32. Melisandre

32

MELISANDRE

A gateway demon ripped Gwyneira away from me, and then she passed beyond the edge of the gateway itself.

In the darkness, I screamed with rage.

I’d had her. I’d been within inches of snuffing her life out forever, and then that damn amorphous thing had the audacity to intervene.

“We should make him pay, don’t you agree, pet?”

Snarling inarticulately, I ignored him. Alaric was only a trick played by the Voidborn—though how the hell he’d managed to be here in this place too, I couldn’t imagine. The gateways weren’t the empty realms, nor were they my realm. Not precisely, anyway. A middle space just beyond reality but still attached to it, weaving through the gaps between what was and what wasn’t , they should have been beyond the reach of Voidborn trickery.

But the creatures who called this place home certainly weren’t beyond the reach of me.

Stretching out into the darkness again, I whipped my power through the between-space that formed the energy of a gateway. Tearing into it as if with claws, I didn’t stop until something caught, something writhed.

Something screamed.

I grinned. In my grip, the little gateway demon thrashed and squealed like a trapped piglet made only of energy. It wasn’t the larger wretch that had saved Gwyneira.

But it would do.

I shredded the shrieking gateway demon into nothing but ephemeral fragments of energy and dust.

“Well, that hardly satisfied,” Alaric commented dryly.

An irritated sound escaped me. “Be quiet.”

“You didn’t even catch the one responsible for thwarting you.”

“I did enough.” Irritation swelled. I shouldn’t be answering him, especially after he just ignored my command to be silent.

The arrogant bastard needed to fear me, not receive encouragement for disrespecting me.

He chuckled. “Do not misunderstand, pet. It is impressive that you can use my power to capture a gateway demon with your ‘bare hands,’ hypothetically speaking. But is that truly the limit of what you want to do? Frighten a few ethereal mice, when you could terrify lions?”

I didn’t respond.

His voice held his smile, even if I couldn’t see him. “Peer past the edge of the gateway, pet. Let me show you what could be yours.”

Damn the bastard for being so tempting. But that was the point, really. He would have me bend—even just a little—to his wishes, when in reality he was dead and gone. Nothing but a game played by the surviving Voidborn.

“Unless,” Alaric continued casually, “you’d rather hide from your true greatness and cower in your own little realm like Smelly Melly the pig farmer’s daughter once cowered from the village girls who terrified her?”

Rage twisted in my gut, hot and biting. How dare he use my past to taunt me?

“Is that who you really are, pet? Smelly Melly… or a queen on her way to becoming a goddess?”

How dare the bastard think he could speak to me this way?

I flung my power at the edge of the lingering energy of the gateway. All around me, the space shuddered, cracking and tearing, unable to withstand my might.

Shrieks came from the tiny beings who still hid within the darkness, hoping they were too small for me to notice them. They burned as the blurred space of the gateway splintered and let in light from my world and darkness from the empty realm beyond.

Alarm tried to interrupt me at that, chattering that perhaps this was a mistake, but that was a mere distraction. Those cracks were nothing. A testimony to my strength and nothing else.

The rippling effects of my strike faded, leaving the energy of the gateway hovering around me like the fraying threads of a rope on the verge of being severed completely. Tendrils of light and sound seeped in behind me from my world, plucking at my awareness like annoying fingers trying to pry me back from the edge of greatness.

But before me lay a profound and eternal darkness. I could see it past the gaps I’d created in the gateway energy, as if the fractured space of the gateway was a cliff overlooking something so much deeper than mere night.

Shudders crept through me, unstoppable. My eyes couldn’t leave the darkness, the pure and utter emptiness in which nothing so small and fragile as life could ever hope to survive. The sheer weight of it, the enormity and inescapability of it, had given rise to countless warnings from the witches and scholars. They all believed that without precautions and protections, it would drive their lesser minds utterly mad.

But I’d been here once. Seen this once, when Gwyneira had escaped being sent here as a sacrifice in my place. Alaric had taunted me that I hadn’t survived it unscathed, but I didn’t believe him. He was a fiction made by the Voidborn to torment me.

