Page 37 of Hellfire to Come
Existing felt… optional.
I wasn’t sure if I was dying.
Or if I had already died and just hadn’t been informed.
Everything hurt. But not in the way a body hurts. Not flesh or bone. This pain was stranger. More intimate. Like my soul was being plucked apart string by string, tuned and snapped, over and over again.
It began in my core; A sharp, smoldering heat coiled like a serpent behind my ribs. It twisted tighter with each second that passed, unwinding only to tear through me again. I would’ve screamed if I could find my voice. But even that had been stripped away in this liminal void.
No chains here.
No dungeons.
No Frederic with his knife and smirk.
Only the remnants of his magic, buried so deep I felt it chewing at the marrow of what made me, me.
And inside it all.
Something else was moving.
Not the curse. Not the pain.
Me.
Or at least, a version of me that still remembered how to fight.
She stirred in the shadows, barefoot, bloodstained, wearing a cracked pair of glasses and a manic grin. She was the girl who once beat back demons with a crowbar. The girl who had nothing but bad jokes and rage and a promise to her best friend stitched across her ribcage like armor.
“You’re not dead,” she told me, her voice echoing weirdly in this not-space.
I stared at her. At myself.
“Could’ve fooled me,” I muttered.
She cocked her head. “You’re not dying either. Not yet. The magic’s just… confused. Like a virus stuck in its own code.”
“The virus is melting my brain.”
She shrugged. “Then melt back harder.”
There was a pause. The darkness rippled, and for a moment, I swore I heard Brooklyn’s voice. Faint. Distant. Like wind through leaves.
It tugged at something deep inside. A tether I didn’t know I still had.
“I told you she’d come,” my shadow-self said. “Now all we have to do is not combust before she gets to us.”
Easy.
Another pulse hit me, white-hot and merciless. It clawed through my veins like molten metal. I arched, trembling in thisbodiless existence, as the magic inside me howled. It wasn’t trying to kill me anymore.
It was trying to take root.
Oh gods.
Was I being turned into a vessel?
Images flickered around me, flashes of glyphs, broken circles, the smell of burned sage and blood. I saw Frederic’s sneer. Rowan’s empty eyes. My hands lighting up with power that wasn’t mine.
