I feelsogood. The shadowed void has been ravaging through me since I woke in the Hollows, but now, it is wonderfully calm. The pain of memories, the sting of regret—all of it has been consumed by the light. Like the heaviness of the world has faded away, and I’m weightless enough to float through the stars.
“We are the most powerful beings among the worlds, Willa. We don’t need to live in agony when the universe expands before us. We will take what’s ours.”
I only want to make you feel good.
The words, which had been so delicious only a moment before, suddenly clang through me like steel. I spent my life running from agony, until I met a king who taught me to hone it like the sharpest of blades; use it to carve out the edges of pleasure, to define the beautiful things with the horrible.
I snap my eyes open. I see none of the dark beauty of the Indomnitus; only the glowing green gaze of the Aeternalis. He is so close, all I breathe is the blood-tinged scent of him.
“You’re old enough to know, Peter,” I whisper, my words a hot breath against his lips. His lashes flutter, and a guttural noise sounds in his throat like the mere whisper of my mouth has left him undone. “There is no pleasure without pain.”
With that, I wrench myself from his grasp, and let the shadows in my chest rise. They mingle with my magic until I am nothing but my rage, nothing but a burning abyss. And with the fire, I paint.
I’ve painted time and I’ve painted life, but I’ve never painted death. It isn’t Niko’s death—a magic of eternal silences and soothing endings—it is the depiction of death the Everlasting has earned. I paint the ripped open bellies of sirens, and the pinned wings of pixies; I paint the empty eyes of the children, and violent urges in the littlest of hands.
The Aeternalis thinks he is above death. I will show him he is not. I will kill his power at the source.
The magic of the island rises up, tangling with mine until I no longer feel the edges of myself at all. I only feel the electric storm of power and shadows, rising, rising, rising.
The Aeternalis tilts his head, his eyes glinting with excitement. “You are such a delicious thing,” he purrs as I let my magic go.
The world tilts, just as it had when I brought Niko back to life. But this time, it isn’t only creation that spills from me. The shadows that have lived in my heart burst from my skin, from my eyes, from my mouth. My rage given form.
And Pan, the child, the Indomnitus—all of them are showered in my void.
Chapter twelve
There is no air, no light—only an endless rush of time. A violent river of dreams and magic, of memory and distance, that hooks through my heart to pull me ever forward.
The lifeblood with which the universe is woven together.
An ancient and visceral magic. Powerful enough that it steals the breath from my lungs; freezes the beat of my heart; squeezes so tightly the blood stalls in my veins.
Worlds upon worlds rush by in a blur, some familiar and some still unexplored, all emanating an addictive elixir of possibility. Once, it had been easy to fall into another horizon as I’d been anchored to nothing, but now my journey through the ward is steady. It is no strain to cling to the land of dreams, when home is embedded in my soul.
A moment or perhaps hours later, I know I’ve aimed true. Not by the familiar sky, or the outline of the land, but by the agonizing pain that sears through me the moment the magic loosens and the ward releases me.
My eyes fly open as I land hard on my back. Black sand flies everywhere and a scream tangles itself in my throat. A scream I can’t release even if I wanted to, as my body has already rebelled against me. My jaw locks, and my teeth grit together against the onslaught of agony.
Unending, incessant pain. And at its center—ice cold and silent—lies my magic.
It seeps from its place at my heart, spreads through my veins. Malignant and dark, it lights up every nerve-ending with pain until my breath stalls in my lungs. It’s all I can do to roll over and bury my face in the sand as black edges my vision. Death slides through every part of me—I taste its rot-sweet scent on my tongue, feel its shadows wash over the blue of my eyes, staining them with decay and void.
And though I know what’s coming next, there’s no way to brace for the breadth of torment as my death begins to lance through my skin. It pierces through me like blades, wound after wound opening in my flesh, slicing through my skin until there is nothing left to hold me together; until I am only festering agony, a gaping laceration.
My muscles seize and my joints lock, sand coating my lips and teeth as I emit a guttural groan. For a moment, I fear my skull has cracked in half. Fear that this is it: the moment the pain is too much for my body to bear. Perhaps I’ll shatter beneath it, ground down to little more than the celestial dust floating in the Letum sky.
The heavens could turn to dust.
My own words float back to me from somewhere in the fractured recesses of my mind.
But you and I endure, Willa.
A truth felt in the marrow of my bones. Inarguable. Sacrosanct. Because if I do not endure long enough to get back what’s mine, what was the agony for?
I force a breath into my lungs, piercing and rattled as it is. Another and then another, until the world stops spinning and I’m able to flop onto my back with a muffled grunt. I open my eyes to find the sky above obscured by slashes of darkness deeper than any night, wriggling and writhing over me. And though they are the source of my pain—physical manifestations of my sins—I welcome my death back to me with conviction.
The ribbons wrap around my wrists and slide over my chest. They flay through the empty shell I’d been on the mainland, and ground me back home. Death, ruin, darkness: that is where my heart has always resided. Without it, I’d floundered, an aimless ship adrift in a never-ending sea.
