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THEIR ECHOING STEPS reminded her of a horse’s slow trot across cobblestones. Some of the bricks in the stairs had loosened over time, creating a musical quality as they clacked together, like dead harpsichord keys.
She focused on the melody and rhythm of their steps and the loose stones and their rhythmic breathing as she followed Arnes, the Monarch, and the armed guard deep into the basement levels of the palace, where they kept their worst prisoners.
It had seemed prudent to wear her hat once more, needing as much protection as possible from whomever they met down here in the dungeons, and she was grateful for her foresight. It was hard enough to travel down the staircase with it on—she could hardly imagine going without it. As they traveled deeper, the energy felt more and more oppressive and punishing, like someone gazing at your back waiting to pounce, poisonous air waiting to be inhaled. She breathed shallowly.
Arnes had offered to go on his own, but she’d refused to let him, knowing this was all her fault. She could still feel the disappointment from the Voice in the amulet when she’d given up without trying. How exhausted she’d been, how selfish, and now here they were paying the consequences of her easy surrender, of her foolish mistake.
With each step down, a new plaguing thought surfaced that she had to shove away.
The thought of the lonely void she’d been trapped in, crying every tear in her body. The thought of her father standing beneath the citrus trees, blaming her again for Ayden’s death. The thought of her brother’s blood, of his hand growing cold in hers. The thought of her own blood pooling out in front of her dimming vision.
I’m sorry, Evyn. I can’t.
Cruelly, strangely, his voice rang out the loudest in her mind, as if she still stood there in the replica of her bedroom, watching Enloris leave. The clearest and freshest of her wounds. Words said quietly that tore through her like rapids, drowning all other thoughts.
Her throat tightened and her chin wobbled, so she refocused on the present once again, just as the Monarch lifted a hand in the air, commanding them all to come to a halt.
They’d stopped before a door made of a dark wood, almost black in color with bright moss colored veins that ran through it. A thrum of power pulsed from the wood, ancient and vigilant—aware, almost. She wondered what kind it was, as it wasn’t familiar to her, but then the Monarch turned to face her and Arnes.
Their hair no longer changed color today, but was all black—naturally so, it seemed. Rings with metal spikes had been wrapped around the circumference of their tightly spiraled curls, and they wore a crown of what looked to be spearheads. Their Majesty had not been dressed for a social call, but for intimidation. Something about it made Evyn feel uneasy, though she supposed it made sense for visiting with dangerous criminals.
“I couldn’t speak of it before, because it is a law of mine that those who are held in these cells are to be kept anonymous from the public,” Monarch Akeda informed. “My guards here have all signed the requisite Bloodsworn contract to never share who is held here.”
Evyn gulped. A Bloodsworn contract was one held for life, unless released by the contract’s owner. If one broke a Bloodsworn, your heart would be stopped by the magic of the contract.
“If we go any further, I’ll need you both to do the same,” they continued, pulling a scroll from a hidden pocket in their black leather gown. The hide of which reminded her of what drakors were rumored to look like.
“Of course,” Arnes agreed, accepting the scroll.
None of this felt right. It felt strange that this would need to be kept a secret—shouldn’t the public have a right to know who was deemed a criminal and who wasn’t? Who it was that would be offered to the amulet?
What would happen if the person wasn’t as terrible, or evil, as Evyn felt they should be to deserve this, and was being held down here for reasons she didn’t agree with? Arnes handed the scroll to Evyn, having already signed it. She took it from him slowly, hesitantly.
“You can either leave,” the Monarch declared, “or you can sign the contract, Lady De’Nath.”
She nodded, holding the contract in her hands. Arnes proffered a quill in one hand, the amulet chain held carefully in the other. Her stomach spiked with nerves, but then her breathing slowed. This didn’t feel right. Something about it bothered her.
Her intuition screamed at her—Take the amulet!
Evyn reached for the quill, and then at the very last moment, lunged for the amulet instead. Arnes tried to swing it away, but it was too late. She pressed her finger to the gemstone and felt herself enter the darkness once more.
Just as last time, her body seemed to be falling through midair, while the air around her tightened like a vise. She closed her eyes and this time, when she screamed from the sudden feeling of weightlessness, she fueled it with her anger, her pain, her fear and frustration.
And just as last time, she landed in the void with little to no ceremony. One moment she’d been falling through darkness, the next, she was still—floating and yet solid-footed all at once.
Unlike last time, however, she did not come here to surrender. She could feel it in her bones. Even though she hadn’t planned to end up here consciously, deep down she’d always known this was how it would end. She’d come here to change things, to fight for a better outcome and not leave until she’d won it.
“I want to talk to you!” she shouted into the darkness, her anger leaking into every word. “I’m not satisfied with any of this! It doesn’t feel right!”
She waited but the void said nothing.
Her hands clenched at her sides into tight fists, tighter and tighter as the silence went on. Her nails bit into her palms.
“Hey!” she demanded. “I know you’re there! Don’t hide from me, coward!”
The void remained silent again.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Not even an echo, or a breath, or a ripple of energy. Her heartbeat picked up in speed as she worried she’d made a mistake.
