Page 47

He protected me, Soren, his mother, and Axel. He wanted to protect the entire kingdom when he became a god, and although becoming a god for vengeance was selfish, he also possessed pure, human intentions.

I peeled my eyes open and jammed the blade back into the open wound. Dirt from my hand caught on the shiny blade in flecks, and my blood coated the jagged tip.

I cut through the first rune, creating the shape of algiz for protection. Together, the shapes made a new rune that represented protection crossed with love. That was all of Drak’s human side. The line with two splitting arms at the top and a single point in the center resembled a tree reaching for the heavens. How strangely ironic that something reminding me of Yggdrasil, where I lost him, was a piece of what also brought him back to me.

“I’m yours,” I repeated. “I’m yours, Drak.”

With the new rune complete, I squeezed the blood out faster onto his soul, waiting for it to change, evolve, restore. Scarlet droplets slid over the odd angles of the crystal, finally dripping to the dirt where they’d stain the earth alongside the blood of the hundreds of souls who gave their lives during the Battle of Sundered Sky.

The soul expanded, scorching the earth around it as the sharp shapes stretched into more violent angles. Another black fracture cut through the brilliant crystal. I hesitated to touch it while steam hissed from the surface, waiting until the glow faded and the mist slowly cleared.

I reached out, swallowing as I pressed my wounded palm against it. The sharp edges dug into my cuts, but the crystal was cool to the touch.

“It’s done,” Soren said behind me, his voice full of something I couldn’t identify. “His body will be waiting where he died.”

Stasia groaned. “Not back up the mountain!”

I snapped my eyes up at him. “How did you know that?”

“It’s what you said is in the journal,” he said, still staring at the soul. His cheeks were flushed and eyes ‌consumed by the sight. I’d forgotten I’d recited the entire passage to him three times now. “And also, I see it. That’s a complete soul. It’s…” he took a labored breath. The moon glinting off the crystal reflected in his light brown eyes. “It’s calling to his body.”

I furrowed my brow, looking back at the soul. “What do you mean?”

“You can’t feel that?” he said, almost as if in a trance. “It craves to return to where it belongs. It remembers being shattered. It remembers every part of his vampire existence, and it wants nothing to do with it. It must return to where it belongs soon.”

His body, his soul’s home. Drak was my home too.

After wrapping my hand with the bandages Stasia had stolen from Mara’s Keep on our way out, I cupped the soul and stood with it in my hands.

It felt wrong to say I was bringing his soul home, because this had been our home once. Old Skaldir was where we belonged.

As Stasia, Soren, and I pushed beyond the ruins’ boundaries, I silently swore to return again with Drak when he was restored and in his body. Even if we couldn’t live here because he had to sit on that damn throne, we’d return at least one more time.

Lux

If the dirt beneath his soul was scorched earth, the place where Yggdrasil burned was a scar. I stared at it in disgust. Instead of black jagged lines like from a lightning strike, or barren and stained like the ruins, the former gods’ domain was alive. This sunlit part of the wasteland showed the earliest signs of recovery, but the gods left their mark. The hole where Yggdrasil’s roots had burned was a cavern shrouded in darkness. An abyss, and in that moment, I suddenly believed this led to the underworld.

Horror choked me.

“Where’s Drak?” I pushed out the words. My frantic search began with a thudding heart and eyes blown wide. “Where’s his body?”

Other than the sprouting tiny flowers blooming at our feet, the dirt moist and tenable, and the abyss left by Yggdrasil, nothing was here. The ash was gone, dispersed by an unseen wind. Soft grey clouds drifted overhead, dimming the sunset from bright to a matte violet spread across the sky behind the clouds.

Quiet blanketed the peak—the true peak—of Vylheim. Mara’s inhabitants once believed the castle was at the apex of our world, a misunderstanding because of the wasteland’s toxic and enshrouding fumes.

Only the sound of Soren sucking air through his teeth and Stasia’s heavy breaths broke the silence. My heart slammed against my ribcage with an ache I’d do anything to cease. I’d carve into my hands again, over and over, splitting the fresh wound open to end this grief.

While the abyss held Stasia and Soren’s attention, my eyes flicked over every inch of ground in the gods’ former domain. My heart raced faster and faster the longer I looked at…nothing.

Fuck! Where are you, Drak?

My thoughts pinned on him while my gaze strayed back to the abyss. The way the shadows curled and uncurled from it, like steam from hot mead, tormented me. What the Hel was down there? Maybe it was Hel’s home. The underworld, where Loki’s forgotten daughter received part of the world’s dead under Odin’s instruction.

I stared, unable to blink as darkness ebbed and flowed, in and out, calling and beckoning us to our deaths. According to the sagas, only one of Yggdrasil’s roots reached Hel; the others stretched into the world of giants, Jotenheim, and…here, Midgard—earth. Yet, why did it seem Hel had taken control?

I forced my eyelids down, peeling them back up again through the dry sting. “No,” I said aloud. I wouldn’t believe the worst yet.

Petals crushed beneath my boots as I ran from one end of the peak to the other. The little white flowers faced the sun in worship of it, but the petals I’d stepped on ended up crushed and flattened to nothing as they squished back into the earth.