Safety. That was what I was promised if I entered this stone. The stone Markus clearly used to dispose of undesirables. I don’t know who made such a promise, or how, but I know I believe it. It’s not like the control of divine magic. Not exactly. It’s more like when I feel grief nearby. Like raw emotion flowing through me in a torrent. Which is why I trusted it. On a visceral level, I understood this emotion couldn’t be a lie. Even as the black stone ripples around me like ice water, even as the world dissolves around me, and even as the emptiness tries to consume my mind, I believe it. I don’t know how, but this is our way out.

  My hand grips Riley’s arm and I pull her closer to me. It feels like we are falling but going nowhere. Emotion collapses on me like ancient wood, battering my mind in every direction it can. There is the promise of safety, but there is also hurt, and fear, and confusion. The deep feeling of betrayal, but an aimless betrayal. Like a child when they fall and don’t understand why it hurts. All of it violently tears an aching grief from every part of me, and my very marrow throbs with empathy for the source. It’s a second-hand guilt, not granted by anything I could possibly change but by a knowledge of wrongness, so pervasive that I can’t help but feel shame for existing alongside it.

  I breathe in the intense feelings and let them flow just beneath my skin. My bones ache with it and yet I feel safe. In a way it makes me safe just with its presence. At first I feel like a stone in rapids, carried with the intensity of the emotion and knowing I belonged to it until as long as it willed. Then, I feel as if I am welcomed by it. Embraced. It needs me, like a tumor needs a scalpel. It’s trying to communicate with me. It’s always been trying to communicate with me, but I’ve never been close enough to touch before. I can feel this in its longing. Its relief. Her relief.

  She doesn’t know how to speak to me. I don’t know if she can speak at all. It feels as if she has no use for words, or doesn’t understand their purpose. I instinctively understand her as ‘she’ but I don’t know how or why. I don’t think she is exactly a person. This torrent of raw feeling might be everything she is. Just vibrant and boundless curiosity, and every passion it has ever led to. She is exuberant at my presence, like I’m water in a world that lost it. She is joy, then she is bafflement, then betrayal and agony. Misery for so long. She doesn’t understand time but she knows suffering. I’m not certain if lack of a temporal sense is better or worse, with how long this pain has defined her. Then blind desperation. The feeling of broken nails on a coffin’s lid, suffocation and aimless attempts to break free.

  Then sunlight. Fiery red and obsidian black. Crawling through the cracks of hopelessness and offering help. Sara. And me. She is telling me a story. Her story, and mine. She can’t give me the details. I don’t think she knows them herself, if she really knows anything at all. She is like the energy in a room, the cloud that informs you of the mood without a word. But she is not less than sapient. She may be more. I can’t tell. But she is a gentle breeze and a violent storm, lacking any desire for control or gratification. Just . . . knowledge. Knowledge of me. Of Sara. Of everyone, everywhere.

  I don’t know when it happened, but our feet are on solid ground. I still hold Riley, who is trembling in anxiety and relief all at once. The world is lit by stars, not from the sky but from that same oily desecration the Void Sage had poured over the arena walls. It drips over trees and pools around hurricane lilies at their base. This is the Radiant Woods . . . but it also isn’t. I can feel the grief of the woods, to the same level and with the same associated well of power. But this grief has only one source. Her. This is like the reflection of the Radiant Woods. Or maybe the woods are a reflection of this.

  “Where are we?” Riley asks, shuddering at the sight of her father’s power, soaking the world around us. As soon as she asks, we find ourselves wading through fatigue. Not our own but hers. It is the weariness of a long journey, and one to a sorrowful destination. We both understand this as an answer.

  “But I can’t feel anyone else here . . .” I wonder aloud. I know other people were abandoned here, only a week ago. I offer my confusion like she offers her grief, and she answers with loss. Deep and layered. “Oh. This is how they do it, isn’t it?” Resignation and acceptance swallows me.

  “Do what?” Riley asks and I sigh, an aching in my throat threatening a loss of emotional control.