She hadn’t thought it through fully, but she’d known for a while now that something felt wrong and she’d meant to come in here to tell them so. It couldn’t go on like this, and now that she was finally brave enough to do something about it—the entity who caused all of this hid from her, refusing to face her.
A wave of frustration slammed up her torso and into her throat.
“I know you’re there and I know you’re listening, so I’m just going to say it!” she shouted again, but this time, her breath wobbled and cracked, sounding more emotional than fierce. It bothered her. “This deal isn’t right!”
More silence met her, so she continued.
“I’m meant to give you some criminal—or at least, that’s my stipulation, not yours. You’d take anyone in replacement of me, and I’m meant to just choose. Me! A flawed human, deeming someone else more worthy of this place, more terrible in my eyes, and you’ll do what? Take them? Indiscriminately? Like it doesn’t matter? We’re all just the same to you?”
As her words spilled from her, she found her anger building, stoking, a bonfire spreading its sparks and embers into the dry tinder of an autumn forest, catching on nearby branches. The injustice of it all. Of all she’d ever been through, that this world had ever been through.
“Well, I refuse to play your cruel game! I will not just replace myself with someone I deem worse, only for them to make a deal with you and replace themself. And on and on and on until the end of time. I won’t do it!”
Again, her words were eaten by the silence and so she screamed into it—at it.
“I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate everything like you! I hate everything you stand for. I hate that you’re dark and empty and make people feel alone and only ever let them bring others to your dark and empty and lonely abyss! It isn’t fair and I refuse to continue allowing this to go on!”
Despite the impenetrable darkness around her, Evyn closed her eyes tightly, in order to look within. Inspired by her rage, she reached inside and called forth her light. The magic stood at attention, just beneath the surface, right where she could pull its hand and allow it into the world. She knew even with her eyes still closed that her light pushed out against the void.
Evyn opened her eyes to see the light had taken form around her body in the shape of armor. The magic felt warm and bright along her skin, like glistening sunlight. In her right hand, she wielded a sword of her power, blazing against the dark. Seeing what her power had gifted her, she knew what she had to do.
The sword burned in her hands, just on the edge of pain, and as she tightened her grip on the pommel, a blast of light burst from both her body and the weapon. Lifting the blade above her head, Evyn slashed it back down through the darkness, splitting through the void with an arc of light.
Again, and again, and again, she slashed and tore and ripped through the shadows.
Her tears finally came, sobs breaking through her anger to become grief. Her throat tightened, sight blurring, and her nose burned and leaked as she sobbed and screamed with every arc of her sword. She cried every tear within her, and then somehow cried more, her keening splitting the void just as deftly as her magic.
All of the pain she’d been holding back came crashing through. The fear of the unknown she’d faced down every day on this journey, the pain of betrayal from her family, from Enloris, the sincere wish to not have lived through all that she had lived through.
“I... I only...” She could barely speak, barely lift her sword, each sob too painful to breathe through. “I only ever wanted... wanted... to be loved.”
Evyn whimpered, falling to her knees.
Her light melted from armor and sword, before stretching into a globe around her, undulating and pulsing off of her, spreading father and farther into the void, her heartache seeming to strengthen it.
She screamed in protest.
How dare her pain become light! How dare such a magic exist! How dare any divinity who had a hand in such magic!
Her chest and throat hurt from her sobs, face sticky and raw from her tears. She whimpered and bled her light into the darkness until exhaustion dragged her body and struggling eyelids down and down and down...
A gentle touch graced her cheek and warmth spread all over her. The tickle of grass beneath her body shocked her and she jolted awake, her eyes flicking open.
Evyn pushed herself upright, finding herself somewhere familiar, but couldn’t quite pinpoint at first. Then it came to her.
She sat in the field behind her home—no, her parent’s manor. Evyn’s home was the cottage in Elvadyn Forest, not here.
But why was she here?
A little girl ran past her, golden ringlets shining in the sunlight, and the kind of laugh children have when their joy is uninhibited spilled from her. A sound she scarcely remembered hearing, or creating. She shivered, a lump gathering in her throat. Younger Evynria sat in the grass and then rolled around, before sitting up and running off to look at a dandelion. The little one grabbed the flower and ate the yellow top right off the stem.
Evyn’s lips curled up in a smile, unbidden, as she watched the child version of herself chew on the flower and lay in the grass to look up at the clouds.
The grass behind her rustled and she turned from where she sat.
A person—no.
A divinity stood before Evynria. She’d seen them before. She knew them, in her bones. A divinity in a dark cloak holding a staff topped with a skull lit aflame. They looked so at odds with the springtime surroundings, but Evyn’s chest warmed at the sight of them anyway.
“Xedara,” Evyn said, the name coming to her lips with ease, as if her soul knew before her mind did.
The divinity nodded.
“I...” she began, but stopped herself. “Why am I here?”
Xedara lifted her hand to point ahead where younger Evynria had fallen asleep in the field, her blue silk dress covered in mud and grass stains, hair seeping through the wildflowers around her. The sun beat down on her, and she’d probably be sunburnt later, but Evyn knew from experience that the little one would at least earn a few hundred new freckles.
