Page 140 of Renegade Kingdom
Chapter Forty-Two
Damon
Icould feel every chain on the battlefield.
Not see them. Feel them. The way you feel a bruise when someone presses the exact spot where the damage lives. But my magic didn’t need eyes. It worked through something deeper, an awareness that lived in the dark spaces between things, in the gaps where light didn’t reach. And through it I could feel the tether of corrupted magic running from the base of every Endless’ skull to the hand of the man who’d enslaved them.
I knew what those chains felt like because I’d worn them.
Three months. Three months of the nightmare sitting in my mind like a parasite, puppeteering my body while I screamed behind my own eyes. Watching my hands do things I would have died to prevent. Knowing, with absolute certainty, that the person wearing my face wasn’t me but nobody could tell the difference.
The shadows knew. They’d learned from my suffering. Every day of imprisonment had shaped my magic into something that understood control and forced obedience at a molecular level. Itdidn’t need to be taught how to sever chains. It had been born with a need to break them.
Fizzle might have been testing me during training, but the shadows had accomplished something before I’d even known it was possible. Instinctively. The accumulated knowledge of what it felt like to be someone else’s puppet, translated into a magic that could cut the strings that bound them.
Now I stood on a battlefield surrounded by hundreds of people who were living the same nightmare I’d survived, and the shadows were hungry to do the one thing they’d been made for.
Free them.
“Damon.” Alyssa’s voice echoed through the bond and through the air at the same time, the physical and the magical layered together until I couldn’t separate them. She was beside me now. She’d fought her way to my position during the battle. Magic blazed around her like an aura. “It’s time.”
The wolf stirred inside me, attentive. We’d never properly met, never shifted. But it understood what was about to happen. It pressed forward, offering its support the way wolves did, shoulder to shoulder, presence to presence.I’m here. I’m with you.
The shadows responded to the wolf the way they always did, wrapping around it like a cloak, dark and protective. Wolf and shadow. Light and dark.
“Tell me what you need,” I said.
Alyssa’s eyes were steady. Blazing with the power of five courts, and terrifying in their intensity. She’d pulled more magic into her core than I’d ever seen living inside her before. I was starting to worry if this plan was a good idea because we had no way of knowing if her body could handle this level of power.
“I’m going to reach out through Nymeria itself. Feel through the ground until I can connect to every Endless on the field. I can feel their chains. But I can’t cut them all at once.”
“I can.”
“I know.” She took my hand. Her fingers were warm, alive with magic, and where they touched my skin the shadows didn’t recoil. They curled around her hand and held on. The bond between us hummed with a frequency that was ours alone. The fifth bond. Shadow and the light.
“When I make the connection, I need you to push your shadows through it. Through me. Into every bond, every Endless, all at once.” She paused. “I’ve never channelled someone else’s magic before. I don’t know exactly what it will feel like for you.”
I almost laughed. “I spent three months with something else living in my head. I can handle uncomfortable.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her face and I could see the faint glimmer of fear in her eyes. We both knew she wasn’t talking about comfort. There was a risk to this just like everything else in our lives. Our own bond could break. Every bond could break. Hell, it would take the two of us with it if I wasn’t careful. But as soon as that fear touched her gaze, it was gone, replaced by a focus so absolute it was like watching a blade being drawn.
“Ready?” she asked.
I closed my eyes praying for even an ounce of the confidence she had.
The shadows expanded. They’d been holding close to my body throughout the battle, a defensive perimeter that kept Arik’s creatures at bay. Now I let them stretch. Farther. Wider. Past the edges of the fighting, into the spaces between the armies, through the gaps in the chaos. The shadows could go where nothing else could. Under the earth. Through the air. Into the dark places where Arik’s corruption was thickest.
And then I pulled it all back inside of me again. So much power. Buzzing with a need to act.
Alyssa hand tightened in mine and I knew it was time, but still I hesitated. Why did the right thing feel so wrong? Saving these people should have been the obvious course of action. And yet, it risked her. And risking her was more than I was prepared to do.
“It’s going to be okay,” Alyssa whispered, sensing my hesitation.
So, with a ragged breath that almost sounded like a sob, I let it flow.
I felt my magic and my awareness, slip through the channel she’d opened for me and had a glimpse of everything this beautiful woman had wordlessly held inside herself. Now that the magic had merged into that single braid inside her it had became not a river but an ocean, vast and limitless, reaching outward in every direction at once. Like spring’s roots growing through the soil, connecting to every living thing. Summer’s heat, pulsing through the air like a heartbeat. Autumn’s wind, carrying awareness to every corner of the field. Winter’s cold, sharpening perception to a razor’s edge.
I gasped at the sheer beauty of it all, and felt the damp sensation of tears on my cheeks realising how much she was silently going through to be what this world needed her to be to save it. I could feel the cost. The drain, the edges of her consciousness blending and fading into the world she now controlled. But the magic of her mates, that single braided line of power, created a kind of barrier, anchoring her inside herself. Keeping her contained in the woman we loved rather than losing her to the world around us.