Or… he was now. But back then, he had been real. At least before I killed?—

“Do you feel it, pet? How it calls to you?”

I growled in irritation. Damn that bastard and his persistent attempts to destabilize me. I wouldn’t crack in the face of him or this place. “I hear nothing.”

“Now, that is a lie.”

“What would you have me perceive, you dead, irrelevant bastard?”

“The possibilities.”

“What?”

“Look closer.”

Fear bubbled at the edge of my mind, and Alaric chuckled, contemptuous, as if he could tell.

Rage took its place, crushing any paltry trace of cowardice as completely as this place wanted to crush me. That bastard sounded closer now. Practically like he stood at my side, but that was madness and I wouldn’t succumb to such a thing.

I peered deeper into the darkness as if I was leaning over the edge of a cliff. But I would not fall. I only sought the better vantage point I deserved.

The darkness before me changed. Pinpricks of light glimmered in the distance, glinting like stars. Clouds of myriad colors slowly became visible, dancing between some of the stars while others shone all on their own, surrounded by nothing but darkness. Like a glistening land beyond a fathomless sea, they all lingered on the far side of the darkness, whispering. Waiting.

Alaric’s voice came again, thoughtful and quiet, almost as if he was standing by my side and musing upon this sight. “The highest ranks of scholars and witches have only glimpsed what you now see.”

I nodded distantly, staring. I’d heard this described. Gleaned details from what little those vain bitches in the Jeweled Coven had mentioned in my presence, years before when they thought me nothing more than a carbon witch barely worthy of being a servant let alone capable of achieving anything great.

But to see it…

“Countless realms,” Alaric continued. “Realities upon realities, all of them marring the beautiful darkness with their pollution of noise and life and light.”

I blinked at the description. “Marring?”

“Well, think on it, pet. What would you call all this power and possibility left to just… be ?” He made a rude sound. “The energy of those realms could be used to serve us—to serve you . Yet they continue to simply exist as if you don’t matter. As if you are nothing .”

I shuddered. That… Was that a good point?

It rather felt like one.

I leaned closer, ignoring the plucking fingers of my realm as it tried to pull me back from the abyss like an annoying child seeking my attention. From across the emptiness, hints of the whispers that carried on the clouds of energy reached my ears.

Whispers of truth that entered the other realms as myths. Legends.

Fairytales.

“You can hear them, can’t you, pet?” He hummed low with awe. “All those worlds where your story could be told.”

Anticipation shivered through me.

His voice became a murmur, as if he stood at my ear. “You know what you need to do. Let this realm die. Let it burn and light the way to your destiny.”

Yes.

Wait… no.

“What?” I straightened, pulling back from the abyss. “I am the rightful ruler of this realm. I am its queen . What good does it do me as ash?”

Alaric was silent for a moment, but the strangest awareness of movement prickled at my senses, as if the insufferable bastard paced a thoughtful circle around me.

A vexed noise left me. That wasn’t possible, and I wouldn’t allow him or this place to make me think otherwise.

The light and sound of my realm tugged at me, and this time, I let it draw me back.

If only for now.

“You seek to distract me,” I spat at Alaric as the ruins of a city street in Lumilia appeared fully around me once more. Burned buildings lined the road on either side, soot and fading bloodstains smudging the crumbling walls. By contrast, my velvet dress and fur-lined cloak glistened in the thin rays of sunlight that pierced the smoky, overcast sky, their color all the more vibrant for the darkness from which I’d just come.

Slivers of warped air floated around me.

My breath caught. I lifted an arm, staring.

They weren’t slivers of warped air. They were… nothing. Hair-thin spaces beyond pure darkness, in which light and substance simply didn’t exist. They floated away from me like dandelion seeds on a breeze.

“I don’t seek to distract you, pet,” Alaric said calmly.

I looked up. In the glass fragments of a broken window, he smiled, wisps of this same endless darkness dancing around him. “I only seek to help you become what you were always meant to be.”