Chapter 20 The Void That Takes and Gives
Falling should’ve felt like falling.
Wind tearing past.
Stomach dropping.
Gravity dragging bone and soul in one direction.
Instead, the void took us like water swallowing a stone silent, cold, absolute. No wind. No sensation. No sense of movement. Just pressure. All around. Inside. Like fingers squeezing through my ribs in search of something burning.
I clung to Eryndor as if gripping him could anchor reality itself.
“Eryndor”
My voice didn’t echo. It just dissolved into the dark.
His arms tightened around me. “Stay awake. Do you hear me? Kaia stay awake.”
“I’m trying.”
The void soaked into my skin, numbing everything. My thoughts pulling apart like threads.
A flicker of gold sparked across his scales, flaring then dimming like a dying ember.
“This place feeds on what burns,” he rasped. “Don’t let it take yours.”
Too late.
I could feel it.
Something inside me a memory, a spark, a voice being scraped thin.
A sudden jolt slammed us sideways.
Not the void. Something in it.
Eryndor growled, twisting mid-air or mid-nothing trying to shield me. “It followed.”
My blood froze.
A ripple moved through the darkness behind us.
The shadow.
The thing that wore no face but endless hunger.
Eryndor’s wings half-formed, flickering flared with molten gold. The void hissed, recoiling from the light. For a heartbeat, I could see the shadow behind us a distortion, a smear of darkness, swimming through the black.
Its voice reached us.
Not through ears. Through the bones.
“You fall where she fell.”
Eryndor snarled. “Ignore it!”
But I couldn’t.
Because the void shifted.
A faint outline appeared beneath us.
Stone.
Red stone.
Cracked like old scars.
And a tower burned, half-collapsed, spiraling upward through an ocean of nothing.
A whisper sliced through my mind:
“Astra’s last refuge… and her grave.”
I gasped.
The ash-haired woman.
The burned robes.
Her bronze eyes, heavy with warning.
Her voice telling me to run.
“Astra,” I whispered.
Eryndor’s entire body tensed. Hard.
“Don’t say her name here.”
“Why? Who was she to you?”
His breath hitched.
The shadow surged closer.
The void closed around us like a throat swallowing whole.
No more time.
Eryndor roared, wings igniting fully in a burst of molten light that tore through the dark. The void trembled under the blaze, rippling like disturbed water. The red stone platform rushed toward us and then we hit.
The impact blasted air from my chest. Pain shot up my spine. Eryndor rolled, dragging me beneath him as chunks of fractured stone shattered around us.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then the world groaned.
The platform beneath us cracked, splintering downward. The red stone pulsed like a heartbeat.
Eryndor staggered up, pulling me with him. His body flickered between forms, wings dissolving into smoke at the edges.
“We have seconds,” he rasped. “Before it arrives before this place remembers us.”
“Remembers us?”
“This is a memory that bleeds. You step too deep you drown in someone else’s past.”
The platform shuddered again.
This time, I heard something beneath it.
Breathing.
Slow. Deep. Ancient.
My skin crawled.
“Where do we go?” I demanded.
He pointed toward the half-collapsed tower jutting upward. Jagged steps spiraled along the exterior, vanishing into black fog.
“Up. Before the void tears this open.”
We ran.
The steps were narrow, crumbling beneath our feet. Every breath tasted of ash. The tower moaned under the strain of being remembered by something hostile.
Behind us, the shadow slipped into the memory.
The air turned cold.
A whisper slithered through the cracks in reality:
“We smell her fire in you. We smell her fear.”
I stumbled.
Eryndor caught my wrist.
“Do not answer it,” he warned again. “Your voice gives it shape.”
The tower jerked sideways as the shadow’s presence tore through the space below. Chunks of stone ripped loose and spun upward like gravity had forgotten which way was down.
My mind wasn’t doing much better.
We climbed faster.
The fog thickened, coiling around us like smoke with intention. Sometimes it felt like hands. Sometimes like breath. Sometimes like the memory of someone calling my name.
At one point I heard footsteps behind us soft but familiar.
Eryndor looked over his shoulder and swore violently.
“Don’t look back,” he ordered.
“Why?”
“Because whatever you hear it is not real.”
I didn’t listen.
I looked.
I saw… me.
A younger version.
Seven? Eight?
Barefoot.
Eyes glowing faint gold.
Hands black with soot.
She reached toward me with a trembling hand.
“Come back,” she whispered.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
Eryndor’s roar snapped me out of it. “KAIA!”
The child vanished like smoke hit by a gust.
My legs locked. Breath shaking. “What what was that?”
“A memory. Not yours.” He cupped my cheek, forcing my gaze up. “This place uses the past like bait.”
I swallowed hard.
“What past?”
I whispered it. I already knew I shouldn’t have.
Eryndor’s expression twisted. Tight with something more than fear. Something like grief sharpened into anger.
“The one she died protecting.”
Before I could ask more, the tower walls buckled sucked inward as though inhaled.
The shadow was climbing.
Its presence scraped against the stones. Tore through the fog. Crept up the steps behind us with steady inevitability.
We ran harder.
My lungs burned. My legs shook.
Halfway up the spiral, the fog parted.
A door appeared in the stone wall smooth, metal, untouched by fire or age. Runes glimmered faintly along its edge, pulsing with a soft, tired light.
Eryndor froze.
“That wasn’t here,” he whispered.
“What is it?”
He stared at the runes with an expression I couldn’t read. Or maybe one he didn’t want me to.
“Her seal.”
A chill slid down my spine.
“Astra’s?”
“Yes. But if this door showed itself…” His voice strained. “It means it recognized you.”
Before I could ask whether that was good or horrific, the stone behind us exploded inward.
The shadow surged through.
Eryndor shoved me toward the door. “Kaia—open it!”
“How?!”
“Blood!” he shouted. “Flame!”
I pressed my palm to the metal.
For a heartbeat nothing.
Then heat flared beneath my skin. A soft glow. Like something inside me responding to something buried in the door.
A whisper brushed my ear female, distant, exhausted:
“Let it burn.”
The seal blazed gold.
The door cracked open and a wave of heat blasted outward like the breath of a dying star.
Eryndor grabbed me and dove inside just as the shadow lunged. The door slammed shut behind us with a metallic scream.
Silence crashed over the chamber.
My pulse hammered.
The room around us… wasn’t stone.
It was metal.
Curved.
Smooth.
Burned black in spiraling patterns.
In the center stood something that looked like a cocoon of molten gold frozen mid-flow, its surface etched with runes that shimmered like dying embers.
I stepped closer.
“What is this place?”
Eryndor’s voice was barely a whisper.
“This… was her heartforge.”
“Astra’s?”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes, exhaling a tremor. “The last place she stood alive.”
I felt the temperature rise slightly warming, not burning. The runes along the cocoon pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat struggling to return.
“Eryndor,” I murmured, “why does it feel like this place… knows me?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Then quietly, painfully
“Because part of her flame lives in you. And it has been waiting a long, long time for you to return.”
My breath hitched.
Before I could respond, the runes flared too brightly to look at.
The cocoon cracked open.
And something inside it began to stir.