“No. What has always set you apart from the very beginning is your heart. The kindness you push to the forefront so easily. The way you care for others. Those are not weaknesses; they are strengths. Give some of that to yourself. You deserve—”
“Nothing. I deservenothing. Hasn’t that been proven? Over and over again!” I bitterly seethe. “Every time I have thoughtthat way, it has always resulted in something bad. If I was so strong, I would have been able to defend myself against a maniacal king. If I was so strong, I would have been able to heal Alexi in time.” Tears drip off of my cheeks and down into the darkness below me as I bunch my hands into fists, frustration darkening my vision. “If I was sostrong, I would have been able to save Bella! I—I would have guarded my heart. I would have let the ice that encompassed it become impenetrable so that I could never know what it is to love someone so profoundly that a betrayal from them feels like I’m being cleaved in two!”
My screams somehow echo out, despite being surrounded by only space, and I feel my magic come to a sharpened point. Looking down at my hands, I watch as glittering black gathers on top of my palms to form what looks like daggers. It calls to me—a dark song, ancient and powerful, beckoning me to flood this magic out into the world and silence it all. Like being lost in the onyx chasms of my mind, I feel nothing and no one as I begin to let that darkness seep from me.
I’m walking a path of solitude, and with each step I take, I feel what it is to be fueled by nothing but anger. And pain. And a sadness so intense it blankets my tongue with its acerbic taste.
You aren’t alone anymore.
His voice comes to me unbidden, and my steps falter.
Let me help you.
My body trembles as Ifeelhim here with me. His warmth and his scent and the way his hands gently cup my face.
There is only you.
A sob rips from my throat as I fall to my knees, the obsidian daggers dissolving into shadows waiting for my command as they writhe around my hands.
I don’t want to know of an existence without you.
I scream out into the unyielding darkness. Into the corners within new worlds and the spaces between stars.
If you’re in pieces, then I want every fucking one of them.
In the distance ahead of me, a small flame ignites, the heat slight but mighty. I reach my shaky fingers towards it, needing to feel that kernel of life within me. Despite the pain, despite it all, I still yearn for that light.
I want you, in any way you can give me. No scenario changes that.
The shadows begin to retreat back within me, slowly. Reluctantly. No. They aren’t retreating. I am calling them back.
I love you. Wholly. Inexorably. In a way that exhilarates as much as it frightens me. With everything that I am or could ever possibly hope to be, I love you.
Relentlessly, I’m pelted with the memories of his words and the moments he spoke them. I see his eyes shining with the truth of each one, and I become undone. I let my grip on my magic release, and like a flame consuming oxygen, everything around me explodes. The shadows disappear, but I know where they’ve gone. Hiding in the darkness within me—always present, always watching. Every time I shoved an emotion into a mental box and locked it away, that darkness grew. Over and over, I had tucked all my hurts—big and small—into the back of my mind because dealing with them, acknowledging the pain they brought and the despair they smothered me with, was more than I could handle.
And thenhecame into my life. And he begged me to let him in. To help shoulder the invisible pain that he somehow managed to see. There is no rational reason for him to have done that—to have treated me with such kindness and respect andlove—unless those emotions were true for him.
Unless I was more than a mission.
I love you.
“She isn’t supposed to be here like this,” that dominant voice booms, his power shaking my body.
“She needs the space to process.”
I love you.I hear his voice again, but it isn’t in my head this time. It’s all around me.
“She is tempting fate. Her magic is—”
“Please. Just a little longer,” the woman implores, her voice shaking.
My ears begin to ring, and my hair rises around me. The last of those shadows pull back into me and settle deep down in my stomach. The sensation is jarring, causing my vision to spin as I collapse onto nothing.
I love you so fucking much.
I scream again, covering my ears with my hands, as the boxes I’ve kept so closely guarded and frozen in time within me rattle and shake. My tears are a turbulent ocean in which I have become adrift. And one by one, those locks burst—lids flying off.
Here—in a space between life and death, past and future, nothing and everything—I become unmade.