And then she’d have to go back. To them. To her parents and her brother. To pain and heartache and loneliness. To fear.
Evyn’s lower lip wobbled and a small sob escaped her. She held a hand to her mouth before grasping herself with both arms in an embrace.
“She never deserved that,” the divinity said.
Evyn spun around.
“No one ever deserves pain like that.”
She tried to catch her breath, wiping away her tears. “So then why must we endure such pain? Why does your torch light paths that lead us through such suffering?”
“To heal from them.”
Evyn stilled. A moment passed and then anger flew through her like arrows. “Why would we need to heal if wounds never existed?”
“Why exist at all?”
She ground her teeth. “I will not play this game again. You were that voice, weren’t you?”
Xedara said nothing, but by saying nothing, said everything.
“I don’t understand,” she finally admitted, shoulders slumping. “I don’t understand any of this. Why me? Why was I chosen?”
“Who said you were?”
Evyn’s brows furrowed. “Well, the stars—“
“You would let the stars tell you your fate?” the divinity asked. “But you are one.”
She shook her head. “Maybe once before. Maybe here. But out there? Out there, I’m a human. And I bleed and weep and sweat and I can die any moment. And the stars, they make other people die.”
“Do they?”
She grit her teeth again. “Well, why don’t you tell me then?”
The divinity shrugged. “I much prefer hearing how you see things.”
Evyn balled her hands into fists, clenching the fabric of her trousers—not trousers, a nightgown. Blood down the front—his blood. The nightgown she wore when she found him. She couldn’t breathe. She breathed too quickly.
“This burden is too heavy,” she cried, falling to her knees against the tiles of his bathroom floor, no longer in the field of wildflowers. “Who am I to carry such power only to wield it so cruelly, so ignorantly?”
“You believe you should only ever wield power to be kind?”
“Well, I...” she didn’t know what to say. It was all too much. “It’s always too much.”
“It isn’t too much for you, Evynria Bellydia De’Nath, daughter of a mortal, wielder of light, soul from the stars who has known the love of the woods.”
Evyn looked up at the divinity who had moved closer to her this time, the delicate scents of belladonna and thyme hung around her. A snake slithered at her feet, hissing.
“It is,” she complained. “It’s too much for me to carry.”
“No,” the divinity argued. “It is the exact amount you can carry. The amount you were born to carry. You were made to carry light into the world, and though it is heavy, you will grow stronger, and someday, you will hardly notice the weight.”
Evyn wiped away new tears. “That can’t be true.”
“It can. And it is true. Look at all you’ve already done, despite what all you’ve faced,” they said, waving their arms to the bathroom they’d been in.
As they did so, the bathroom became a hallway in her parent’s manor. Her eyes went instinctively to the cupboard—the one she’d hide in for hours, sometimes skipping supper.
The hall faded to empty ballrooms, one after the other, and despite their emptiness, she felt the ghosts of the people who’d been there, remembering what it felt like to decline to dance when she desperately wanted to, seeing her brother watch her from the edges.
Then she stood in her father’s study, her parents’ phantoms stood just where they’d been the day of her brother’s funeral. They’d shouted at her, blaming her for what had happened, wishing it had been her who had died instead.
She cried more and more with each new room, each new setting, each new set of ghost-like figures.
The scene where Voladys found her curled on the forest floor, broken and alone. The scene where she thanked the moon for finding her worthy of saving, even if she didn’t agree. The scene where she buried seeds three years after his death.
And then the scenes changed.
Enloris insisting he join her on her journey. Roan holding her in the void. Otsana sitting with her by the river, telling her to keep her darkness hungry. Ylid trusting her and training her to use the magic that scared her. Arrius thanking her for saving his sister. Arnes telling her the stars had led them to her, chosen her.
“You can not only carry this heavy burden, but you do so with grace and integrity, dear one,” Xedara said, bringing Evyn back to the field of flowers. “You are capable of so much more than you believe. All of this life was created for you. The pain, the healing, the loneliness, and the love. All for you. As all of their lives were created for them.”
She sniffled, tears falling still. Evyn couldn’t stop them and stopped trying to for the most part. “What of the void that was here? What of the replacements? I... I don’t want to—“
“It is gone from here. You banished it to whence it came with your light, and now, it is for your use.”
Evyn blinked. “My use?”
They nodded. “This vessel used to take people to a prison within the Abyss, but now it will take you wherever you wish. You healed it and now it works for a new purpose.”
She had nothing to say at first, trying to absorb all she’d learned. She still didn’t feel right about what she’d learned of pain and the need to heal from it, but a truth sat uncomfortably there that she knew one day she’d have to face, no matter how unfair it seemed.
As she went to tell the divinity thank you, however, she looked up to see that Xedara was gone. All that they’d left behind was a glowing opalescent key in Evyn’s hand that melted into her and disappeared.
Intuitively, Evyn raised that hand to her chest, just above her heart, and closed her eyes.