  “I’ve never understood it. The purpose. Well, at least what the Collector, or the Original, or whatever you want to call him got out of it. I suppose I know why people complied. But where I am from, people are fed to the Radiant Woods. The Nexus. They are tortured there. Devoured. Forced to live, but only a life of agony, chosen for them by a creature who loathes them. In Potestia, these people were simply brought there directly. But the same clearly happens in the Republic. You can tell by the comfort. The building with no ramps, the lack of braille or an equivalent on library plaques. The public benches, free of bars. The clean streets and the perfect clothes. Just like in Potestia, the people society wants to forget are disposed of. Even more groups of them, it seems. I’m surprised by the ones they left behind. Anyway, I suspect they are disposed of in the same way.

  “But the sages, they fear the Nexus. They fear the Original, I think. But they also seem to work with him. I never understood how they delivered their . . . sacrifices. I hadn’t had time to investigate it yet. But this. This is how. It’s connected, somehow, to the Radiant Woods. It’s also isolated. But it’s connected. And it’s used to deliver them. That’s why these . . . stones exist at every border. It links them. It allows the sages to throw out the garbage without risk to themselves. The perfect arrangement. Disposal of the people they look down on most from the comfort of their own homes. Although, I suppose it’s probably not in the literal home of most. Markus just enjoyed watching, I suspect. He enjoyed pain. Either way, this is how they do it,” I explain. Riley takes a sharp breath.

  “This place . . . it belongs to them. I can feel it. I can see it. It stinks of my father. We are in danger, we have to get out. Lillith, it’s not safe here. This place is theirs. They can reach us without even touching us,” Riley whispers, a mild tremor in her voice. We feel injury, like vindictive words from a close friend, then safety again. I understand it immediately.

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  “No. This place is no one’s,” I reply. A rush of relief and agreement washes over us. Then that feeling of wrongness returns. “This place can’t be owned. Just abused. It shouldn’t exist at all. It is a ship in a bottle. Expression in its purest form, caged by glass and a narrow exit. But one thing is for sure. Whatever level of control they have over this place, the cowards wouldn’t dare face us right now. Not directly. Not when their victims can share their grief with me.” I flare my mana as I say this and the world bends around me, creaking like an aged floorboard under the pressure of my current power. Riley’s eyes widen and she gasps like I’ve just punched her in the gut.

  “No wonder they call you a demon queen,” she mutters.

  I shrug. “Perhaps. Either way, your father has a yellow belly, Riley. Always has. He won’t come within a thousand miles of me while I’m here. And the Original? Well, he’s tried before, and he knows he can’t hurt me, or anyone with me, in this state. It’s why he tried to kill us when I threw us in,” I reply.

  “Anyone with you?” She asks. “He’s a sage, and one of the most powerful, Lillith. You may be protected, somehow, but he can take my mind from me in a moment. How am I safe?” Spring dances around us, or the feeling of it. The expression of gentle breezes and quiet nights watching the stars. Reassurance.

  I consider her question. I have been here before, without Sara and with the twins. Or at least, I have been in the actual Nexus, which is extremely similar. The Collector never took Autumn or August’s minds. But . . . his priests did. I know he directed us together to make me more vulnerable, but he could still have controlled them. Actually, his priests shouldn’t have been able to control them. Not without his help. I think back to Peter’s story. How he regained his mind when approaching the woods, but lost it again upon entering. The stronger power washed it away, but returned when he entered. The twins only fell under the influence of divine magic when the priests were around. Maybe . . . it’s the other way around. Maybe he can’t control his victims without the priests. Maybe he needs them. But then the monsters . . . aren’t directly controlled. Instead, they are offered incentives. Death in exchange for attacking me.

  “No. He can’t,” I reply. “I don’t know why, but he can’t. Not on his own.” Certainty and victory erupt around us like geysers, confirming my guess. Riley can feel it too, I can see it on her face, and in the way she relaxes her muscles, just a little. She sighs.

