“I noticed,” I mutter, glancing at the impenetrable mist. “How do I get to her?”
“You don’t. She is the realm now. Or the realm is her. It’s unclear.” He picks at a loose thread on his jumper. “She is very angry.”
“She is,” I agree. “Dreven has a talent for inciting that. Can you traverse this?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
I groan. Talking to him drains my patience faster than a syphon net. “Useful as ever. Look, if she walled us off, she walled off the Devourer’s prison too. I need to make sure she didn’t accidentally lock herself in a room with a view of the void.”
Ambivalence points a trembling finger into the grey. “She went that way. Or perhaps that way. The geometry is... emotional.”
“Emotional geometry,” I scoff. “Fantastic. Just what I need.”
I step past him. If Nyssa constructs walls based on anger, then I simply need to be more irritating than the fog. I shove a pulse of pure disorder into the mist. It doesn’t break, but it shudders.
“It hates that,” I say, watching the grey shudder.
Ambivalence covers his head with his arms. “Please stop. You’ll make it worse.”
“Worse is the goal,” I reply. “Order keeps walls standing. Chaos knocks them down.”
I gather more power and then stop with a grimace. Order. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, witch.”
Nothing happens for a solid ten seconds, which is nine seconds too long for my liking. Then, the grey soup to my right splits with the precision of a scalpel. Tabitha steps through, adjusting her cuffs like she hasn’t just been hiding in the metaphysical woodwork.
“You rang?” she asks, voice dry.
“Took you long enough,” I snap, dropping the chaos flare.
Tabitha glances at Ambivalence, who is currently trying to merge with the floor tiles. She ignores him and turns her clinical gaze to the wall of fog. “She is exercising divine will fuelled by rage.”
“Why are you lurking in the walls of the Pantheon Realm?” I ask, eyes narrowed, trusting her even less than I did before I suspected she was possessed by the Devourer.
“Someone has to bring order to your absolutely horrendous brand of chaos. And I don’t mean just you, but all four of you. Together you…” She waggles her fingers. “… rile each other up.”
“And?” I press, stepping into her personal space. She doesn’t flinch. She never does. It makes me want to set her coat on fire just to see if she screams.
She glares at me and pushes me back slowly. “I am not your enemy, Chaos.”
“No? I get the feeling that you are not all you appear to be.”
“Meaning?” she snaps.
“Meaning you are attempting to get close to Nyssa. You followed her here. Why?”
“We’ve been over this. I don’t want to be devoured. Do you? Won’t you stop at nothing to prevent it?”
“Are you possessed?” I ask bluntly, growing bored with these games.
She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t flinch. She just stares at me with that infuriatingly blank expression that makes me want to unravel her knitting.
“That is a crude question, even for you,” she replies, smoothing her sleeve. “If I were possessed by an entity that consumes worlds, do you think I would still be standing here arguing with a god who behaves like a toddler?”
“Maybe,” I say, stepping closer until I invade her personal space completely. “The Devourer learns. Maybe it learned that being boring is the best camouflage.”
I reach out, not to strangle her this time, but to test. I place my palm flat against her chest. She stiffens, but she doesn’t retreat. I push a pulse of chaos into her—just a little jolt, enough to rattle a soul.
If she is the void, she will drink it. If she is Tabitha, she will hate it.
