Page 145 of Renegade Kingdom
Not with technique. Not with skill. With the blind, absolute certainty that nothing was getting past me. The bear did not think. Did not plan. Did not weigh options or calculate odds. The bear knew one thing and one thing only.
She is behind me. Nothing touches her.
The strike intensified as Arik poured everything he had into it and I roared through the pain and the audacity that this man actually thought he had a chance of touching her.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t a bear’s roar. It was the sound of the earth itself splitting open. The sound of roots tearing through stone. The sound of a mountain deciding that it would not be moved, and meaning it with every atom of its existence.
And Arik’s strike shattered against me like glass against iron.
But it all came with a cost. One I gladly paid. As Tank the man floated further into the darkness, away from everything I had once been and into… nothingness.
After that, there were only fragments of sensation.
Impact. Something hitting me from the left, the right, above. I caught it. Crushed it. Threw it. The taste of blood, mine and theirs, hot and copper-bright. The ground shaking beneath my weight as I moved, not with the bear’s usual measured stride but with something primal and ungovernable, a force of nature that destroyed everything between it and the thing it was protecting.
I forgot my name.
The word Tank meant nothing. It was a human word for a human man and I was neither. I was earth and fury and shield. I was the thing that stood between the light and the dark and refused to move. I was root and stone and the deep, grindingpatience of mountains that had waited millions of years and would wait millions more.
And through it all, she was behind me. The light. The warmth. The thing the earth recognised as its heart. She was becoming something vast and extraordinary.
I was the safety. That was all I was now. All I had ever been. The steady presence. The unmovable object. The bear that would die before it let anything through.
The battle continued. I continued. There was no difference between the two.
I was the shield around a goddess setting right a realm, and there was nothing human left in me to remember what I had been before.
And somewhere, very far away, a man named Tank drifted in the dark and hoped that someone would find him before he disappeared completely. But in that darkness, I had only one thought.
She was magnificent, and all that mattered was her.
Chapter Forty-Four
Alyssa
Ihad no idea what I was doing. But as I closed my eyes on the battlefield, trusting in the ones I loved to keep me safe, I let my consciousness sink into that well of power Nymeria had opened up inside of me.
I sank into the realm itself. Into the very magic that had created the fabric of the world she’d created. I could see the way she’d woven the strands together. Her the magic had separated to form the five courts of power where it was supposed to instead be woven into one glorious tapestry.
Nymeria had never been perfect, but she had come here with the intention of creating something better. Perhaps that was a naive ambition. Maybe better was just the same as usual as you lied to yourself, trying to see the world through different eyes.
There was nothing new here. All of the horror and the violence she’d tried to escape wherever it was that she’d come from had just formed here as well. The same problems in a different place. Maybe it was all just inevitable when you filled a world with creatures who had the capacity to make decisionsfor themselves. It would seem that existence was impossible without chaos. And through chaos, darkness was always born.
“We could have it all, little sister,” Arik’s voice purred from somewhere, everywhere, I couldn’t even tell. “You see it now, don’t you? The mistakes she made. The flaws in her logic. Together we could tear it down, start again. Create perfection.”
“You and I have very different ideas about what this realm deserves, Arik.”
“Arik? Even now you refuse to call me brother?”
He was getting too much entertainment out of this, and I could already see that he was trying to buy time. To distract me enough for him to turn the tables on the battle raging outside.
But I refused to let myself get pulled into it. I wasn’t here for a chat. I had one purpose and he was trying to distract me from it. So I pushed his voice aside and took a centering breath as I searched for what I’d come here for.
From this place, all things had been created. That included the land. It included me, and more importantly, it included Arik. Here was the place I’d find his vulnerabilities and here was the place I’d find my way through those cracks to finally destroy him.
“Those are some very murderous thoughts you’re having, dear sister,” Arik mocked. “Anyone would think you didn’t like me very much.”
I looked around, searching harder. There had to be something. If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to distract me.
