Chapter 42 Nyssa
Nyssa
Ihave never felt pain like it.
It tears up my arm in a straight line, a hard drill under the skin, into the elbow, shoulder, spine. Every muscle jolts. My jaw locks. I force the channel narrow. I don’t give him space to spread. He hits my chest and slams against the seam of the Crown.
He scrapes for my throat, my eyes, the base of my skull. I clamp shadow across every exit and run light straight down the centre like a rod. Death sits at the exit point, steady and ready.
“Deeper,” I grind out. “If you want me, take me.”
He drives. The brand I set at the mound bites and drags. He hits it. It takes. He tries to shear off and fails. He is inside the mark, and he knows it.
The spear throbs in my palm. It feels like pressure trying to turn my bones to grit. My shoulder shakes. I lock my elbow and pull him higher into my chest, up to the knot he thinks I can’t reach. He resists. I use the brand like a hook and bring him in.
I’m shaking uncontrollably, and the gods around me are frantic, but they can’t touch me.
Sparks of death are flying all around me.
I force the knot up into my chest. It scrapes along the brand like wire dragged through a ring.
It resists. I pull harder. The Crown bites and gives me leverage.
I hear Dreven say my name like a warning and a prayer.
“More. Stop edging. Take all of me.”
It wants to. That’s the flaw. Want makes it predictable. It commits. The spear thickens and turns into a bar I can feel along my sternum. The brand locks. He is in the seat I built.
He pours in a hard line. No flood. No fog. Just that single thread I defined. The chamber groans. The floor rings. Dastian throws the rebound along his channels in bright lines that die on command. Voren’s net tightens to a singing wire.
I open the route behind the brand and drag.
The rest of him tries to stay outside. I take the choice away.
The hook bites deeper. The seam at the wall narrows to the width of a nail.
The rope snarls. I make it straight. The pressure changes in a way that means he understands there is no more testing. He pulls to leave.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I grit out, my jaw clenched so tight I think I crack a tooth.
I keep him pinned inside me. He realises his mistake and tries to flee, but there is nowhere to go. The Crown inside me recognises him and holds him there.
“Good… snakey…”
“Nyssa!” Dreven shouts, trying to use his shadows to block the worst of the death sparks.
I lock gazes with him through the flashes of light.
This is it for me.
If I make it back, then I believe who I truly am.
If I don’t… it doesn’t matter anyway.
“Do it,” I whisper and see the flash of pain as he hears me over the clash of magic.
Dreven moves.
Cold impact.
A perfect, clean line of a shadow blade straight through my sternum.
The world snaps to a pin. Sound folds.
I see the knot clearly now. No fog. No mass. Just the core I forced him to be, bound by my brand, pinned to the circle, to the Crown, to the cut in the stone. It writhes. It cannot spread. It cannot hide. It is exactly the size I said it was.
It shrieks so loudly, but I’m too far gone to wince. My head hits the stone as my body convulses, feeling every second of the agonising death.
Silence takes me.
Not absence. A still place. No weight, no water, no body. The Crown is a steady point in the middle of nothing, and the brand I hammered into him is a bright hook I can see even now. The knot writhes on it, small and ugly, trying to pretend it is something else.
A thread touches my wrist. Voren. Cold and certain. He doesn’t drag. He waits.
“I have you,” he says, not with sound. With authority.
It tries to lunge for me, to ride me out, but death doesn’t play by his rules. This is my tide. The chamber is a memory now, but the law I wrote there sits inside this space like a ring of iron. The brand binds to it. He pulls; the hook bites. He screams.
I bring light up inside the grey. Not brightness. Definition. I show myself the lines. His centre. The twist he uses to hold himself together. Shadow closes the gaps. Death sharpens. All the pieces I kept in balance for the Judge click.
I twitch and feel death descend. My eyes close, and I let it come. It’s the only way. Fighting it will let the Devourer live, and that is not an option.
I let go.
Darkness creeps in at the edges, gripping me in its coldness.
“Nyssa,” Voren’s voice is steady. “I’ve got you.”
I know.
I can feel his presence wrapped around my soul as it leaves my body.
It is not a gentle drift. It is a tear. One second, I am agony and stone, the next I am clarity and cold.
The physical world drops away, leaving only the grey stillness of the veil.
Voren stands right beside me. He does not look like a man anymore; he looks like a fundamental law of the universe wearing a stylish coat.
