CHAPTER 194

CHAPTER 194
It started in my chest.

Not the careful braided layering of power Mother had taught me.

Not the controlled channel Pelagius had drilled into my body over days of training until I could hold all three powers together without my hands shaking. This came from somewhere underneath all of that, somewhere I hadn't known existed until this moment, and it arrived without warning and without mercy.

It hurt.

That was the first thing I noticed.

My limbs felt like a fire was building in it and I was inching towards it, like a moth to a flame.

Like I knew it could kill me but I didn't mind dying.

Nala died this same way after all.

My veins felt like they were expanding. My skin felt too tight. Every breath I pulled in tasted like something burning and it was me, I was the thing burning, the sun moving through a body that could carry it but not without cost, not without bleeding for it.

I stood up anyway.

The Thornick that had been holding my hair had already let go, stumbling backwards with both arms shielding his eyes. The others were doing the same, pulling back, knocking into each other to get away from whatever I had become in the last ten seconds.

Hades turned.

I watched it happen. Watched him turn toward me with that expression he'd been wearing since I walked into his ballroom, that particular contemptuous amusement that hadn't left his face through any of it, through my fighting and my bargaining and my screaming Nala's name across the open air.

I watched it leave.

It didn't disappear all at once. It drained out of him slowly, like water finding a crack, and what replaced it wasn't fear exactly, not yet, but it was the thing that comes just before fear in someone who has never had reason to feel it before.

A reassessment.

His eyes moved over me with something that looked almost like concentration.

"What," he said slowly, "is that?"

I didn't answer him.

I didn't have words left. I had grief and guilt and rage and underneath all of it this enormous burning thing that was costing me blood just to hold and I was done spending any of it on conversation.

I hit him with everything.

The blast picked him up off his feet and threw him backwards into the palace wall hard enough to crack the stone behind him, and the sound of it was enormous, ringing out across the entire domain, silencing everything else.

I was already moving before he landed, pulling sun power forward despite the way it tore at me from the inside, ignoring the blood running freely from my nose, from the reopened gash on my leg, from somewhere along my hairline I hadn't noticed until now.

The dark underground was suddenly very bright and I increased the brightness, desperate to destroy the cause of my sorrows.

All these underground rulers ever do is take from me and I'm fucking done with it so if it'll cost me my life then so fucking be it.

I'll die happy.

Eternity with this guilt sounded terrible anyway

He came off the wall faster than I expected.

That was new.

That was him taking me seriously and it should have frightened me but I had nothing left that fear could attach itself to, so I noted it and kept moving.

He threw his darkness at me in a concentrated wave, more powerful than anything he'd used before, and I felt it hit my chest like a physical wall and I didn't dodge it, didn't deflect it, just let it crash into the sun power burning through me and I felt it dissolve, darkness hitting light and dying there, and Hades felt it too because he pulled back for just a fraction of a second.

That fraction was enough.

I drove sun power into the ground beneath him and earth power up through the cracks and ocean sense from Pelagius to find every point where his shadows were anchoring him to his domain, my vision going white at the edges, blood pouring freely down my face now and I didn't stop.

He fought back.

Genuinely fought back, not the testing and toying he'd been doing since I walked into his ballroom.

His shadows came in waves, relentless and heavy and crushing, and each one cost me something to absorb, each one pushed me back a step or drove me to one knee before I could force myself upright again.

He opened the ground beneath my feet and I flew. He pulled the air from around me and I burned through the oxygen I had left in my lungs and kept moving. He drove darkness directly into the sun power trying to smother it from the outside and I felt it like a hand closing around my heart and I screamed and burned hotter and it fell away.

We were destroying his palace and I relished in the knowledge.

The ground between us was an unrecognisable ruin of cracked earth and scorched stone.

But the code was deadly.

I was bleeding from places I'd stopped noticing

So was he.

He threw another wave of darkness at me and I absorbed it the same way I'd been absorbing them, sun burning it clean from the inside out, and when it dissolved and I was still standing he looked at me and for one unguarded moment, just one, I saw it move across his face.

Fear.

The real thing, ancient and unfamiliar on a face that had never had reason to wear it, there and gone in less than a second but I had seen it and I held onto it because it was the only thing keeping me upright.

I stopped absorbing and started pushing.

Everything I had, everything the sun was burning through me to give me, I drove it outward in one continuous wave and I watched him brace against it and hold and brace and hold and then slowly, one knee at a time, go down.

He hit the ground breathing hard, one hand pressed to the ruined stone, darkness flickering around him in unsteady pulses like a flame running out of air.

“Wait, let's talk about this Celeste. It's killing you, this power. We both can forget this ever happened, just take your people and leave.”

Bingo.

I had him where I wanted him.

I sent the signal to Pelagius.

While I waited, I poured everything until the god of the underground was screaming in pain.

He arrived in style, sea water hitting the scorched ground around him, and his eyes swept the destruction with something that might have been impressed if he'd been capable of showing it.

"Well," he said, reaching for my shoulder, “you surprised me young lady.”

"Don't." I pulled away before he could touch me.

They knew I was not ready yet they sent me here.

Like the tool I was to these gods and their bickering.

His hand dropped.

I was already moving toward the place Nala had fallen into, my legs barely holding me, blood dripping off my chin and onto the ruined stone beneath my feet.

Jock was already there, limping, one wing dragging, and Kelin beside him, and without a word between us we understood what had to happen.

I used my air power to pull her, her weight difficult to lift.

But it was the guilt that made it all the more difficult for me.

Jock and Kelin joined, pulling her up with their snout.

Terra appeared beside me, her voice soft.

"Celeste—"

"Don't," I said, and my voice came out in a tone I didn't recognise. "Don't say a single word to me right now.”

We left with Nala carried between her brothers, and the ruins of Hades' domain at our backs, and I didn't look at any of it. Not the destruction, not the bound god still on his knees in the rubble, not the crack in the earth where I had lost her.

I just walked.

Because stopping meant feeling it and I wasn't ready for that yet.

Instead, I took my fallen warrior to her home where I'll face her father.

After killing two of his children.