My heart skipped a beat, falling into rhythm with another as a whistle moved through the space. Recognition stirring in instinct. The Viper uncoiled. And I let it devour me whole.
It began with the sound of splitting air. Then shadow burst from my flesh, thick and writhing, pouring over me like liquid night, swallowing skin and light alike until there was nothing left but shape and hunger.
Prowling forward toward the whistle, I realized this was what I was meant to be. Not a curse. Not a cage. A catastrophe.
Soldiers dropped where I passed, nix metal shattering, its poison dissolving to dust before it could even touch me. I didn’t feel the pain anymore. Or fear. Only purpose.
The sound cut through again. Soft and hauntingly perfect. Reaching through me, winding around my ribs, threading through every black vein. It wasn’t a request, but asummons.
The Viper stilled inside me and when we blinked, there she was, Isolde, only feet away, whispering a dark lullaby in a tongue my soul remembered. My shadow bent toward her before I even moved, obedient to her will.
Every instinct screamed to fight, to strike, toendher, but my muscles refused.Everythingrefused. I was still burning, but not by my own spark.
Then she smiled, slow and terrible, her lips parting to reveal fangs too sharp to belong to anything with a soul.
Her power reached for me and instead of clashing with mine—itmirroredit. A twisted reflection winding tighter until my pulse beat with hers. The world around us dimmed. The battlefield, the screaming, even Ronan’s voice through the bond, all gone. There was only her.
“Tick. Tick. Tick.” Her words came from a tongue split down the middle. “I’ve found you.”
She wasn’t just darkness dressed as reign; she was the echo that came before me. The one history had warned, had buried.
ThefirstViper. The real nightmare.
My mask fractured.
The black veneer that had swallowed my face peeled away in shreds that dissolved against the wind. Beneath it, my skin trembled with the effort of holding shape, light wavering behind my eyes like a candle fighting to stay lit.
Isolde was unmaking me. Thread by thread.
The corruption still clung to my hands, black winding over bone, climbing higher, coiling around my throat. I couldn’t dispel it. Couldn’t glamour it. Couldn’t even lift my own damn hand. Because it wasn’t mine to control anymore.
Laughter unraveled inside my skull, a ringing that snuck into every thought. The curse obeyed her call, and my knees hit the ground before I even realized I’d fallen. Power bled from me to her like ink through water, beautiful, unstoppable, and wholly hers.
Ronan’s voice charged down the bond, terrified and begging.Move,he demanded.Verena, move—
My body didn’t answer him, only Isolde as she held the full influence of my curse. Of me.
In a single shiver of time, we were no longer fighting. The battle had slipped from our hands as nix winked our magic out fully one by one. But not the soldiers, they had stopped pushing and started surging. There were too many blades as the wall of bodies locked us in.
Ronan tore through, breaking the ranks, screams cutting short under his wrath. Nothing mattered but the distance between him and me. Reve’s dagger came from the side, meant to cripple. Ronan caught it barehanded. But the blade cut deep, nix burning into his blood and he staggered as the ground gave way, my body jerking as invisible hands caught me. Ancient wards screamed as they broke, their shattering resonating as my vision went dark. And then the world flipped as I was dragged through the tear, and into the fallen kingdom of Nyctom.
I came back to myself in fragments. A breath. A pulse. A weight.
Reve carried me, hands rough where my skin recoiled beneath them. I wanted to spit, to burn him from my flesh, but nothing moved. My limbs were statues, my tongue lead.
Isolde’s whistle still rang through my mind, a command I couldn’t disobey. And the world swayed in slow, dreamlike pulls as he walked on, carrying me toward what waited ahead.
The shift began in the air, the atmosphere shivering before anything else did as it became thick and stale with centuries of stagnancy. The scent wasn’t death. It wasafterdeath, whatever clings once the soul has fled.
The ground splintered gray green, every step revealing strains of dull orbs squeezed between the cracks. Trees leaned and twisted, bark slick with damp, their roots split open to expose pale strands like nerves.
And above it all, the sky stretched endlessly. Wrong in its splendor. Indigo and violet tangled together, streaked with soft mauve that rippled in a livingexhale. Stars were scattered across it in careless collections, each one beating, each one alive. But its full moon ruled it all, leaving nowhere to hide as it fed the dark.
Exactly how I’d imagined it. Only crueler.
My stomach lurched when Reve dug his fingers tighter, when a void opened before us. I looked to the stars for comfort, right before he sifted us away.
When the gates of the Nyctom palace came into view, time had dissolved entirely, each step becoming a blur. It surfaced from the wasteland, stripped of glory but not of ghosts.
