“Good. Let her stew.” I adjust the strap of my blade and look at the three of them. “We go, we look, we don’t engage unless I say. If he tries to take me, let him. I’ll make him regret every second he spends inside me.”
Dreven’s jaw flexes. He hates it. He accepts it. It does something warm to my chest.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Born,” Dastian says.
“Always,” Voren echoes.
Dreven doesn’t answer. He just takes my hand.
We step into his shadows. They fold up and over us, cool and absolute without suffocating.
Chapter 39
Voren
We come out on wet grass under a sky that looks bruised around the edges. The passage tomb rises ahead, a perfect curve of earth and stone under a rim of stacked white quartz. The dead whisper somewhere beyond the trees. The air is wrong. It’s too still, too expectant.
The dead gather for me. I don’t call them; they come anyway. They keep to the edges of the quartz, a ring of pale shapes that refuse to cross the white line. I see farmers with sticks, kings with nothing on their heads, a woman with hands rough from grinding grain. They watch the mound the way mortals watch a lit fuse.
Nyssa steps to my shoulder. “Path?”
I nod and let the wraiths show me the places the void hasn’t marked. The grass looks the same everywhere, but the dead know the difference. I lift my hand, and the air tightens along a thin curve toward the passage. “Keep to the line. If you step off it, you step into him.”
Dreven moves to her other side. Dastian prowls to our flank, eyes hot, restless. Nyssa adjusts the grip on her blade and gives me a short nod. “Go.”
We walk. My boots sink into wet ground. No sound from birds. No breeze in the trees. Only the soft hiss of the dead warns when I drift a foot too far to the right. I correct, and the pressure in my chest eases.
At the entrance stone, Nyssa stops. The carved spirals cut clean lines in the damp. She sets Tabitha’s sigil in front of the low gap. It snaps into place with a sound like a latch. Geometry hangs in the air, a frame of blue-white light that locks to the stone. It narrows the threshold to a fist-width seam.
“Last door he gets,” she says.
“He will test it,” I say.
“I’m counting on it.” She looks at me. “Can you pull any souls if he tries to force his way through?”
“Yes.” I feel them already, nested in his mass. Thousands. Not digested. Stored. He hoards them. “He keeps them as tools. He doesn’t understand rest.”
“Take them if you can,” she says. “Weakening him is priority one.”
Pressure builds along the seam. The blue-white frame tightens in answer. He is already here. Not a shape. A weight. He pushes at every gap in the geometry, tasting for a flaw.
“Hold,” Nyssa says, low.
Dreven’s shadows spread across the quartz like ink through cloth, but they stop shy of the line I marked. He knows better than to interfere with the path the dead set.
Dastian rolls his shoulders. Static crawls over my skin. He is ready to burn.
I lift my hand toward the seam. The air thrums. There they are. Thousands, packed tight. Not gone. Waiting.
I reach with my will, not brute force. I thread between layers of pressure and hook the nearest soul with a tug that is more suggestion than demand. A woman tumbles free of the seam and drops into the wet grass, pale and shaking. She looks at me with wide eyes and then dissolves, finally allowed to move on.
He notices. The pressure at the seam spikes.
“Again,” Nyssa says.
I pull three more. A man with a scar over one eye. A woman with a shawl. An old king with empty hands. They go the same way, quiet, grateful. The Devourer squeezes the seam until the frame creaks.
