Page 117 of The Madness Within

My fingers pulsed with fire and ash. His eyes glowed red, seething with the hunger of a justice no court would ever understand.

The child, Asa, the lie he’d worn, screamed. All three mouths opened at once, each wailing a different pitch. He twisted, black ichor oozing from his nose, his eyes rolling white. He tried to shift again, to hide behind some new illusion.

We didn’t let him.

“Ever wonder what happens to monsters when the gods stop watching?” I murmured, pressing my fire slicked palm to his chest. My magic surged, burning through skin and soul.

Dorian’s shadows struck next, horned, spiked, beautiful in their cruelty, piercing each throat at once before yanking the creature into the air. He convulsed, cracked, all three necks snapping like dry wood. Still alive. Still writhing.

I tore open his chest with a flick of my wrist and a whispered command, revealing the mess of bone and void where a heart should’ve been. “This is your punishment,” I whispered. “Not death. Exposure.”

He bled smoke and screams. Reality split at the seams around him. Dorian howled a curse into the night, a vow that froze the air and shattered the stained glass in the rafters.

Then the beast looked at me, only me.

His middle head, the stitched one, forced open its mouth, skin splitting, and with a voice soaked in decay and prophecy, it rasped, “The Hollow King is coming for you… and this world.”

The chapel shook. The candles exploded.

Dorian’s voice cut through the chaos. “What did he say?”

But I couldn’t answer, not right away.

Because in that moment, something ancient in me woke up. A thread of my power snapped loose like a leash breaking from its post. My hands trembled, not with fear, but with recognition.

When I finally spoke, my voice was nothing but truth.

“He wasn’t talking to you.”

After we ended him, we burned the body in Veilfire and buried it beneath salt and silver.

The air hadn’t felt right since.

Something shifted the second those words left his lips, something old, something watching. Like the world exhaled wrong and hasn't quite remembered how to breathe again.

Later that night, I sat curled at the edge of the bed, knees hugged to my chest, watching the fire chew through the last of the wood.

Its glow kissed the walls in flickering waves, but I felt no warmth. Just a weight pressing behind my ribs, coiled like a whisper I couldn’t shake.

“He said the Hollow King is coming,” I murmured, voice low, cracking. “And I believe him. I just… I don’t know who that is. Or why he sounded like he already knew me.”

Dorian came up behind me, his hand sliding into my hair, his thumb tracing the curve of my jaw. “Then we’ll find out,” he said, calm like thunder before a war. “And when we do, we’ll tear down whatever stands in our way.”

I turned toward him, my smile a blade sheathed in soft lips. “We always survive, Dorian. But this feels different. Bigger.”

He didn’t answer right away. He just kissed me, slow, deep, like he was trying to anchor me to now. To him.

And maybe I needed that.

Because whatever the Hollow King was, whatever he wanted…

He’s coming for me.

But he’d have to go through the devil I married first.

Epilogue

There was a time I thought death was the only thing that truly made sense.

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