I take the hit with the room. The roof sags again. I push it back up and lock the joints. The spear drives through the slit and into her palm.
Her body jerks and she screams.
Chapter 42
Nyssa
Ihave never felt pain like it.
It tears up my arm in a straight line, a hard drill under the skin, into the elbow, shoulder, spine. Every muscle jolts. My jaw locks. I force the channel narrow. I don’t give him space to spread. He hits my chest and slams against the seam of the Crown.
He scrapes for my throat, my eyes, the base of my skull. I clamp shadow across every exit and run light straight down the centre like a rod. Death sits at the exit point, steady and ready.
“Deeper,” I grind out. “If you want me, take me.”
He drives. The brand I set at the mound bites and drags. He hits it. It takes. He tries to shear off and fails. He is inside the mark, and he knows it.
The spear throbs in my palm. It feels like pressure trying to turn my bones to grit. My shoulder shakes. I lock my elbow and pull him higher into my chest, up to the knot he thinks I can’t reach. He resists. I use the brand like a hook and bring him in.
I’m shaking uncontrollably, and the gods around me are frantic, but they can’t touch me. Sparks of death are flying all around me. I force the knot up into my chest. It scrapes along the brand like wire dragged through a ring. It resists. I pull harder.The Crown bites and gives me leverage. I hear Dreven say my name like a warning and a prayer.
“More. Stop edging. Take all of me.”
It wants to. That’s the flaw. Want makes it predictable. It commits. The spear thickens and turns into a bar I can feel along my sternum. The brand locks. He is in the seat I built.
He pours in a hard line. No flood. No fog. Just that single thread I defined. The chamber groans. The floor rings. Dastian throws the rebound along his channels in bright lines that die on command. Voren’s net tightens to a singing wire.
I open the route behind the brand and drag. The rest of him tries to stay outside. I take the choice away. The hook bites deeper. The seam at the wall narrows to the width of a nail. The rope snarls. I make it straight. The pressure changes in a way that means he understands there is no more testing. He pulls to leave.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I grit out, my jaw clenched so tight I think I crack a tooth.
I keep him pinned inside me. He realises his mistake and tries to flee, but there is nowhere to go. The Crown inside me recognises him and holds him there.
“Good… snakey…”
“Nyssa!” Dreven shouts, trying to use his shadows to block the worst of the death sparks.
I lock gazes with him through the flashes of light.
This is it for me.
If I make it back, then I believe who I truly am.
If I don’t… it doesn’t matter anyway.
“Do it,” I whisper and see the flash of pain as he hears me over the clash of magic.
Dreven moves.
Cold impact.
A perfect, clean line of a shadow blade straight through my sternum.
The world snaps to a pin. Sound folds.
I see the knot clearly now. No fog. No mass. Just the core I forced him to be, bound by my brand, pinned to the circle, to the Crown, to the cut in the stone. It writhes. It cannot spread. It cannot hide. It is exactly the size I said it was.
It shrieks so loudly, but I’m too far gone to wince. My head hits the stone as my body convulses, feeling every second of the agonising death.
