Jasmine’s gaze flickers to the black lines snaking along my throat. I still have my shirt on; I rarely ever remove it.
“Most times, it left marks,” I murmur, and her eyes linger over them. “And when that didn’t work.” My chest feels on fire as the memory claws its way in. “They cut into my chest, pried open my ribs, and took the light out.”
I’ll never forget the pain.
“I was always awake, watching them extract physical shards of light from inside me. Pieces wrapped in tissue, threaded around nerves, it was… agonising.”
A soft noise escapes her, eyes glassy with tears, but she never speaks, and her fingers never stop brushing soothing touches over my cheeks.
“It was worse when it was her turn.” I wince as the words spill out. “When they removed her light, replaced them with fragments of dark, stitched them in. Piece by piece. And there was nothing I could do.”
My hands tighten into fists.
“They’d experiment on us, then throw us back into The Divide. Never letting us heal, barely surviving, starving.”
I breathe through the burn in my chest, remembering the unbearable agony of simply waiting for the next set of torture to arrive.
Jasmine doesn’t interrupt, but by simply being here, the pain becomes something less.
“He succeeded in his goal,” I say, voice hollow now. “Eventually, I became what he wanted. A mutilation of Light and Dark. But only after I lost…” My words fail me, because I’m tracking the tears falling down Jasmine’s cheeks.
“Your sister,” she finishes for me.
“Sherida.” Her name shreds my throat. Flickers of her cries, screams, pleads, erupting in my mind. “We were held in The Divide for so long, the things he did. She didn’t…”
“We did it, brother, we survived… we’re going home… No, no… I’m fine. I’m just… resting. Wake me… wake me when we’re home, brother…”
I see her dying face in every shadow, her cries in every silence. And some nights, I wake and reach for her like we’re still in The Divide, in that cage together.
“We’re here, Sheridan. We’ve made it… We’re out of the Dark Realm, we’re out…” I brush her cheeks. Cold. “Sheri, you can wake up now. You can wake up… Sheri… Why isn’t she waking up, Kane? Kane… Why isn’t she… No. No! Sheri… Comeback to me… please… I can’t do this without you… I can’t… I… come back…”
“I held her dead body in my arms, and in that moment, something changed—something answered.”
Jasmine’s fingers move again, tracing my throat with her thumb in a tenderness that aches.
I hesitate, because this is the part I never say aloud. Not since I told Kane all those decades ago when we were just boys. He dismissed it then, refused to believe it. Because why would he believe in a saving goddess when no one ever came to save him?
“The Dark Goddess spoke to me,” I say, and my darkness stirs at the name. “As I held my sister, she spoke into my mind.”
Maybe I’d made myself believe it was her, maybe I just needed to believe in something, that some being out there saw what had happened, what I’d lost, and was coming to save me—us.
But it felt real to me, and it changed everything.
Jasmine’s eyes search mine. “And Kane knows this?” I nod. “But he told me he doesn’t believe in gods.”
“After everything we went through, after watching people worship a man who thought he could become one...” I shake my head. “Kane stopped believing in anything but survival and revenge.”
We watch one another, that small line between her brows deepening like she’s trying to make sense of something.
“I believe in the Goddesses, but the Goddess isn’t the one who saved me. All she did was give me a choice. To let the pain and rage devour me, or let it become power.” Our powers entwine, metallic flickers making light dance over her face. “She gave me the ability to meld minds.”
Jasmine still holds my face, but her fingers are rigid. “That’s when you and Kane…” she whispers.
“That’s when we stopped being children.”
She pulls back slightly, just enough to really look at me. Not with fear, but with a kind of dawning horror.
“I don’t know how much Kane told you, but we could have left. We were in the Pit, the Earth Realm was just on the other side but instead, I let the dark consume me,” I admit in a low murmur.
