“Lotte.”
I could feel the incantation trying to fold me into the midworld as keenly as I could feel Calder’s hand on my wrist, trying to drag me with him. I held fast, refusing them both, imagining my limbs were as heavy as iron as I drew on my Vold magic, letting it flood me with strength.
I stared at the space where Calder had stood, long after he had disappeared. The Spider huddled quietly before me, the great masters witnessing my choice without expression. I saw none of it, my memory burning with the vision of mismatched eyes, tight with betrayal. I had taken enough from Calder. I had caused him enough pain. He had sacrificed again and again, and I was deciding that it was enough, even though it wasn’t my decision to make.
I wasn’t going to let him watch me die.
I knelt opposite the Spider, my legs folded beneath me, my palms resting on my knees. With the pain of what I had just done and the fear of what lay before me, I stared past the Spider to the Darkness, calmly fuelling all my emotion into my thudding heartbeat. The drumming of my power reverberated through the cave, duplicating with each echo until it was an army of drums, leading an army of Vold, all of them thundering through me to get to the horrible dark thing infecting the woman before me.
I heard their cries, their axes and bows raised into the air, the tattoo of their horses hurtling toward me. It was the power of my ancestors; deep and rich and dark. It spilled against my tongue and burned in the back of my eyes, and I let it take me over, uncaring of the consequences.
The people I cared about were far away.
The great masters could leave whenever they wanted, but I knew they wouldn’t. Whatever they were, they wouldn’t perish at my hand—or at the hand of the Darkness. They were playing a bigger game, fighting the larger war. When this battle ended, they would remain, watching the lines of fate snap away from me, fallout released to the wind, waiting to catch onto some new victim.
“You don’t have limitless power,” I told the Darkness. “You’re wavering already. This cave isn’t shaking. My sweat has dried up. Did you exhaust yourself?”
“The world must have balance,” it replied, through the Spider’s unmoving mouth, it’s oily voice almost drowned out by the sound of my power thundering through the cave. “Where there is darkness, there is light.” The Spider crawled closer, sitting on her knees as I was. She motioned to herself, and then to me. “For centuries, we have fought for control, and for centuries, the light has lost. And now here you are, the final obstacle, the final defence, the last remaining speck—”
I released my hold on the energy broiling inside me, my eyes never leaving the Spider as it exploded out of me in a series of whispering shadows. They multiplied like smoke fanned from the flame, swelling and forming cloud-like billows that disappeared into the cracks of the mountain above us. For a moment, nothing happened, and then there was an explosion of sound and light as the sky opened up above us, the entire top of the mountain blowing into a million pieces. Those pieces rained down everywhere—huge boulders and jagged shards of rock, all falling in a seemingly deliberate pattern to encircle the slab of rock where I still knelt, facing the Spider. Neither one of us moved, even as the shadows grew larger, sucking oxygen from the air and expanding, noise like thunder rumbling across the landscape and making the little pebbles around my knees jump.
I curled my hands into fists as I felt the pull against my heart. It beat frantically, only now registering the extent of energy that I had just released into the world. It thudded faster and faster, my breath coming in short, pained gulps. The whole sky was darkening, the heat of the dying sun filtering away until it was only a faint orange spark behind dark and monstrous storm clouds. The air smoked in places, and I raised a hand in wonder, the awful pain in my chest forgotten for a moment as a little pocket of air seemed to burn and crease, wrinkling down to ash and floating away. It smelled of putrid, rotting flesh. My shadows were burning the Darkness from the very air around us.
Before me, the Spider began to scream—the sound broken apart only by her manic laughter, which seemed to persist through her obvious agony.
“You’re going to die!” she screamed at me, glee in her yellow eyes and a promise beneath them, winking through black eyes.
The frantic thudding of my heart slowed to a sluggish blur, and I knew she was right. I turned my face up to the sky as it began to rain. Ash and water. Dirty and cold. It whipped against my cheeks as the wind battered it in every direction. The smell of disease itself being burnt into cinders filled my nose, making me choke as I watched the world fall to a different kind of darkness.
My darkness.
It was soggy and filthy and beautiful as it grew and grew, thundering so loud that I almost tricked myself into seeing the army made of shadows charging down the mountain in search of the Darkness. Tendrils of smoke curved around the Spider, seeping into her eyes and mouth. She began to choke, her skin burning and flaking away into little flickers of ash. The rain persisted, forcing each little ember to drive towards the ground, where it joined rivulets of slush flowing down the mountain.
I tipped forwards, my head falling to the Spider’s lap, my arms curling up to protect my chest. My hands pressed over my heart. I couldn’t feel it beating anymore. It strained, and I strained with it, fighting for another breath, and then another, each short inhale costing me dearly. The light had been sucked from the world, and I suffocated on evil as it rained down around me. I blinked through the deluge, hearing the torso of the Spider thump to the ground beside me, her legs a dead weight beneath my head. We would die here together. Dark and light.
The world would be in balance once more.
Something moved toward me, and I forced my eyes to stay open long enough to make out Vidrol’s face. He crouched, his hand slipping beneath my shirt until his fingers pressed to my heart. It rattled back at him. An echo of life.
“I can save you,” he said lowly, the green in his eyes filling me with silky energy.
It whispered against the bones of my rib cage, feeding me enough air to gasp out a sound that was more of a plea. He pressed his fingers inward, and I almost felt my skin collapse beneath his touch, the Spider’s prophecy drifting back into my mind as my heart strained toward him.
For a world repeated three times, there will be three champions. If three times they fail, evil will be set free, and a final storm will stir in the wind. The storm will fall to the waters, the worlds lost to darkness, her failing heart in the fist of a King.
I thought it referred to the king of Ledenaether, and maybe, it had been a possibility—one of the many lines of fate now dangling freely from my soul—but instead, the King of Fyrio knelt before me, his power wrapping around my heart, breathing life back into it.
“If you want to continue in this world, you will continue as its queen, Lavenia.”
His words fed into his power, wrapping another layer around my heart, squeezing it so tightly I wasn’t sure if he was saving me, or ensuring he would be the one to kill me. This was the moment they had been waiting for—the moment of my death. Vidrol had decided that this particular future didn’t suit his designs, and he was stepping in to interfere … but not without a price. I could feel the heaviness settling into my limbs, the fuzziness at the corners of my vision.
“Help,” I croaked, because I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, even though we both knew I was accepting his terms.