What do we do now?”
“We walk away from what we want. We ignore the Queen. We ignore the trap. We focus on the exit.”
I set a pace that forces Despair to jog or be dragged.
He chooses to jog, though he complains with every breath.
The fog swirls, dense and grey, feeding off his misery.
It tries to solidify into a barrier, sensing the lack of hope, but I push back with cold, hard arrogance.
I simply refuse to believe I am trapped.
My refusal works better than hope. The grey thins, shredding into wisps rather than walls. The ground beneath us turns from obsidian to the cracked stone of the original entry point. “We are close,” I state and keep going.