For now, I am no longer armored in only my own dreams, but with the dreams of everyone. Cloaked in their hopes and desires; their fears and their nightmares. Everything that makes this life so beautiful and terrible. I wear the weight of them with honor, impenetrable and infallible.
Niko’s death wreathes around his head as he takes in the ruin of our kingdom. It crawls up his throat in pestilent swathes until he appears as sin itself, hellbent on ruining everything in front of him.
I entwine his fingers with mine, taking heart in the ice of his rage that sparks at the contact.
“Together?” I ask, a mirror of his fury unraveling in my chest.
He grins wickedly. “Unleash, you feral creature. I’ll follow your madness to the ends of the earth.”
“A simple ‘yes’ works just fine, Your Dramatic Majesty.”
“Hmm,” he hums, still grinning. “I never thought I’d celebrate your ridiculous nicknames, and yet I find myself warmed by their return.”
I give him a wink, before diving into my magic. It shimmers in my blood, illuminates my bones in fractal bursts of infinite color and light. There are no more shadows, no more hungering ache. There is only the void of Niko’s death around our wrists, binding us together as the magic of the island threads between us both.
A power both ancient and new as all the best dreams are, a universal longing and the spark of something different.
I was inundated so deeply in shame, I’d never been able to see the true shape of who I am. Never able to appreciate the beauty of its sharp edges and desperate wants, nor of the loyalty carved so deeply, it is a part of each breath.
But next to Niko in the land of dreams and nightmares—I am finally at home in my own skin. Standing still used to feel like a death sentence, but now, I find peace in the pause.
Niko’s death rises to his call. His ribbons expand before us, fanning out in a blanket of darkness over the city. The same darkness that consumed me my first day on the island, and the one that’s saved me so many times—the essence of an end.
Silence descends over the mayhem as power radiates from the King of Carrion in wave after wave of void. As he shields our people with his horror—as he protects them with his decay. There is no more haunted laughter; no more roar of flame or screams of fury.
There is only the quiet of death.
A pained exhale hitches from Niko, but I take heart knowing he will no longer be broken by the agony. For now, it is not an enduring pain, but one demanded as repayment of death. And just as he shoulders my eternal tie to the island, I bear theburden of his suffering. Together, our magic is whole—the cost of it no longer too steep to pay.
Closing my eyes, I reach for every nightmare that plagued me as a child. Visions of tiger beasts with vicious black eyes and fangs to drink blood. Banshees with screams loud enough to cause one to go deaf and blind. Shadows that come alive to pierce through skin.
I open to the magic of the island, allowing nightmares fill my thoughts. Not only my own, but those of every child who’s passed through Letum. Vampires, and werewolves, and beasts of every make. I paint each one with all the colors of my heart—honing them in the dark shades I’d been ashamed of, imbuing them with strength of the lighter ones. The ones borne of love, of wonder. The ones capable of slicing through anything that threatens them.
I unleash them from my heart in a rush of rage. For every child who never had agency over their fears; for every adult the world buried neck deep in their terror—their nightmares take it all back.
They race alongside Niko’s death. They sink their fangs into the Strayed, tearing into their flesh. They blind and deafen them; they drink their blood and shatter through their bones. They fly to the trees of the Grove, to where Sam and Adira and the Silva Lucai hold the line, and join the spirits of the Nyawa in flaying the reanimated corpses into pieces.
And when it is done—when there is nothing left of the Eternal Children but their empty corpses—there are no more sounds of terror.
Even as the people of Letum gaze upon the nightmares of my heart—as they feast upon the horrors innate in us both—there is only wonder. We have shown them the worst of ourselves, and they do not run from it.
Long live the Carrion King. Long live the Queen of Dreams.
Niko watches the scene unfold before us with humility; with happiness. Cheers rise around us, and the flames at sea die, but when the king turns to me, there is no victory in the pits of his eyes. Only death I feel winding around my own heart.
Because as his ribbons recede, and my nightmares fade into the rapidly falling night—I feel the presence of the one who escaped their wrath.
Looking up, we see the Aeternalis floating high above the city. Buoyed by stolen morphellia dust, he hangs in the air, taking in the ruin of his Strayed. Watching, as the island he once created blooms beneath the care of enemies.
His shadow twists in the sky behind him, nearly a malevolent trick of the light in the darkening sky. But even from this distance, I feel the skeletal horror of its rage—the empty hollow of a smile crawling over Pan’s face.
Niko roars in fury, his death shooting toward the Aeternalis. He may not be able to kill Pan with his magic, but he can bind him in it. He can drag him down to earth to revel in the consequences of his eternal hunger.
He can make him wish for a death that will never come.
I don’t realize something feels wrong about the way Pan stays still in the air—something off-kilter in the way his smile only widens as the weight of Niko’s terrible power barrels toward him.
It isn’t until a horrible gasping noise sounds from Niko’s mouth that I understand: in his death’s distraction, the Carrion King has made himself vulnerable.
