Chapter 69 Chapter 69

Chapter 69 Chapter 69

Davina's POV

The air inside the ritual chamber tasted like metal and old rain.

I stood at the edge of the circle Mara had drawn on the stone floor, watching Derek take his position at the center. Candles burned at each of the seven points. Ancient symbols carved into the walls seemed to pulse with a light that had nothing to do with fire.

"You don't have to be here," Derek said without looking at me.

"Try to make me leave."

He didn't argue. He knew better by now.

Aria stood beside me, her small hand tucked inside mine. She had been quiet since we entered the chamber. Too quiet. Her eyes tracked the symbols on the walls with an attention that made me uneasy. She recognized things in them that she shouldn't have been able to recognize.

Mara began.

She moved around the circle, speaking words in a language older than any pack I had ever known. The candle flames bent toward Derek even though there was no wind. The temperature in the room dropped until I could see my own breath.

"Mom," Aria whispered.

"I know," I said. "Stay close."

The ritual was supposed to create a barrier. A seal. It was supposed to push The Void back and lock the door behind it. That was what Mara had explained. That was what we had agreed to.

But something was changing.

The symbols on the walls stopped pulsing. They went still. Every single one of them at the same time. Like a held breath.

Derek went rigid at the center of the circle.

"Derek." I took a step forward.

"Don't break the circle." Mara's voice was sharp. "Do not cross the line, Davina."

I stopped. My hands curled into fists.

Derek's head tilted back slowly. His eyes were open but they had gone white. Not wolf-gold. White. Like everything behind them had been emptied out and replaced with something vast.

And then the room spoke.

It didn't come from Derek's mouth exactly. The sound came from everywhere. From inside the walls. From inside my chest. A voice that felt like standing at the bottom of the ocean and looking up.

You.

Derek's lips moved but the voice was not his.

I have been trying to reach you for so long.

Mara stopped walking. She lowered the ritual knife slowly.

"What is happening?" I asked.

"It's communicating." Her voice was barely a sound. "I have never seen it communicate."

I am not what they told you I was. The voice pressed against my skull, not painful, just enormous. Too big for the space it was filling. I am not a weapon. I am not a destroyer. I am old. I am tired. I am in so much pain.

Derek's hands shook at his sides.

"What do you want?" he said out loud. His voice cracked on the last word.

I want it to stop.

The candles flared and then went down to almost nothing.

The seals were placed on me without consent. I was imprisoned because they were afraid of what they did not understand. And I have been alone inside that darkness for longer than your civilization has existed. For longer than your species has existed. I have been alone and I have been screaming and no one has heard me.

Aria's grip on my hand tightened until it hurt.

"Is it telling the truth?" I asked Mara quietly.

"I don't know." She was watching Derek with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Fear. Real fear. "The old texts don't describe anything like this. The Void was always characterized as mindless. A force, not a being."

They lied to you. They lie about what they do not want to face.

Derek stepped forward inside the circle. One step toward the center of nothing. Toward whatever invisible point the voice was emanating from.

"How long?" he asked.

Millennia. The word does not contain it. There is no word in your language that contains it.

The sound changed then. It became something underneath language. Something that bypassed words and went straight into feeling. Cold and dark and endless and alone and screaming and forgotten and alone and alone and alone.

I heard myself make a sound I didn't intend to make.

"Stop." Derek's voice came out rough. "I feel you. You don't have to keep showing me."

The feeling cut off.

The seals are breaking down because I am dying, The Void said. Not because I am escaping. Because the prison that was built around me is falling apart as I weaken. And as the walls crack, the pain leaks out. The energy leaks out. Everything you have interpreted as attacks has been agony finding the nearest exit.

"All of this," Derek said quietly. "All of this death. All of this destruction. It was pain."

It was always only pain.

Mara sat down on the floor. Just sat down like her legs had stopped working. I understood the feeling.

"What do you need from us?" Derek asked.

I need someone to help me die.

The silence after that was total.

Not a sealing. Not another prison. I need to be released. I need someone to enter the space where I exist and guide me out. I cannot find the way on my own. I have been in the dark for so long that I have forgotten what the light looks like. I need someone to show me.

"And if someone does that," Derek said. "What happens to them?"

They will feel what I have felt. Every year of it. Every moment of the isolation and the agony. It will not be a small thing. It may be more than a human mind can hold.

"But they would survive?"

I do not know. I have never asked anyone for help before. I have never had anyone to ask.

Derek turned toward me then. His eyes were his own again. Back to the gold I knew. Back to the man I loved. But something had settled in his expression that I recognized and hated. A certainty. A resolution.

"Derek, no."

"Davina."

"I said no."

"You heard it." His voice was steady. Quiet. "You felt it. You know what it's been holding. We can't seal it away again. We can't add more years onto what it's already carrying."

"Then find another way."

"There isn't another way." He crossed the ritual circle and took both my hands in his. His thumbs moved over my knuckles. "Someone has to go in."

"Then let it be someone else. Let it be anyone else."

"I'm the one it's been reaching for. You heard it say that. It found me. Whatever connection exists between us, I'm the one who can navigate this."

Aria looked up at me with her strange too-old eyes.

"He can do it, Mom," she said softly.

I wanted to shake her. I wanted to tell her she was a child and she didn't know what she was talking about. But she said it with the same certainty Derek wore on his face and I hated that I could see it too. The thread between Derek and that voice. The recognition in his eyes when it spoke.

"If it destroys you," I said. My voice was not steady. I stopped pretending it was. "If you go in there and it destroys you, I will never forgive you."

He pulled me in and pressed his mouth to my forehead. Held it there for a long moment.

"I know," he said against my skin.

He stepped back.

He turned toward the center of the circle.

And he closed his eyes.