Page 230 of Of Nine So Bold

“I love you, my daughter. I always have.”

She faded like a dream.

And we stood once more at the edge of a nightmare.

The endless void surrounded the nine of us, with only a shadow of colorless dirt beneath our feet and the sliver of a portal at our backs. The vines still choked it and crawled out in every direction all across the emptiness, just as they had when we saw them from the parapet moments ago. Ghostly traces of the colors that had filled the sky moments before still drifted in the far distance, the glimmer of other realms inside them. But now the vines had reached them.

And already, the distant lights of other realms were starting to falter.

“We have to stop this,” Niko said.

Dex scanned it all, shaking his head. “I’m open to suggestions.”

A low, contemptuous chuckle came from the darkness. “Your world, yourlifeis almost gone, Gwyneira. Why do you still bother to fight?”

I tensed. The hissing, clicking voice seemed made of thousands of smaller voices, all of them so twisted by hate and ravenous hunger that the sound of them made my skin crawl.

The Voidborn.

And my stepmother.

Out of the depths of the void, a monster slithered like a ghostly eel larger than the tallest of buildings and longer than my eyes could see. Scales darker than a moonless night wafted in and out of view like they were not quite fully present, whiletheir edges glinted with silver like blades ready to slice. Smaller shadows with glowing eyes darted around its shifting surface, diving in and out of it like crazed wisps of smoke.

Voidborn. So many, they surpassed any hope of counting them all.

“The Nine,” the creature sneered as it wound around us. “Saviorsof the realm.”

The Voidborn flitting around its massive sides cackled.

“That, uh… that fucking thing is the queen, isn’t it?” Clay asked softly.

Lars nodded, his eyes on the creature. “Think so.”

“Deargods,” Niko whispered.

The creature slithered around the fading scrap of land on which we stood. “What fools you are.” Twisting sinuously, it veered wide of the dying glow of our world. “You saved nothing.”

“Much as I’m loving this encouragement,” Clay commented. “Anyone got any ideas?”

I didn’t respond, staring at the enormous monster winding around us. It seemed to have no end, and it circled us as if to surround us on every side—left, right, above or below. Yet for every time it coiled closer, it would then veer away.

“We pour our power into the gap to our world,” Dex said. “Fuel it enough to return and figure this out when we’re not on the edge of oblivion.”

“It won’t work, my friend,” Casimir replied. “Our world is being drained even now by powers from the void. If we pour our power into that, it will only drain us same as the nexuses.”

“So we…” Niko made a desperate noise. “We close it. That tear she made. We shut it somehow.”

“It’s our only connection to our world,” Byron countered. “Sever that and…”

“We’re trapped here,” Lars filled in. “And we die.”

The demon growled like he refused to accept that, while Ozias shuddered, grim horror radiating from him.

My heart ached.

“But we’ve lasted this long,” Niko argued, desperate hope in his voice. “These bonds between us… Everything we created in the temple…”

“The bonds we’ve forged may be a reflection of the nexuses of our world,” Casimir said. “But they have not changed reality. Whether it is through the portal closing or our world dying, once the energy of our world is fully gone, we won’t last. Even a nexus cannot withstand the absence of all things that is the void.”

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