Page 141 of Renegade Kingdom
“Alyssa…” My voice cracked as the reality of how close we would always be to losing her filled my mind.
“I know, Damon. But you don’t need to worry about me. I can feel where I’m supposed to be, and it’s here with you, and Maddox, and Ryder, and Dean, and Tank. All of you. I can be me and I can be what this world needs me to be as well. BecauseI have all of you. This is what my mother was missing. She was missing the reason. The hope. The love. The things that make life worth living. You don’t have to worry about me slipping away.”
I could feel her resolve and the brightness of her love blazed through every chain her magic had found across the land. Every putrid bond. And each of them blazed a little brighter as the people at the end of them found a glimmer of hope once more.
“Quickly, Damon. You need to free them before Arik realises what we’re trying to do.”
And this time I didn’t hesitate. I let the shadows flow through her, sink deep into the very fabric of Nymeria and reach for the people who needed us the most.
The sensation was staggering.
I was myself and I was everywhere. Standing on the Spring Court soil with my eyes closed and simultaneously present inside one thousand, five hundred and thirty-seven minds. That was the number. One thousand, five hundred and thirty-seven Endless, each one a prison, each one a person screaming to get out.
I felt them. Not as abstractions. Not as data points. As people. A woman whose last free thought had been her daughter’s name. A man who’d been an innkeeper before Arik’s forces came through his village. A teenager, barely old enough to hold a weapon, who’d been taken two months ago and still had enough of himself left to be terrified. An old man whose resistance was a single word, repeated endlessly, stubbornly, like a prayer.No, no, no, no, no.
The chains were everywhere. Wrapped around each consciousness like barbed wire, digging deeper with every struggle. And at the other end of each chain, Arik. His will. His control. His absolute, suffocating certainty that these people belonged to him.
The shadows found the chains and trembled with recognition of the pain they dealt.
It was time to cut.
But I had to be careful.
This was the part that terrified me. Not the scale of it, though the scale was overwhelming. Not the magic, though the magic was pulling from reserves I didn’t know I had. The part that terrified me was the precision required.
The chains were embedded in living minds. Ripping them out with brute force would do the same damage as the chains themselves, tearing through neural pathways and magical connections without discrimination. I’d seen what happened to people who were freed carelessly. The broken ones in the camp, the ones who stared at nothing and couldn’t form sentences. Some of that was Arik’s cruelty, but some of it was bad severance. Chains torn out instead of cut.
I couldn’t do that to them. I wouldn’t. These people had suffered enough.
So I didn’t tear.
I cut.
The shadows moved with a precision that wasn’t learned but remembered. Every cut was a scalpel, not a saw. Finding the exact point where chain met consciousness and separating them with a delicacy that belied the darkness of the magic performing it. One at a time and all at once. The shadow magic could exist in multiple places simultaneously. That was its nature. Darkness was everywhere. It didn’t need to travel because it was already there, waiting in every space where light didn’t reach.
The first chain severed with a sound only I could hear. A snap, like a guitar string breaking, followed by a rush of freed consciousness that hit me like a wave. The woman whose last thought had been her daughter’s name gasped. In her mind, in the space where the chain had been, there was suddenlynothing. An absence. A silence where Arik’s commands had been screaming.
Freedom didn’t sound like trumpets. It sounded like silence.
The second chain. The third. The tenth. The hundredth.
They severed in a cascade that accelerated as the shadows learned the pattern. Each chain was slightly different in how it attached, but the fundamental structure was the same, and the shadows were fast learners. What took careful precision on the first cut became fluid on the fiftieth. By the hundredth, the shadows were moving through the Endless like water through a net, finding and cutting and moving on in a continuous, flowing motion.
Through the bond, I felt Alyssa straining. The channel she’d opened was vast, carrying five courts’ worth of magic across an entire battlefield, and maintaining it while the battle still raged required a concentration that was physically breaking her. I could feel the tremor in her hand in mine. The taste of blood where she’d bitten through her lip. The raw, grinding effort of holding the ocean open while I worked.
I pushed faster. Not reckless, never reckless, but faster. The shadows cut, the chains fell and the people inside woke up.
Two hundred. Three hundred. The cascade was a flood now. Each severed chain sent a ripple through Arik’s network, weakening the connections to the ones still bound. The system he’d built was interconnected, each chain reinforcing the others, and as more fell, the remaining ones grew thinner. Easier to cut.
Seven hundred. The shadows were singing. I didn’t know how else to describe it. A vibration in the darkness, a frequency that resonated with liberation, with the breaking of bonds. The wolf sang with them, its young voice joining the shadow’s ancient one in a harmony that filled my chest until I thought I’d burst with it.
Through the bond, I felt my brothers. Each of them holding their ground, buying time. Tank a mountain at the north. Dean’sice spreading across the southern perimeter in a web of frozen earth that slowed the creatures to a crawl. Ryder’s storms overhead, constant and devastating, the sky itself turned against anyone who served Arik. Maddox’s fire wall burning at the west, alive with Summer magic, a barrier of thorns and flame that nothing could breach.
They were doing this for me. All of them, holding the line so that I could finish what the nightmare had started. The man they’d chained. The brother they’d almost lost. The one Holden had sent into Nymeria as a test subject, expecting him to break.
But I hadn’t broken. And now my not-breaking was the reason one thousand, five hundred and thirty-seven people would get their lives back.
Eight hundred and fifty. Nine hundred. One thousand and more.
