Page 112 of Witchlight
The Fury never forgets,he thought.Whatever you have done will come back to you tenfold, and it will haunt you until you make amends.
That was all he’d ever wanted to do: make amends.Fixeverything he’d ever broken. But every step Merik had taken forward had meant two… three… a thousand steps falling back. Everyone he’d ever loved was always left ruined or cursed or dead. Kullen. Cam. Safi. His sister. Even his own mother all those years ago. How many times could Merik’s body die, only to come back so he could destroy the world again?
Eventually, the burning in his knees prompted him to haul himself upright. In the distance, he could sense things had changed—although he could pinpoint no reason why. The battle sounded the same. The war forthe Cahr Awen still raged, and he needed to pull himself and his winds together so he could fly that way. So he could stilltryto wring some use from his ever-failing soul.
He was just stumbling away from the embers, sucking winds to him, when he felt his magic shift. Like a wind snapping into a new direction or a whistle piercing through total silence: whatever had been a reliable constant inside him was suddenly gone.
Just … gone.
Merik fell. A lurching, brutal fall that shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did—but that sent him once more to his knees. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He was again choking on Hagfishes that weren’t Hagfishes, and death was coming for him.
He prised up his head, fighting to see against dark, writhing winds that he could no longer feel with his magic. They crushed into him, fists that wanted to shove him down. He couldn’t fight them. He was beyond weak; he was beyond dead; he was simply empty.
Ah, it is he who would be king,said a voice Merik felt more than heard.So close, and so easy to find. But do not worry, Little Hound: it will all be over quickly, the end of everything.
Paladin,Merik thought, and old words surfaced in his brain—sentences from a book in Kullen’s apartment he’d found months ago:The Paladins we locked away will one day walk among us. Vengeance will be theirs in a fury unchecked, for their power was never ours to claim.
Merik knew, with a sickening, violent certainty that such a Paladin had now awoken—and now vengeance would raze the Witchlands until there was nothing left.
At that thought, the ancient voice scuttled up Merik’s neck and tickled into his ear. A living voice that said, “Why, look at the little hound, cowering before his master.”
The winds softened. The blackened cyclone stopped its spinning. And finally he could see who spoke to him: she was like a bird’s skeleton bleached by time and sun. There were echoes of what she might have been—pale, blond, powerful. But now, she was a crooked, stretched-out creature with arms that were too long for her body and fingers with swollen knuckles. Her head was hammered thin and long, her eyes distended and glowing.
“I can see you do not recognize me, but long ago, I was exalted. Long ago, these plains belonged tome,and all knew the name of Itosha.” She smiled, an unnatural expression that revealed teeth too straight. Too sharp. “I will enjoy teaching the world my name again.”
She settled onto the carpet of ash that had once been Last Holdout. For a creature of such distortion, she moved with carnivorous grace.
Merik pushed to his feet, ungainly and weak. He swayed once he was upright—but he didn’t fall over.
It made the creature laugh. “Oh, Little Hound. You have no Paladin here to protect you. And no magic either—which must hurt so very deeply. Although…” Her smile returned, no longer amused, but instead hungry. “Nothing will hurt as much as what comes next.”
She slashed out, a whip of pure wind to reach for Merik.
Time stretched long. As if each heartbeat were a lifetime, each breath a generation. No, Merik had no magic. This monster was right about that. Whatever had once been the source of his witchery, it no longer lived inside him. Where Esme’s collar had cut Merik off from the source, now there was no source.No Well either,he thought—although that realization was deep, deep in the crevices of his brain.
Where Merik also found a tiny pocket of something else.
It blustered and blew inside him. A corner made of Threads that bound him to a different Paladin far, far away inside the sleeping ice. Merik had used those winds before, when he’d fed himself on rage and hungered for vengeance. They’d been brutal and electric.
Now, the winds were the smile of a Threadbrother who wasn’t gone, but only sleeping.Take them,Kullen said from his tomb.
So Merik did.
When Itosha’s wind finished its whipping arc, Merik spun sideways on a burst of freezing, summoned air. Hoarfrost laced around him.
There are advantages to being a dead man,he thought, smiling just as Kullen would have.
Then he made a wind whip all his own, and he attacked.
Vivia was empty. Where for weeks she’d been resisting the magic always lapping and singing, now there was nothing at all. No connection to the waters of the Amonra or the fog still rising into the sunrise.
She’d wondered in the mountain what it would feel like to lose her Tidewitchery—for the waters to snap off into silence. Surely her pained resistance against that magic was infinitely better than having no connection at all.
Ithadbeen.
Now she knew with merciless certainty that the possible deluge of her tideshadbeen far better than having no tides at all.
“Gone,” Vaness croaked, her eyes bulging and terrified.
