The expression she wears is one I’m guilty of parading in the hells. A cold mask, filled with loathing. Dressed in a tattered andworn black gown, she lifts it to take a few slow steps forward. Veilflower vines curl beneath her bare feet, carpeting the ground.
Swirls of gold on her left arm glint in the low light of the night sky. The marking traces along her skin like the most vibrant demon mark I’ve ever seen. It climbs over her shoulder, glides along her collar, and plummets to her heart.
If it is a demon mark, it’s unlike any I’ve seen.
She lifts a hand and vines burst from the ground, snagging my face by the chin as if she were gripping it herself.
“An impressive replica,” she says as the vines turn my face for her inspection. “But a replica all the same.”
I jerk my chin away from the vines, wincing with the motion. They vanish in tufts of blue smoke. Snagging the dagger from the grass, I pull myself to my feet.
“Let us mend and be done,” I say firmly. “I cannot continue to exist with a partial soul, and you cannot continue to stay… here.” I glance around to find us standing in the middle of a rolling field of veilflowers.
“You mean my prison,” she retorts with a dry laugh as she swings her arms wide. “Where I’ve watched you live twenty lives. Each iteration of my shadow growing more compliant than the last.”
Twenty… lives?
Netharis has kept me for twenty lifetimes?
I swallow hard, searching for my voice. “Were that true, we wouldn’t be standing here,” I counter, using the same cold tone.
“Were the gods not greedy, you would not exist!” she shouts and the ground rumbles gently under my feet. “None of this should have ever come to be! I should not be fractured. I should stand whole.Left to live as agreed upon!” Her voice breaks with the ferocity of her words.
There.
There’s the bitter and cold rage.
Whatever happened to her—to me—in ages past, she still lives it. How could she not? She’s been wholly severed from the realms—removed entirely from everything.
Left to rot, I realize.
“How have you survived twenty lifetimes here, fractured?” I ask,unable to stop myself.
She laughs bitterly.
It’s a dark and haunting, almost musical sound.
“Without me, you would have withered eons ago,” she replies. “Netharis anticipated this. He devised a tether. A bridge so to speak. As long as it remained, you could draw frommeto live.”
My brows crease. “Wouldn’t a tether require consent?”
“Yes,” she laughs darkly. “And you gave it… each time you signed your contract.” She shakes her head in a slow toss. “Imagine my surprise when you willingly shattered the very thing responsible for keeping you alive.”
“I-I don’t understand,” I stammer, my mind racing to piece together the truths she’s revealed. “Why? Why would Netharis—”
“By controlling you, he controlled me. That was his true intent,” she interjects. “In an ironic twist of Fate, I came to realize if I let you wither, I would be trapped here—lost until some unwitting mortal stumbled upon me. I couldn’t take that risk. I’ve waited long enough. You will be reclaimed and I will take my place beside Life. As it should be. As it once was.”
Reclaimed…
Not mended?
My eyes shoot wide. She means toassumemy being to escape her prison—by stealing my body,my life.She steps toward me and my fingers tighten around the hilt of the bloodstone dagger.
“I will not bereclaimed,” I counter, lifting the dagger.
Her eyes fall upon it and she pauses.
“You do not have a choice,” she snaps. “The lives you’ve lived were never yours. Twenty lives and twenty deaths—I felt them all. Every end, each beginning—countless attempts Netharis made to mold you into something he could use to control me.”
