Her eyes flash. A barrier of pure, rigid order snaps into place against my skin, shoving my hand away with a force that jars my shoulder.
“Do not touch me,” she hisses.
I shake my hand out. “Solid. Rigid. Definitely Order.”
“Are you quite finished?” she asks, adjusting her coat.
“For now.” I glance at Ambivalence, who is currently hugging his knees. “So, if you aren’t the bad guy, help me get to Nyssa. If she has separated herself from Dreven and us, she is in danger. She won’t accept who she is, so her true power lies dormant. She won’t be able to access it if something goes wrong.”
Tabitha stares at the grey barrier. “She is rejecting control,” she states. “We cannot use force. We must align with the intent.”
“Align with rage?” I ask. “That is my speciality.”
“No. Align with the need for solitude.” She clasps her hands. A geometric pattern glows blue in the air before her. It presses against the fog. It does not break the mist; it slides into the texture of it.
The grey parts. It opens a corridor.
“After you,” she says.
“In your dreams,” I say with an eyeroll. “Ladies first.”
She smiles wickedly and steps through.
I follow. The ground is solid here. The air feels thin against my skin. Ambivalence scuttles after us, keeping his head down and muttering about the structural integrity of emotional constructs.
We walk for a few minutes, but it’s a path to nowhere.
“Okay, this is getting frustrating,” I muse when we walk past the same dent in the fog wall for the second time. “We are repeating the same course. Your geometry is broken.” I stop dead.
Tabitha frowns at the glowing blue lines fading into the mist. “It is precise. The variable is the environment.”
“The variable is a slayer who hates being told what to do,” I correct. “You tried to use logic on a refusal. That never works.”
Ambivalence sighs, sitting on the floor again. “Maybe we should just stay here. It is consistent.”
“Get up,Melvin,” I snap. I look at the grey wall. It is smooth, featureless, and incredibly boring. Nyssa isn’t boring. This isn’t her; this is her barrier. And barriers are meant to be breached.
“She keeps walking away,” Tabitha says. “The path loops because she is rejecting arrival.”
“She is trying to get out. We need to find the way out and wait for her to find it. Either that or we will be in this loop forever,” Melvin pipes up.
“Melvin,” I say, staring at the beige lump of a god. “That is the most sensible thing anyone has said all night. It’s disgusting.”
Tabitha purses her lips. “He is correct. If she is rejecting arrival, she is seeking departure.”
“Exactly. We stop chasing the girl. We chase the door.” I turn my back on the looping path. The fog swirls, thick and stubborn. It expects us to walk forward. I decide to walk sideways.
“What are you doing?” Tabitha demands as I step off the obsidian path and straight into the grey soup.
“Breaking the narrative,” I reply. “Coming?”
I don’t wait for an answer. The chaos inside me purrs. The fog hates the lack of structure. It tries to push me back onto the path, but I push back with sheer, unadulterated nonsense. I project the feeling of being late for a reckoning with Aethel—pure, frantic desire to be elsewhere.
The grey thins. The obsidian floor cracks, revealing jagged stone beneath.
“It’s working,” Melvin squeaks from right behind me.
“Of course it is.” I grin at the shifting mist. “Nyssa wants space. I’m giving her the biggest exit sign in the realm.”
