Page 93 of Renegade Kingdom
Did you really think it would be that easy?
I clenched my jaw. Pushed back. The nightmare’s voice was a knife in the dark, and I’d learned long ago that responding only gave it more to work with.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. Calm. Keep it calm. Don’t let them see the worm moving. “The bite took. I can feel the wolf. But he’s distant. Like he can’t reach me.”
“Because the nightmare is between you,” Alyssa said, and there was something in her voice. Not panic. Certainty. Like she was seeing something the rest of us couldn’t. “The wolf needs a bridge.”
She stepped closer to me. Her hands came up, hovering near my chest but not touching. The magic in the room responded to her movement, the air thickening, the temperature shifting. And for the first time since we’d entered the chamber, the dark veins in the floor flickered.
Not gold. Shadow.
“Get back,” Dean growled, but Alyssa shook her head.
“No. Look.” She pointed at the floor.
The shadow veins were spreading. Slowly at first, then faster, racing out from where I stood in dark lines that pulsed with a rhythm I recognised. Not my heartbeat. Something else. Something deeper. The rhythm of the chamber itself, the same slow breathing I’d felt in the walls since we’d arrived, only now it was answering something.
It was answering me.
The worm recoiled.
For the first time in years, I felt the nightmare flinch. Not a strategic retreat. Not a calculated withdrawal to regroup. A flinch. The instinctive, animal response of something that had just encountered a predator larger than itself.
No,the nightmare hissed.No, this isn’t...
The shadow magic hit me like a tidal wave.
I gasped. Staggered. Dean caught my arm but I barely felt it because the magic was everywhere, flooding through every vein, every nerve, every dark corner of my mind that the nightmare had claimed as its territory. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t kind. Itwas ancient and vast and utterly indifferent to anything as small as a nightmare, the way an ocean is indifferent to a single wave.
The wolf surged forward. Not distant anymore. Not muffled behind the nightmare’s walls. The bridge Alyssa had mentioned, the magic of the Fifth Court was the bridge, and the wolf was sprinting across it with everything he had.
The nightmare screamed.
I’d never heard it scream before. It had always been the one in control, the one doing the tormenting. But now something was tearing through its carefully constructed walls, something was flooding the dark spaces it had claimed, and the scream that ripped through my mind was the sound of a parasite being burned out of its host.
I dropped to my knees. The stone was cold under my palms. I was vaguely aware of voices around me, of hands on my shoulders, of Alyssa’s magic flaring bright and hot in the air. But it was all distant, all secondary, because the war inside my head was consuming everything.
The wolf was there. Not fully formed, not yet, butthere. A presence made of teeth and fury and the absolute, unwavering certainty that I washisand nothing else was allowed to stay. He threw himself at the nightmare with a savagery that should have terrified me, and the shadowy magic of the Fifth Court followed in his wake like an army.
You can’t,the nightmare shrieked.I’m part of him. You can’t just...
The wolf didn’t answer. Wolves didn’t negotiate.
I felt it happen. The moment the nightmare lost its grip. Like fingers being pried off a ledge one by one. The worm that had lived in my head for months, that had whispered and mocked and controlled and tortured, was being torn free. Not gently. Not surgically. But violently. Completely. The shadow magic filled every space the nightmare vacated, flooding in like water intoempty chambers, and where the nightmare had left scars, the magic smoothed them over. Not healing. Claiming. Making me whole in a way I hadn’t been even before the nightmare took hold.
The last thread snapped.
And then there was blissful silence. A nothingness until that cold shadowy magic started to seep into those last remaining spaces inside me.
The nightmare was gone.
Not caged. Not suppressed. Not pushed to the back of my mind where it could wait and plan and eventually resurface.Gone.Burned out by shadow magic and savaged by a wolf that had crossed a bridge made of ancient power to reach me.
I knelt on the floor of the throne room and breathed.
Just breathed.
The air tasted different. Everything tasted different. The world was sharper, clearer, like I’d been looking through dirty glass for years and someone had finally cleaned it. I could feel the stone beneath my hands, every grain, every crystal. I could hear my brothers breathing. I could smell Alyssa’s magic, warm and bright, and the deeper, older scent of the chamber itself. Earth and shadow and the roots of something vast.
