Chapter 1
Dreven
Idon’t think. I end.
The beast implodes as the last beat stutters out of her chest. Its howls choke off. Limbs dissolve. Faces melt to nothing. The realm feeds, suddenly ravenous, gorging on the quiet she’s left behind.
I slam down beside her, and shadows pour from my skin, black and vicious.
“Nyssa.” I spit her name like it might wake her.
It doesn’t.
Voren’s hand is still buried in her chest. He looks up at me, and there’s a crack in him I’ve never seen. “I’ve got her,” he says, and it’s not a boast. It’s a prayer he’s forcing into a statement.
Dastian lands hard beside us, magic snapping off his skin. He scans the emptying battlefield, then her face, and for once, he doesn’t smile. “Give me something to break.”
“No!” I growl. “There is nothing…” I grab Voren by the lapel of his coat as his hand slips from her chest. “Fix thisnow, you utter fuck!”
Voren doesn’t flinch. He just stares back at me, his face a mask of stone, and I feel the anchor snap. The tether that boundme to her vanishes, and the void it leaves behind is an agony, a cold that not even my shadows can fill.
“I need her soul,” Voren says, his voice dangerously calm. “It hasn’t gone far. But this realm will try to claim it. We don’t have long.”
I release him, my hands shaking with a rage that has no target. He crawls over her, placing his palms flat on her chest where the wound has already vanished, leaving her skin pale and unbroken. A silver mist, colder than a winter grave, seeps from his fingers, sinking into her.
“What do you need?” Dastian asks, his voice tight, the chaos in him a violence waiting for a direction.
“Keep this realm from eating her memory,” Voren orders without looking up. “Build a wall.”
Dastian doesn’t hesitate. He slams his hands onto the cracked stone, and a dome of roaring, red-gold energy erupts around us, sealing us in with her body and Voren’s desperate magic. It’s a shield made of pure defiance.
I drop to my knees on her other side. Her face is serene, a cruel mockery of the fire that lived behind her eyes. I touch her cheek. She’s empty. A vessel without its light.
“Bring her back,” I whisper, the words a raw scrape in my throat. “Or I will unmake you, cell by cell.”
“I don’t need threats,” Voren snarls, eyes closed. “I need quiet.”
The promise he made to her hangs between us, heavier than any oath sworn to a god. His focus is absolute. The silver mist deepens, swirling over her still chest like a miniature storm. I can feel the pull of it, the cold tendrils of his power sifting through the fabric of the realm, hunting.
Dastian’s shield buzzes erratically, like a million bees. It’s the only sound in the sudden, crushing silence. Outside the dome, I feel the realm press in, greedy for the fresh vacancy Nyssa hasleft. It wants to claim her, to dissolve her memory into its hungry void. Dastian grunts with the effort of holding it back, sweat beading on his temple.
My shadows twist and turn, useless. They can kill, they can hide, they can tear down worlds, but they cannot fill this hollow space inside her. I smooth a strand of golden hair from her face, my touch clumsy with a rage that has nowhere to go. She sacrificed herself. She chose this ending, trusted Voren to rewrite it. The sheer, suicidal audacity of her choice makes me want to burn this entire realm to the ground.
“Find her,” I snarl at Voren, the words scraping my throat raw.
Voren’s body goes rigid. A tremor runs through him, and the silver mist around his hands flares with a blinding, white light. “I have her,” he whispers. “But she’s not alone.”
“The Firsts?”
He shakes his head, his eyes opening and pinning my stare. “All of them.”
“All the slayers?”
“Makes sense,” Dastian grits out.
It does. But it kills me. It’s the final crossing. The spirits of the slayers past are at peace; they have done their duty and passed on the baton. If Nyssa is with them, she is… somewhere very far away. “Can you bring her back?” I ask the only question that matters.
“It’s not a question of ‘can’,” Voren says, his voice strained, the silver mist around his hands flickering. “It’s a question of whether they’ll let her go.”
