Page 198 of Voidwalker
Not just the wall she’d built for Boden, but all of them, every wretched brick she’d piled up when sorrow threatened to choke her, every smear of mortar when the cracks began to show. Down it came with a thunderous crash, and for the first time in ten years…
Fi let herself be vulnerable.
Utterly, shatteringly vulnerable.
She threw herself against Antal’s chest and cried, earnesttears that drenched his shirt, wretched sobs that stole her breath. Each time she gasped, he hugged her closer. She let herself cry, bleeding grief and curled nails against the soft hollows of Antal’s skin. She cried because she needed to drain this anguish from her bones if she was ever going to stand up again.
And as he held her, as Antal mumbled soft words into her hair and stroked her back, Fi wondered if he’d had anyone to hold him when he’d broken like this a century ago. She gripped him all the fiercer for it.
For a time, her tears seemed endless.
But that was never the case, was it? Eventually, Fi’s breaths calmed. Her eyes blinked back to focus. Her hands still clenched Antal’s shirt, a hollow but sated feeling in her chest, composure enough to finally look at him again. The daeyari regarded her with soft eyes, lashes veiling irises of glowing crimson.
Bright. Fresh.
Fed.
There came a fresh pang.
“Was it hard?” she whispered. “Knowing his name?”
Fi was grateful for his pause, the weight he gave her question.
“I think,” Antal said, “I was glad to know his name. Maybe that should become a habit.”
And he’d be stronger for it, strong enough for their confrontation with Verne. Another parting gift from Boden. Not to be squandered.
“We have to see this through,” Fi said. “We have to make this right.”
“We will. As Veshri watches from the Void, I’ll see this through with you, Fionamara.”
A different chill ran down Fi’s spine. A memory of endless black. Red eyes. She swallowed the remnants of her sorrow for now, sitting straighter in Antal’s lap.
“Antal?” Fi’s voice came swollen. Hesitant.
He tilted his head, face half buried in the Void roots of her hair.
“Is Veshri… real?”
Antal paused a long moment. Then a confused, “Of course Veshri is real. He was the first daeyari to achieve immortality, by weaving a body of Void ether. He taught others of his kind to follow, millennia ago.”
“Sure. But what about now?”
“Veshri wanders the Void. When daeyari near the end of their first millennium, it’s common to take a pilgrimage. They travel the Shattered Planes, hoping to intersect Veshri’s path.”
“What does he look like?”
Antal shifted her to arm’s length. “I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but… Veshri is the oldest of the daeyari. More at home in the Void than upon the Planes, antlers sharp and clothes spun from darkness. Why do you ask, Fionamara?”
She’d love to tell him. In a moment. After she remembered how to breathe.
“When I was trying to get away from Verne. I cut a Curtain into the Void—amistake,” she added, noting Antal’s alarm. “I panicked and I made a mistake and… I was in the Void, Antal. I should have fucking died. Then a daeyari appeared. I thought I imagined him, but… he helped me get out.”
A ludicrous story, when Fi spun it all into one run-on, tear-muffled summary.
Antal’s eyes went impossibly wide.
“You cut into the Void?” he whispered.
