Not that I wouldn’t have tried.
“Any time with him was better than an eternity of never knowing what he felt like.” There wasn’t space for me to lie here. There wasn’t really a point to it. We were in Death’s domain, andI was made from pieces of his essence. He would know the taste of it on my tongue before it left my lips.
And his eyes narrowed now because he knew I spoke the truth.
“Long ago, when I first made your kind… I thought about how I wanted to do it.” His hand pressing against the small of my back led me like he had me chained—my muscles weren’t my own, my movement was that of a puppet. He walked me until I stood at the edge of the Lake, and then he tapped gently at my spine so I fell to my knees. “I wondered if it would be better to let you feel, or if it would eventually drive you to insanity. Humans are messy, Sephtis.” His fingers tangled in my hair and he kneeled beside me.
I’d never been this close to the water. When we put the souls in the Lake, we did it from the archway, safe from the liquid below.
We weren’t supposed to touch it.
It was another rule I’d never questioned. I’d never thought to ask why.
“We were made from them.” I whispered, because I knew it was true. The red line in my chest came from a soul—from a human. Whatever I’d once been.
“You were made from me,” he hissed, and the words felt like darkness, like spikes running along my skin. It made the veins inside me turn to acid, and I screamed as he jerked my head forward until I was an inch from the clear water of the Lake, so close I could almost feel the breath of the souls as they swirled beneath me. “You are my hand, my breath. You’re mine, Sephtis, and you betrayed me. You took something that didn’t belong to you. And I can see now that I was right. Reapers weren’t meant to feel—just look at them. Humans. Broken and loving and hating and warring.” He punched out each word with a twist of his fingers, another burst of pain through my veins. “If you’dbeen able to feel all along, you would have crumbled under the weight of their folly. Here.” He pushed me closer to the Lake. “I’ll show you.”
I didn’t have the strength to fight when he shoved my head beneath the water.
There was a moment where I felt nothing, a moment where it was bliss and silence, a cool sensation of peace…
And then Death’s fingers in my hair twisted, and I opened my eyes… and Ifelt.
The past year had been nothing—the souls I’d reaped since then had felt like daggers ripping along my edges, aching and tearing me apart.
In the Lake, every human who had ever died and was yet to be reborn screamed in my ears and Ifeltit.
Lifetimes of emotion. It wasn’t just pain—it was joy and sorrow, lust and love and hate. It was all and everything and too much.
I opened my mouth to scream and the icy water of the Lake flooded my lungs and choked me. Little shrapnel shards of chill and emotion tore through me, rending my nerves, my flesh, my mind.
The fingers in my hair tightened as Death yanked me up, and the voice in my ear was cruel when he whispered, “Don’t you understand? This is what it will be like. An eternity of feelingthis. It will build, Sephtis. Every soul you take will pile atop one another until their lives, their guilt, their pain, their hopes… It will beallyou can feel. Better to tell me how you did this so I can fix it now.”
Fix it.
He wanted to fix it?
He wanted to take the Ardor from my veins, to sever the connection between Cole and me? He wanted me to be what I’d once been, when that was so far from a life I remembered now.
There wasafterCole…and before that was an abyss. Every moment leading up to that was nothing more than a footstep that had been washed away in the sand as soon as the waves of his emotions—his hate, his pain, his love—poured over me and tore me out to sea.
I couldn’t see the shore, and I didn’t want to. That sand was smooth now, the steps long gone.
I couldn’t be what I was before; I was created to behis.
“No,” I choked out, one syllable that felt like it tried to take my lungs with it. My defiance played across Death’s face as I watched, and the white ring in his eyes flared for a moment before his snarl turned into a soft frown.
“Hm. Pity. We have an eternity, Sephtis. I can remind you of who you belong to.” This time when he pushed my face beneath the water, I didn’t close my eyes. It was blinding, the white lights of the swirling souls. They weren’t attacking me.
They weren’t trying to hurt me.
They just existed, and the Ardor within me called out to the feelings and emotions attached to them—proof that who a human was carried with them from one life to the next.
Proof… and…
In the distance, there was a flicker of color. It was soft at first, so far off and mixed with the sensations trying to peel away my sanity that I didn’t understand it.
But as it came closer, everything grew quiet.
