Page 150 of Renegade Kingdom
I unmade him with that.
The pieces came apart the way salt comes apart in water. Not violently. Not painfully. A slow letting go. His existence dissolved into the fabric it had been woven from. The flaw at his core, the hunger and the rage and the terrible emptiness, settled into the realm and was held there, the way ashes soften the soil they fall into.
The last thing he felt before he went was what he had always wanted.
Someone who saw him fully.
And loved him anyway.
The cost arrived before I had finished drawing breath.
Every second of his pain. Every century of loneliness. Every moment of rage and hunger and the gnawing, consuming conviction that he was worthless. It poured into me like molten iron into a mould, filling every space, every gap of my consciousness that wasn’t already occupied by my own self. I would have screamed. I would have screamed for hours, if there had been a mouth to scream with, if there had been air. But there was neither. There was just the pouring in. The settling. The terrible, permanent weight of a brother I had never been allowed to know becoming part of me forever.
Then the realm sealed around me. That last acceptance that I was to take Nymeria’s place. The final piece of power slotting into place and the realm accepting that it was enough. That I was enough. Because all of the pieces of Nymeria had been reunited again. The ones she poured into the abandoned son, and the ones she poured into the abandoned daughter, even if she’d let me go with guidance rather than nothingness.
I felt it close around me the way you feel a door close behind you. The barrier between Nymeria and the world outside, the ancient wall that separated magic from mundane, tightened. Solidified. In the space where Arik had pressed against it likea fist against glass, I took his place. Not as a threat. As a foundation.
IwasNymeria now. The voice in the wind. The magic in the soil. The consciousness that lived in every tree and stone and creature and drop of water. The realm breathed through me and I breathed through it and we were the same thing. The same vast and ancient creation.
And I was drowning.
The pain was too much. The vastness was too much. I could feel every living thing in Nymeria, every heartbeat and every breath. Every creature stirring in every forest and every fish swimming in every river. The sheer scale of it was dissolving the edges of who I had been. Alyssa was a name that meant less with every second. A woman. A person. Small and fragile in a way that didn’t fit what I was becoming.
But then the bonds pulled.
Five threads of warmth and love. Something so distinctly messy that they couldn’t be anything less than perfect. They strained against the vastness, and even in their weakened state they held me together. Because they refused to let me go.
I could feel them. Dean’s cold clarity. Maddox’s warmth. Ryder’s defiance. Damon’s shadows. And somewhere beneath all of it, distant and fading, something that felt like earth and steadiness and the deep, patient love of a man who had spent his whole life holding things together.
Tank.
He was lost too. I could feel it through the bond now, faintly, like hearing a voice through water. The bear had consumed him. Every human thought, every memory, every piece of the man who had held me through the nights, who had stood at my side even when I didn’t realise what he meant to me, all of it eaten by the primal certainty that nothing would touch me. He was earth and fury and nothing else. A mountain without a name. And thedistance between the bear and the man was widening with every heartbeat.
We were both lost. In different ways, in different oceans. The goddess drowning in the vastness of a realm. The bear drowning in the depths of its own nature.
But the bond held.
The bond between us was the first bond, forged long before we’d stepped foot back in this place. It had formed in a garage when a bear shifter walked into my life and looked at me like I was something worth protecting. It was the friendship we’d built when he knew I wasn’t ready for anything more. And it wasthatbond which held when everything else dissolved. It was a thread in the formless dark. Thin. Fragile. Present. A line of warmth connecting two drowning people who couldn’t find the surface on their own.
I reached for it. It was impossible not to, because this was part of the very core of who I was and who I ever wanted to be.
And I felt it, half a breath later when he reached for it too.
I couldn’t tell how long it took. Time had no meaning in that space. It might have been seconds or centuries or the span between one heartbeat and the next. But somewhere in the formless dark, my hand found his. Not a physical hand. Not a physical touch. The essence of reaching. Of holding on. Of just refusing to let go.
His hand in mine. My voice in his darkness. The bear let go because the man had something to hold onto. I found my body because he anchored me to it.
We pulled each other back.
Then finally, on a blood soaked battlefield, I opened my eyes.
The smell of blood and smoke filled the air. Groans of the injured filled my ears and I flinched as all of my senses came screaming back at once. My body was where I had left it, achingin ways that should have broken me. Bloody tears staining my face that I didn’t remember crying.
Tank was on his knees in front of me. Human. No longer the mountain of fur and fury. Just a man, bloody and broken and shaking, with his hand wrapped around mine so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was wrecked.
“Hey,” I said. Mine was worse.
