Still Eury didn’t move, didn’t speak.
I’d failed, taken too long. She was gone, truly gone.
The world dimmed, and the back of my head fell against the spire. Through the Convergence’s murk, three queens emerged. Come to finish their work, to steal Carys’s inheritance as though it were gold they could claim.
Let them try. Their greed would make them husks.
I would never know the rest of the story; I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My lids closed, the world went dark, and I exhaled from my numb chest.
The world became smaller, smaller… and just before I left it, a sound came from beside my ear.
A gasp. Small, sudden, like a first breath.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Eurydice
A strange,liminal space. Almost darkness, but not quite—the world barely existed. I had thoughts, but not in real words; they drifted without shape, almost without my control. A fat strand of light sat right in the center of me, tendrils of it reaching outward. Every tendril eventually dissolved into the great nothingness of me.
Inside me, the dark expanse ate away at the light, devouring at its edges. But the light was too much, too great to consume completely. Once, I’d had a word for that light; once, I’d had a word for the darkness, too. As it was, I only watched the two coexist.
Then, a third color. Green. It appeared in the darkness first as a droplet, then a spill, then a bloom. And every moment it grew, I felt a greater longing. It was succulent. I latched onto it, suckled at it, greedy, until the green grew and merged into the darkness and the light, andsuddenly?—
Life.
My eyes flew open as I pulled in air, a great punch of it into my lungs, a violent, bruising gulp. The world snapped into startling color, so much red and green and the expanse of blue sky. Clouds and grass and trees and blood. Blood everywhere.
And a voice in my head, laughing and laughing and laughing.
“Rise now, daughter of scorn.” Like gravel in a drum.
Details came to me in pieces. Hard stone against my back. An arrow through my lung. Three shapes approaching. Women—queens.
And in my lap, an ice-cold blade.
Beside me, a dark-haired form slumped against the stone. Limp, eyes shut with his face turned toward me. I knew that face, those soft lips. Dorian Crowmere. His palm lay open to the sky, blood dripping from the fate line.
I understood.
I’d died—actually died. Gone beyond. And somehow he’d brought me back. He had emptied himself into me. He’d delivered the dagger back to me. Caustrix’s tooth. Caustrix—the voice in my head.
I was Eurydice. Eurydice Waters. A daughter of scorn.
And I’d been murdered.
My murderers stood before me, three queens of three courts in a land of brutality and vengeance. But they were the least compelling thing in my sight.
A feeling flowed through me unlike anything I’d known. Not rage. Not even anger. Not power like I’d known it before my death, butpossibility.
Around me, the air danced with it. All four magics—dark green feralis; golden solaire; ebony noxveil; pink viridine—twisted and twined through the world at the center of the Killing Fields.
They were as visible to me as the sky and trees. My chest glowed with solaire. It moved through my body—warm, insistent, threading through my veins like liquid sunlight. I’d never been able to feel lightmagic inside me, and I understood why the moment it collided with what already lived inside me.
Caustrix’s acid met the solaire and fought it. Not gently—not two rivers merging. Like two animals in a cage. The light surged through my chest and the acid rose to meet it, and for a terrible second my body became the battlefield. Heat and cold. Growth and decay. My ribs ached with the pressure of it, my fingers curled and locked, and I thought I would come apart—that whatever Liora’s sword had opened in me, my body couldn’t contain.
Until something shifted. Not in thought, not in will, but in marrow, in the blood itself. The two forces stopped fighting and began to move together. Not merging—never merging—but circling, the way two fighters find a rhythm without either yielding. Solaire spiraled alongside Caustrix’s acid, and where they touched neither destroyed the each other. They held. Tension without collapse.
Air reached my lungs again. My heartbeat thudded, and it was steady.