Page 95 of She Who Holds My Wrath

Time fractures, memory splinters, and the world just… dissolves. There’s nothing. I am nothing. There is only The Void.

It has teeth. It digs into what’s left of me, pulling at the tattered shape of my soul, tearing, tasting, trying to dissolve me into nothing.

I don’t know if it’s minutes, days, years. I only know I’m suspended in something that is not life, and not death. Because death would mean rest. But I’m not alive, either. I’m caught in the jaws of an endless beast. And only two things are keeping me from letting go entirely and sinking into oblivion: the echo of Daisy’s voice, and the memory of her hands on my skin.

I cling to them the way a drowning man clings to the last breath of air.

But The Void doesn’t care. It tears at me, rips the pieces of me apart, piece by fragile piece. Every time I try to form a thought, a darkness rips through it like claws. Every time I fight for a shape, a name, a self, it rakes me clean and leaves only raw, burning fragments behind.

But one thing it can’t quite eat, is the bond. Our bond is a torn thread, a frayed little ember where there used to be a roaring inferno. But it’s there. Thin and faint, buried under layers of nothingness. But it’s my only hope.

I grab it. It hurts. Every time I reach for it, black fire gnaws at me. But I hold on anyway. I follow it, hand over hand, crawling along an invisible line through the dark. For what feels like centuries, it leads nowhere. A dead end. Just a soft ache of what she used to be.

Until one day, it doesn’t.

The first time I feel her again, it knocks the breath I don’t have out of me. A shock hits the tether: rage, grief, terror. It slams into me like a lightning strike. Suddenly, there she is. Her magic, her emotions, alive and blazing. Not the soft warmth I remember. This is sharper, fractured, tainted. A storm instead of sunlight. But it’s still her.

Daisy.

I run. It’s not running the way I remember, with legs and lungs and ground. It’s motion through nothingness, dragging myself along the bond towards a pinpoint of light in the endless dark. The closer I get, the brighter it grows, until I can see something taking shape at the centre.

Her.

She’s a distant figure in a circle of light, shoulders shaking, golden hair tangled around her face, her hands bright with flame as people crowd around her. My chest constricts.

I reach for the light. My hands—if they are hands—hit something solid. Invisible, but unyielding. A wall, but not. I snarl, pounding my fists against it. The Void shrieks in answer, black fire lashing up my arms. The barrier doesn’t even shudder. It’s like a two-way mirror; I can see her, hear her, feel her… but she can’t feel me.

“Daisy,” I snarl, slamming my palm against the surface. “Little flower. Look at me.”

She doesn’t. She screams instead. A broken sound that shreds through my already ravaged soul. Her grief floods through the bond in jagged waves.

I thought being separated from her by death would be a cruel fate. But watching her break from the other side of an unbreakable wall, is so much fucking worse.

I don’t leave the mirror after that. There’s no point. There’s nowhere else to go. The Void surges around me, endless and hungry, but here, pressed against the barrier, there’s at least light. A sliver. Enough to see her.

I don’t sleep, I don’t eat. I sit on something that is and isn’t a floor, a pitch-black mist coiling around me, and I watch.

She can’t hear me. But sometimes, when the bond stutters, she pauses. Fingers twitching like she’s heard a whisper she can’t quite catch.

Days pass. Weeks. Time leaks away like blood from a wound. But I watch her train with Maelkar, white flame lighting up the arena. His shadows coil, taunting, goading her into striking harder. I hate him more than I have ever hated anyone. The first time he calls her ‘little flower’, something inside me snaps.

“I’ll gut you myself,” I roar, smashing my fist into the barrier. Black fire erupts around my knuckles, eating at whatever passes from my skin. “That’s her name for only me!”

The mirror trembles for the first time. A thin fracture spiders out from under my fist. The Void shrieks in utter delight. It likes it when I break.

Maelkar just smirks in the vision beyond the glass—that infuriating, lazy grin on his lips. Daisy snarls at him, cheeks flushed, sweat coating her brow. And for all my anger, I can’t deny it… he’s making her stronger. He’s honing her into the weapon she needs to be.

When she finally knocks him back, chest heaving, my pride is a physical ache. “Good,” I tell the darkness surrounding me. “Burn him. Burn them all.”

I don’t know how long I sit at the edge of the nothing, my back against the cold invisible barrier, watching her train. Time isn’t real here. There’s only her.

But suddenly, the scene shifts, the arena melts away and stone bleeds into stone, only darker, colder. Torches flare to life in iron brackets, stretching long shadows down a narrow corridor. The wards here hum against my bones with old, heavy magic I recognise from the palace dungeons.

I can tell from the sensations I’m feeling, this isn’t a memory or a flashback of Daisy’s… this is happening now.

Daisy is storming down into the dungeon, Maelkar at her shoulder, with Elyistria and Sariya already ahead, standing outside a cell. Inside, on the floor, huddled against the bars of the neighbouring cell, is Velentha beside him.

The sight hits like another blade in my gut.