Page 128 of Devil's Deal

I wonder how Woland will feel when he sees me after. I hope he’ll be sorry, even just a little. I know he doesn’t desire me as a person, just as a tool in whatever war he’s waging.

My breath comes faster, shallower, the air too hot to enter deep into my cooling body. I can’t draw enough. It’s a relief.

And yet, I still hope I matter to him just a bit. Maybe enough to be sad for a few moments when he realizes I am gone for good. Not because he lost a tool, but because he lost me.

I gasp and gasp. My lungs won’t let the air in.

But then, I won’t be gone. I’ll be in Nawie.

Wiosna will box my ears for dying so stupidly.

I can’t wait.

Something in my chest settles and releases. It’s quiet inside. Too quiet.

The moon rises in the east.

The poludnica is silent. I am slumped on top of her, and my heart doesn’t beat, and yet, I am still here. My eyes burn, and yet they see. My ears hear something akin to a roar, coming from far away.

Suddenly, Chors’ mark on the inside of my palm pulses, cool and restful like water in the river at night. I try to raise my hand to look, but it won’t listen. I am just a mind trapped in a body. And my body, which was always so obedient, refuses my control.

Yet, I feel everything. I feel the sickness inside me. It’s in every part of me, little black particles that settle in my organs and float down to the bottom of each vein like silt. Everything is so motionless. So still.

The roar is louder now. The mark on my palm stops hurting.

I try to blink, but of course, my eyes don’t listen. They burn and burn, tears gathering in the corners, but at least, I see.

I see the poludnica crumple to dust under me. I slump forward, my face pressing into the ground. If I breathed, I would draw a lungful of her dust into me.

My being grows thinner, freer. I feel a call to detach and fly. To look at everything from above. To see the world. All the worlds.

And yet, I’m not sure. Should I leave? Or maybe there’s still something worth staying for?

A memory appears in front of me, as clear as if it happened yesterday. Little Jaga when she was twelve, her blood-slicked hands clutching the handle of the sacrificial knife. How scared she is. I wish I could protect her.

The roar is gone, and silence surrounds me. I wonder if my ears stopped working. What even was that sound? But my eyes are still open, though I can’t feel anything. I’m still inside my body, so when someone rolls me roughly to my back, I see the ground falling away, the sky coming into view.

And then it’s not the sky. Woland is above me, his face grief-stricken and scared. He looks so unlike himself, I want to laugh.

He says something, but I can’t hear him. He repeats it, over and over, with such incredible desperation. His eyes are so wide, and they blaze with emotion, but in a cool, pleasant way. Not like the sun’s heat. Not like the pain that tore at me for the last few hours.

The heat in his eyes is good and comforting, and I wish I could smile to show him my gratitude. I’m thankful because the last thing I’ll see is his face.

It’s so expressive. The neutral mask he sometimes has around me is fully gone. He’s so stunning without it. Even more beautiful than Chors.

His expression changes, the grief falling away to reveal something more visceral.

I see the exact moment his fear morphs into rage. Despair evaporates, replaced by resolve. His full mouth presses into a flat line, his eyes narrow with focus, anger swirling in the gold. He puts both hands on my head, but I don’t feel his touch.

And then, I do.

I explode into a thousand shards, fracturing in agony greater than any pain I’ve ever felt.

My body is ripped open, and I become a multitude, pieces of me tearing and tearing and tearing apart, yet all connected by thick, pulsing cords of vicious suffering. They spring back and form the shape of my body. Each particle is so tiny. Each place where it touches another hurts with impossible agony.

I am an intricate patchwork of torment, sewn together with fire. But the pieces don’t fit together, and so I’m ripped apart again, becoming a mist of bloody pieces, and put together again, and it doesn’t fit, and I scream but I have no throat, and I weep but I have no eyes.

It happens over and over, my being ripped apart and rearranged, and the adhesive holding my body in one whole is pain. I lose count of how many times it happens. It’s an eternity. A torture that will never stop, never fade. I soak, drown, submerge in pain.

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