“Frayed is my default setting,” I shoot back without turning. “Get used to it.”
I reach the threshold and stop dead. It’s not a corridor or another ruin beyond. It’s a chamber so vast and silent it feels like the inside of a void. In the centre, floating a few feet above a dais of black, glassy stone, is a curled-up snake that appears to be made from steel. It doesn’t hum. It doesn’t pull. It just waits.
No grand beast, no army of memories. Just an empty room and the prize.
“That seems too easy,” Dastian murmurs, echoing my exact thought.
I narrow my eyes, squinting at it. There is a test here, we just have to wait for it to reveal itself. Or take a page out of Rynna’s book and dive in headfirst without thinking. Either way, this day is far from over.
Chapter 3
Voren
“Easy is a word that doesn’t exist here,” I say, my voice flat in the oppressive silence.
The chamber is dead. Utterly, profoundly dead. Not even the faintest whisper of a soul lingers, which is unsettling when you are used to a legion of ghosts surrounding you. It’s a vacuum, and my power recoils from it.
Nyssa takes a step forward. Dreven’s shadow twitches, ready to haul her back. Dastian’s hand crackles with contained energy. I watch her. The life I pulled back into her feels fragile, a thread stretched taut over a blade. She’s walking toward the very thing that could snap it for good.
“Don’t,” I command, the word cracking like ice.
She ignores me, of course. She’s running on pure, suicidal momentum. She stops a few feet from the dais, her shoulders set. The snake doesn’t move.
“It’s just a crown,” she says, her voice trying for casual but landing on strained as she stares at it.
We are primed, ready to strike, but nothing happens.
“It’s dead,” she says flatly.
“Dead,” I murmur and move closer.
Up close, I feel nothing. No echo. No grief. No hunger. Just a cold absence that sucks at the edges of my power like a drought.
“Dead isn’t the same as gone,” I say, circling the dais. The snake of steel doesn’t track me. It doesn’t react to Nyssa either, which I hate more. “Dormant. Starved.”
“Starved of what?” she asks, eyes on the thing like she’s daring it to twitch.
I shrug. “Who knows? No one has ever worn this thing since the Wraith King died and became the Devourer.”
Nyssa reaches for it and snatches up the snake before I can stop her. “Is this it? The Crown?” She places it on her head, and I lunge forward, but nothing happens.
The snake remains impassive; it doesn’t turn into anything, and the realm doesn’t quiver in her presence.
I hate it immediately.
Nyssa stands there with a metal snake on her head, defiant and ridiculous, and my power recoils at the emptiness coiled on her head.
“Off,” I say, because the idea of a starved artefact of my domain latched onto her skull makes something primal in me bare its teeth.
She arches a brow at me and doesn’t move. Dreven’s shadows tighten; Dastian cracks his knuckles like he’s trying to make patience out of noise.
I circle the dais once more and extend a hand, letting a thin veil of wraith-light unfurl from my palm. It kisses the metal.
Nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a sigh. The Crown of Wraiths is a corpse.
“Dormant,” I repeat, more to myself than to them. “It needs a tithe.”