He grips my arm, grounding me before the pull of the afterlife can drag me off course.
I look down. My body lies crumpled on the floor of the underwater chamber. Dreven stands over it, his shadow blade dripping with my blood. He doesn’t move. Dastian stares down at me, red sparks jumping from his skin to the wet stone. They guard the empty shell.
The Devourer screams. It is a vibration that shakes the grey space around us. He tries to detach from my dying cells, desperate to flee before the final severing. He thinks death is an exit. He thinks the vessel breaking frees him.
He is wrong.
The brand I hammered into his core holds fast. It glows white-hot in this dim place, a chain linking his essence to mine. He pulls, but the hook drags him with me. I am not leaving him behind.
With a blinding flash of light and an inhuman scream, the chamber goes silent and dark.
He’s gone.
I float next to Voren, waiting. Waiting to be pulled back into my body so I can resurrect for the third and hopefully, final time.
I look down through the veil. Dreven drops to his knees on the wet stone.
He presses his hand over the wound, shadows pulsing into the dead flesh, trying to bridge the gap.
Dastian doesn’t move. He stares at my face, his hands shaking.
They are waiting for the gasp. The sudden intake of breath that signals the slayer refuses to stay dead.
I wait for it too.
Minutes pass. The silence in the grey space grows heavy.
“Voren,” I say, looking at the Wraith god. “Why aren’t I falling?”
“You will,” he says with a soft smile. “Be patient.”
“Do you know me?” I mutter in response.
But I wait. The Devourer is gone from my body, gone from this world, but it looks like I have as well.
“You,” a voice echoes around me, and I turn as Voren steps in front of me.
“Hands off,” he warns.
“I am not here to harm her. I’m here to thank her.”
I peek out from behind Voren’s massive body and see a tall, regal man, floating like a wraith in the wind.
“Wraith King?”
“Vestihe,” he replies. “My name is Vestihe.”
I nod. “You’re welcome,” I say, floating fully out from behind Voren. Vestihe looks like Dreven around the jaw, but his eyes hold the same endless grey as the realm we currently occupy. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have a resurrection appointment to keep. I’m running late.”
Vestihe nods. He keeps a respectful distance from Voren, who radiates enough territorial aggression to frighten a lesser spirit. “The Devourer is ended. You severed the hunger from the void. That is no small feat. You did what we could not.”
“I aim to please,” I mutter. I look down through the shifting mist of the veil. Dreven remains on his knees in the flooded chamber. He grips my lifeless hand so hard his knuckles turn white. Panic flares, cold and sharp. “Voren, why isn’t it happening? Why am I still here?”
Voren tightens his grip on my spectral arm. “The tear was deep, Nyssa. The brand took a significant portion of your essence with it when it snapped.”
“I don’t have time for deep tears,” I snap. “Look at him.”
Dreven bows his head until it rests against my chest. He thinks he failed. He thinks he just murdered me for nothing.
Vestihe follows my gaze. “He mourns.”
“It’s a waste of time,” I counter. “Put me back.”
“I can’t,” Voren says softly. “You must pull yourself back. The anchor belongs to you.”
“Pull myself back. Right. Because everything requires manual labour today.” I glare at Voren, but he offers no help. He just stands there, looking infuriatingly calm while my body grows cold on the floor.
Vestihe drifts back, giving me space. At least the dead know when to step aside.
I look down. The water around the chamber is still, but the shadows around Dreven thrash. He thinks he destroyed me. He thinks he followed an order that cost him everything. The sight of his despair hits harder than the shadow blade did.
“I’m coming,” I whisper, though sound doesn’t carry across the divide.
I focus on the sensation of the Crown. Usually, it burns. Now, it is just a dull ache, a phantom limb I can’t quite flex. I reach for that spark, the stubborn refusal to quit that defines every slayer before me.
It resists. The Veil pushes against me, heavy and solid.
“Harder,” Voren advises.
“Shut up,” I snap.
I grab the invisible line connecting my spirit to that battered shell on the stone floor. I don’t ask. I don’t plead. I demand.
Mine.
The grey space jolts. Below, Dastian’s head snaps up. He feels the static. Dreven stays frozen, afraid to hope.
I grit my teeth and haul on the connection with every ounce of will I possess. The grey blurs. Gravity grabs my ankles and yanks.