  “I guess I don’t have an option but to hope that’s true,” she replies. “But . . . what do we do now?” I turn. I feel ice, and winter, and loneliness. Almost every direction I turn reeks of failure and forgotten corners. Almost. As I continue shifting, excitement assaults me. Hope. A violent hope that burns through me and urges me forward.

  “We go that way, I suppose,” I respond. Riley seems to agree. And we walk. And walk. And walk. “So,” I finally say as the weight of silence starts to crush me, “You want to tell me about what happened with your father? You don’t have to, but you are welcome to.”

  She flinches, and I regret asking, but she nods a moment later. “Everything you know about him will help you kill him,” she agrees. Nevertheless, it still takes a moment before she speaks again. “My father . . . my father has a lot of children. Some born from him, others stolen from their families. But he has a lot of children. Or rather, he has a lot of sons.”

  I wince. “Sounds familiar,” I agree. She nods.

  “He is only interested in sons. Apprentices. People to carry on his name. He’s been around for a long, long time, and he has many sons, but no daughters. None but me,” she continues. That confuses me a bit. How long could he possibly have been around? I just got here eighteen years ago, he shouldn’t have been around any longer than that.

  “And he uses the nexus to avoid having daughters?” I guess. She shakes her head, then pauses, looking at the filth of his magic as it poisons the plants around us.

  “In a way, but not like you are thinking. His Nexus energy, it’s no good for creating, or even changing a creation. It is the power of emptiness. The power of the void. And his only mana aspect is the same. He can’t directly manipulate us like that, and the Original would kill him if he tried. That is one of several things the sages are forbidden from doing if they want to keep the peace. No, his method is far simpler. The very thing you described before, actually. If he has a daughter, he simply disposes of them. Through one of these places, I suppose,” she answers. I don’t reply. The next question is obvious enough that it doesn’t need to be asked.

  “Like I said. My father has a lot of sons. Too many to pay any special attention to any of them. And my mother, well. She knew what would happen when she had a daughter. Her doctor knew as well. And neither was willing to watch it happen. I was dressed as a boy. Treated and trained as a son. My father’s visits were rare enough and my mother’s staff caring enough that we managed to hide it. For a while. An entire childhood, a gift I will always cherish. I was trained to use my father’s void mana. I was pushed to grow strong. The very picture of masculinity, or whatever definition Rowan has for it. All to feed the illusion . . .

  “But I did too well. I grew too strong. Too skilled. Better than any of his sons with mana or steel. I started to get too much attention. Too much praise. And my father finally noticed me. Riley is a gentle name, but an ambiguous one. I hoped to keep him in the dark but . . . he grew too involved. He wanted to parade me around as a trophy, and he did exactly that. I was an extension of his prestige. But any well used object will eventually crumble. Any paint will fade and chip if handled too often, left in the sun too long. Well. After nearly two years of his orders, the cracks started to show. I was found out, publicly, and he was . . .” she trails off.

  “Furious?” I guess. She offers a single humorous laugh.

  “Worse. He was humiliated. He was ashamed and it was my fault. I never saw my mother after that. I could never convince him to tell me where she was. Here, I guess. But me? He wanted to make an example out of me. A public example to all the mothers of all his other children. To all his sons. And so I became a slave. Still paraded. Still used. No longer to inspire praise, but fear,” she finishes. We walk in silence for long enough that I am certain the Cliff Notes are all I’m getting.

  “That sounds disgustingly like him,” I finally mutter. She looks over at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “What about you? What’s your history with him? Why is he so afraid of you, who didn’t even know he was the Void until you saw his face?”

  I take a deep breath through my nose and look around at the dark, empty landscape. The eternal night which mirrors the day of the Radiant Woods. The dripping stars. I scratch the shaved side of my head as I think for a moment, then I shrug.

  “Yeah, alright,” I agree. “Your father, Rowan now I guess, I’ve met him before, if only once in person. On the day I died. Although, at the time, he went by ‘Oakley’.”