Page 56 of Branded By Shadow
“You’re right,” she said, the words clear and steady, cutting through the roar of the battle. “I have to stop fighting.”
She took a single, deep breath. She closed her eyes. And she let go.
It started with a crack in the stone floor at her feet. A delicate fissure from which a single, impossible flower emerged. It was a black rose, its dark petals unfurling with an unnatural grace. Then another crack, and another. A silver poppy. A spectral lily whose petals glowed with a soft, internal light.
The cracks spread across the entire amphitheater, a beautiful, intricate web. From every fissure, flowers erupted, blooming in a silent wave of creation. The stone floor was consumed, replaced by a carpet of surreal, otherworldly blossoms. The frigid air was suddenly thick with a thousand intoxicating scents. It was a tidal wave of life, so potent and overwhelming it was almost suffocating.
The battle ground to a halt. Julian’s agonizing aura of golden light flickered, his concentration broken by the sheer impossibility of it all. Marcus, still trapped to his knees in black ice, stared with wide, disbelieving eyes. He and Alexander could only watch as the divine garden bloomed around them.
And the abyss, which had been a creature of pure, concentrated malice, was overwhelmed. Its predatory focus on Julian shattered, replaced by a sudden, lustful gluttony.
The Shadow Realm had craved Cora for so long, and now, she had apparently offered herself up on a silver platter. The void was a wolf paralyzed by the appearance of its perfect prey. Its control, once absolute, was fractured by pure, ravenous desire.
For the first time in what seemed like forever, my head cleared of its horrible whispers. In that sudden, beautiful, terrible silence, a familiar presence reached out to me.“It’s drunk on her power, son. Lost in its own need to consume.”
My father. He was one of the few people the void hadn’t tried to use against me. It shouldn’t have been possible, not when he’d succumbed to its power years ago. But my father had strength still.
“What do I do?” I wanted to ask. I couldn’t move my mouth, but my father heard me anyway.
“The Shadow Realm’s hunger is its only weakness. It has no discipline, only appetite. It cannot hold you if you have an anchor it cannot touch. Find her in your mind. Hold on to her. Now!”
The command was a blade of pure clarity in the chaos. He was giving me a weapon. A strategy. While the void was lost in its gluttony, mesmerized by the impossible garden, I had a chance. I fought the hunger, the hate, the relentless pull of the nothingness. I tore my consciousness away from the stunning, lethal offering that Cora had laid out, and focused on the source.
On her.
I found her image in my mind, her amber eyes, the defiant set of her jaw, the memory of her scent. I grasped at it, a drowning man clinging to a single piece of driftwood in an endless, black ocean.
I pulled on the ghost of our broken bond, on the memory of her surrender, on the faith in her voice when she had screamed my name. I made her my anchor, the one thing in existence the void could not devour because it was already a part of me.
And for a brief, miraculous moment, I found purchase.
The churning chaos of my form began to coalesce, the shadows pulling inward with a sound like grinding stone. The massive scythe-blade on my arm dissolved back into flesh. The lashing tendrils retracted into my body. The rampage ceased. The oppressive cold in the amphitheater lessened. My skin started to reappear, visible beneath the swirling darkness that still clung to my shoulders like a tattered shroud.
I was still a thing of horror, a creature of nightmare made manifest. But I was the one holding the reins. I could beat this. Or so I thought.
A high, piercing whine shrieked through the air, and a scream of pure, white light cracked against my chest.
The impact was a sensation of pure, holy fire, a cauterizing brand searing itself directly into my soul. I looked down and saw it. The arrow sticking from my body.
It had found one of the few parts of me that remained solid. And, in the process, it had targeted the one thing holding me together.
The anchor shattered.
The image of Cora in my mind cracked and dissolved into dust. My father’s advice, the lifeline from the abyss, was just an echo, then nothing. The fragile control I had just won, the purchase I had found, was burned away in an instant.
As the light faded, a voice cut through the ringing in my ears like a blade of righteous hatred twisting in the wound. “Cleanse this filth, sisters! Now, when he is weak.”
The void began to laugh. A patient, triumphant sound that filled every corner of my being.
How convenient,it purred in my mind.Artemis’s aim is always so precise. And now, there is nothing to stand in our way.
The flesh I had reclaimed dissolved. The bones that had just solidified turned to smoke. My consciousness, the very thing that wasme, began to fray and unravel like old thread. I felt my memories being eaten, my name being erased, my very existence being rendered down into the base, mineral nothingness of the Realm.
The last thing I felt before the cold took everything was the ghost of a broken bond. The last thing I saw behind my eyes was her face.
Cora.
Then nothing remained but darkness. I was no longer a man. I was no longer a conduit.
