My eyes remained on the same ornate ceiling I had woken to a while back.
For some reason, I felt strangely calm despite everything that had happened over the past few hours, though I suspected that had less to do with courage and more to do with my mind simply giving up on processing any more disasters for one day.
I turned to look at Aela.
She had pulled a chair up beside the bed, her figure slouched slightly as her eyes remained fixed somewhere on the floor. My gaze moved to the rapier strapped at her side, the pale sheath and threaded hilt resting silently against her hip.
I knew exactly why it was there.
It was the only thing standing between whatever I might become if I failed the Trial and the rest of the house.
"Are you ready, brother?"
She asked it lightly, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Absolutely not."
I fell silent as the words left me, noticing that they had not made her laugh. They had not got any reaction from her at all.
"You do not need to do this, you know."
She muttered it, and the way her voice came out made it sound as though she was not entirely certain of it herself.
But I had no other option now.
Erel was already dead, and knowing what waited for this world, it was better to die to Aela’s sword while trying to become strong enough to face it than to sit in this house and wait for whatever was coming to arrive on its own.
Aela looked at me for another moment.
"If you want more time, I can speak to Father."
"You think that would work?"
Her lips pressed together.
"No," she admitted quietly.
That was about what I expected.
The Ledger opened before me.
The runes were as ethereal as I remembered them, settling into the air before my eyes despite the turmoil sitting beneath my ribs.
YUN OF CLAIOM
DOMAIN: FATE
ASPECT: UNPROVEN
MARKED
RELIQUARY: DORMANT
TRIAL: UNTAKEN
My eyes stayed on the words in front of me.
Domain of Fate.
I had not told anyone about it. It was expected of me to have drawn Dream regardless, being from House Claiom, so nobody had even thought to ask.
Yun had kept it a secret too, across the one week he had known about it. I still did not know whether he had done that out of fear or confusion, and I probably never would.
Either way, I had to keep it hidden for as long as I could manage.
It was simply too big a thing to reveal. Fate should not have existed as a Domain at all, and nobody in this world knew that better than I did.
Letting out a slow breath, I focused on the faint pull the runes seemed to carry. It resonated from somewhere within me, from my soul itself.
Then, before I knew it, darkness took me all at once.
For a second, I thought I had simply passed out or closed my eyes.
Then I realised that was not the case at all.
I was standing.
My eyes were open.
There was simply nothing to see.
No matter where I turned, darkness pooled around me, thick enough that even my own body remained hidden below me. It was not only my vision either. Every one of my senses strained outward for something, anything, and there was nothing for them to reach.
Then I felt it before I saw it.
A faint ripple moved through the darkness, the emptiness itself shifting around me as though something had disturbed a still surface. It collapsed inward, pulling into shapes I could not name before stretching out again and settling all at once.
Then colour began to drip into it.
The darkness gave way to light.
And when I looked around, my heart dropped at where I found myself.
The roof of my apartment.
The very place where he had murdered me.
What the hell?
I stood at its centre, the stars above me exactly as I remembered them from that night, the sun still nowhere near rising in the distance.
My head snapped towards the door almost on reflex.
He was there.
Standing exactly where he had stood that day, his figure half-covered by darkness.
The faint runes of the Ledger coalesced in front of me, and this time I had not called them at all.
YOUR FATE
THE AUTHOR, KILLED BY WHAT HE HIMSELF MADE
I read the words, and my heartbeat caught up to what they meant before the rest of me did.
No. No, no, no, no.
No, you fucking don’t.
I took a step back in disbelief, then another as the cold absurdity of it settled into me.
Do not tell me it wanted me to beat him.
He took a step towards me, painfully slow, his red eyes already locked onto mine.
"You fucking bastard. Who are you?"
I yelled it, every word I had wanted to say that night finally leaving me now.
Still, he said nothing.
He only took another step forward.
"Who sent you? What do you want from me?"
Nothing.
"Say something, you damn bastard!" Visit g.com for the full chapter.
He kept walking.
Fuck this.
I turned for the far end of the roof because running was the only realistic option I had.
There was no chance in any life of mine that I was going to beat him, not when he had come from years further along, carrying every broken ability I had personally handed him.
Turning my back on him, I pushed off for the first step of a sprint.
Then some part of me almost wished I had not.
Before my foot could land, it felt as though time itself had stopped.
My thoughts were still moving while my body remained locked where it was, my ears ringing faintly as the roof, the stars, and the doorway all stayed fixed around me.
I tried to move my hand, my leg, anything at all, but nothing answered.
Before I could put a single thought together, something faint ran across my neck.
It was barely more than a tickle.
Then the buzzing in my ears vanished, and the world settled back into motion.
Wait, why am I...
The stars moved sideways out of my vision.
The edge of the roof came into view, then the roof itself, tilting where nothing should have been tilting.
Then I was looking at my own body.
It stood exactly where I had left it, still upright, still caught in the middle of that first step.
And headless.
Oh, so...
I could not even finish the thought before the darkness consumed me whole again, cutting off everything around me.
Wait, what?
Did I die?
Did I die again?
Just like that, I was dead.
Killed by him a second time.
Did that mean I had failed the Trial? Was I a Fissure now?
The thought hammered through my head before consciousness returned to me almost mockingly, the darkness pressing in from every side as I realised I was back in that void.
But before I could even think about what any of it meant, I crashed to my knees.
My fingers reached for my throat, gripping and clawing at it while I desperately tried to pull in air that would not come. The pain had not reached me when I had actually been beheaded.
It reached me now.
Now, when all of it finally caught up with me, my body shuddering beneath the weight of what I had just watched happen to it.
Still trying to pull in more air than my lungs could hold, I kept moving my fingers around my throat, searching for a cut that had never been there.
"Fuc..."
"Cough... Fuck me..."
The words barely made it out.
My hands shook as I pushed myself up slightly, the darkness still pressing in from all sides.
Then it shifted again, spreading out unevenly around me in the same way it had before.
And deep down, with a cold certainty, I already knew what that meant.