40. WEN

Ihurtle into the void head over heels, like a boomerang thrown by an angry god.

When my momentum finally slows down, I don’t know how long I’ve been careening through the nothingness. The one thing I know is that I’m physically here, again. But unlike the first time, there’s no confusion how I got here.

It was that realms-sundering explosion. After I touched Godric’s Angel Essence.

Why it reacted that overwhelmingly, when it only zapped me before, I have no idea. But now that my brain is no longer in a vicious spin cycle, a one-two combo of urgency hit it.

To get the Hell out of here. And to return to Godric.

Godric. He will guide me out. He always brings me back.

But something else comes back to me, making my sluggish heart boom. The look on his face as everything detonated. The shock, the pain.

He shouldn’t have felt anything when I harvested his Angel Essence. Unless …

Dread drenches me as I scour my memory, if the Angel Essence was still connected to him when I saw it.

I can’t remember. After I realized he could see it, and he ordered me to take it, hunger overtook, and I made a grab for it, and?—

What if that was his Life Essence?

No, no. No.

Godric.

My scream for him rends the void. It rages back at me, furious at my disturbance, my presumption.

But he—he doesn’t answer. I feel him nowhere. Like when he disappeared. No, no. NO.

Stop it. Stop falling apart. Slow down. Think.

This could be like that time. I didn’t feel him then, yet he was out there. Maybe I’m overestimating my ability to always sense him. Or my senses are scrambled from that detonation.

Yes. Yes. That has to be it.

But if I can’t connect with him, I have to get out of the void myself. I did it once before, I think. After Azazel almost killed me. I’ll find Godric back in the cavern, trying to bring me back. Nothing has happened to him. I didn’t do anything to him. I couldn’t have. Not him.

Not ever him.

I wrench away from the void’s grasp with everything that I have, and its non-existent tentacles sink deeper into me. It never wants to let me go, but this time it’s rabidly trying to hold me back.

“Let me go, you bitch, or I’ll destroy your empty, evil ass?—”

Suddenly, I’m hurtling again. No, falling.

I slam onto something hard and jagged, hear the crunch of bone and the tearing of muscle even as agony blasts my already fried brain apart.

Once the blood- and bile-colored streaks of pain and nausea clear from my eyes, I realize I’m on my back, staring at the cavern’s craggy ceiling.

The void let me exit it dozens of feet above ground. A lesson, no doubt. A punishment for wanting to leave it, for daring to disrespect it.

My right shoulder and arm feel pulverized. It’s a miracle I didn’t shatter completely.

But the injury isn’t the worst of it. Without Godric guiding me back, the transition between the void’s plane and this one is brutal. I feels like my cells have been scoured and filled with acid. The time distortion is making it feel endless, until I feel dying must be a better option. I bet that’s the void’s doing, too.

I’ll deal with that bitch later. I need to make sure Godric is okay. That’s the one thing keeping me from closing my eyes and escaping into oblivion.

When I finally stop spasming with the torment, I peel my shaking body up on my intact arm, and realize I’m not on the ground. I’m on the altar. Or what used to be the altar. It’s now a heap of smoldering shards.

My heart booms with dismay as my gaze pans around, and the sight that surrounds me?—

“No!”

His cavern. Our cavern. It’s decimated.

My earliest memory is of a post-explosion site. I’ve seen many more throughout my life, in reality or in documentaries. This—this looks, feels far worse than anything I’ve ever seen.

Aside from the destruction that has wrecked everything beyond recognition, the crystalline walls I loved so much have been fused into turbid, scarred expanses. It feels as if the detonation had blasted the magic of this place, destroyed it at the source.

There’s no way I could have survived this. Which means …

Godric. He shielded me.

My heart burns as I rise on trembling legs and shriek, “Godric!”

The silence that answers me resurrects my terror. Hobbling off the destroyed altar, my eyes slam around. The dread of seeing any part of him peeking through the rubble almost makes me black out.

Suddenly, I stumble backwards. With a pull that feels like the leash. If it caught me around the heart, and squeezed.

Without a second thought, I swing around and follow the pull, deeper into the cavern, where I’ve never been before.

As the crunching and grinding of healing tears through me, I weep as I clamber over the debris, pursuing the tug that keeps squashing my heart tighter.

It feels like forever, but it must have been no more than twenty minutes before I exit the radius of destruction. I come to a stop, swaying with depletion—and shock.

A hundred feet away, with a cloud of dense fog hanging high over it, a massive underground lake spreads beyond the limits of my vision. Tranquil waves lap the rocky shore, the rhythm section to what sounds like a choir from Heaven and Hell. The harmonizing hums seem to be coming from every surface, as well as from the depths of the water.

The tug compels me to move again, and with every stumbling step closer, the water phosphoresces brighter. With the same emerald Godric’s eyes emit. My emerald.

The fog seems to be parting under its brunt, and my heart cleaves in two when it reveals what it has been shrouding.

Godric!

Hovering high over the water, he has his back to me, his wings half-spread.

He’s here! He’s okay!

“Godric, I’m here! I?—”

My yell backlashes in my chest when I realize he’s not hovering. He’s floating. His body is limp, swaying within the currents of the flaming runes that seem to have bled off his wings and body to stream around him like rings around a planet.

Then their revolutions bring him facing me. His head falls backward with the movement, and it looks as if he’s looking Heavenward. But even from this distance, I can see his eyes. They’re no longer any of the colors I adore. They’re black.

That’s not what terrifies me. I’ve seen them this dark before. I’ve seen them when he was in a fugue and they were unfocused. But I’ve seen eyes like this, at half-mast and unseeing, only on corpses, before someone closed them …

Heart bursting with fright, I bloody my throat on shrieks. “Godric, look at me—see me—please, please, PLEASE—GODRIC!”

But he remains floating up there, inert. Absent. Gone.

No!He can’t be gone. He can’t be. He isn’t. I didn’t do anything to him. I didn’t.

You did.

Everything inside me, in existence, stalls.

That voice.

What I’ve never heard while awake and aware. What I’ve never really heard before.

The voice of the void.