“Do it,” Dreven orders from the dark.
I take a breath and drop the mental walls I’ve been holding up since we left BlackFen. I stop banking the fire in my chest and shove it outward.
The effect is instant. The golden light I’ve been suffocating flares, turning my skin translucent. I am a beacon in the grey fog, a flare sent up in the middle of the ocean. The heat of it makes the air shimmer, and the snake in my soul uncoils with a hiss of anticipation.
Dastian moves at the periphery, the air growing thick and static-charged as he lines the edges of our trap with chaotic potential. Voren is a pillar of frost, his magic snapping into place like a steel trap, anchoring the reality we’re about to break. Dreven weaves the shadows, stitching a lid for a box that doesn’t exist yet.
The chewing sound stops.
Silence slams into the corridor, heavy and absolute. The hair on my arms stands up. The pearl glow in the distance expands. A pressure builds against my eardrums, the kind you feel at the bottom of a deep dive.
“Here we go,” I murmur, tightening my grip on the steel.
Then, the void exhales. A cold, rot-scented wind blasts up from the depths, ruffling my hair. It smells like old graves and forgotten names.
Hello, little slayer,a voice slithers right into the base of my skull. It isn’t the snake. It’s the thing the snake used to serve.
I grip my blade until my knuckles turn white. “Hello, arsehole.”
The laughter that follows scrapes the inside of my skull like rusted wire.
Still so defiant. Still so mortal.
“Come up here and say that to my face,” I challenge with as much venom as I can muster.
The bridge beneath me shudders. The scar tissue of my old life feels slippery, sweating under the proximity of the void. Below, the darkness isn’t empty anymore. It swirls, thick and viscous, rising like floodwater in a blocked drain.
“Hold,” Dreven commands from the shadows. His voice is tight, a wire pulled to snapping point.
I don’t move. I let the gold fire in my chest roar, feeding the beacon. The heat of it is blistering, searing my skin from the inside out. I burn like a lighthouse, and the monster navigates the rocks straight for me.
A shape coalesces in the pearl glow. It’s huge, formless, a shifting mass of teeth and hunger that defies geometry. It doesn’t look like a king. It looks like the end of everything.
I see you, Nyssa Vale,the voice purrs, vibrating through the soles of my boots.You wear my crown. You sit on my throne. You bleed my light.
“I’m keeping it,” I grit out.
The presence surges upward. A limb of pure negation lashes out, aiming for my ankle.
“Now!” Voren roars.
The trap springs. Dastian unleashes chaos, searing the edges of the corridor with white-hot instability. Voren slams the frost-shackles down, freezing the air into iron-hard bars. Dreven drops the ceiling of reality, folding the shadows inward to seal the box.
The impact is deafening. It isn’t a noise, but a pressure wave trying to liquefy my internal organs. The box slams shut. Dreven’s shadows stitch the ceiling to the floor, sealing the void in a pocket of non-existence, while Voren’s frost hardens into a cage that defies physics.
The limb of darkness flails, hitting Voren’s frost bars with a sizzle.
“Get off the bridge!” Dastian yells, his voice distorted by the chaos static rippling through the air.
I don’t need telling twice. The scar-tissue rope beneath me is dissolving, turning into grey slush under the assault of the trapped entity. I scramble backwards, crab-walking on the slick surface as the Devourer realises it’s been had.
It doesn’t like the box. It throws itself against the shadow-lid, bulging the fabric of the realm outward. My light is still blazing, and it wants me. It wants to tear the Crown right out of my soul and eat the leftovers.
A tendril shoots through a microscopic gap in Dastian’s chaos-fire, grabbing for my ankle.
I slash down with my blade. Steel meets shadow. It feels like hitting a brick wall, but the light in the metal burns through. The tendril dissolves against the skin above my boot.
I throw myself onto the solid stone of the corridor floor just as the bridge collapses completely, falling into the cage with the monster. Dreven clenches his fist, and the final shadow-seam snaps tight, sealing the Devourer inside.
