Nyx releases me.
The force leaves my limbs all at once, and I stagger forward into the place she occupied, fingers closing on emptiness. The ground holds no imprint, and the air carries no scent.
Something vast and hollow opens in my chest.
Not grief.
Grief is too small a word.
This feels like an amputation.
I turn on Nyx, power rising instinctively, the courtyard trembling in response. “You had no right,” I say, and the restraint in my voice is thinner than I intend.
Her gaze remains steady. “The Law predates you,” she replies. “It will outlive you.”
“You could have warned me.”
“She was warned.” The finality in that answer lands like iron.
For a moment, something fractures behind my ribs, a crack that radiates outward into silence. I feel for her again, for that thread that once pulsed between us, and there is only distance.
Not emptiness.
Distance.
“You removed her,” I say, quieter now.
Nyx studies me carefully. “We enforced the Law,” she answers. “What becomes of her beyond that is not yours to command.”
The distinction is deliberate, and it lodges under my skin.
Wings unfurl behind her, vast and dark, the Coven rising in a single seamless motion. The rush of feathers devours the sky before surrendering it back.
Nyx holds my gaze one last heartbeat. “Donotmake us return for you,” she declares.
Then they are gone.
The courtyard settles into ruin and smoke.
I stand alone in the space where Valeria vanished, the world feeling structurally altered, as though something integral has been removed from its design.
What fills my chest is not sorrow.
It is a cavernous, echoing absence so large it borders on fury.
The storm that moved beside me has been taken beyond my sight.
Yet beneath the silence, I swear I can still feel a pressure shift in the atmosphere, faint and distant, like thunder rolling somewhere beyond the horizon.
***
The Coven finds me three nights later.
They always do.
That is the nature of family.
It knows where you are.
