Page 48 of Maneater

Odessa, demigoddess of wrath.

When I finally opened my eyes, I was back in the Ossarith, standing before Raithe’s ossiraen. His tree towered above the others, a wooden behemoth in a sea of god-trees.

But I wasn’t focused on that. My attention was on the small bundle in my hands.

Resting in my palms was a seed, no bigger than a silver coin.

Oval, with a pointed tip, it caught the light in a deep, crimson red.

My seedling. My ossiraen. Pride rose in my chest, and with it, a quiet joy.

The darkness inside me no longer felt like something other, something to fear or fight.

It wasn’t a force pushing back. It was part of me now, woven through every piece of who I was. Not a curse. Not a flaw. My divinity.

“Odessa,” Raithe’s voice reached me in a low whisper.

I didn’t turn to face him, though I felt his presence behind me.

I didn’t know what to feel when it came to him.

The Ossirae’s test had revealed every moment my divinity had surfaced, every time Wrath had taken hold.

I saw it all clearly now. My memories were no longer clouded or broken apart.

I remembered what I’d done, the lives I’d taken, the harm I’d caused, the men I’d left maimed or dead.

But there was no shame. No regret that clung to me.

I was a demigoddess of Wrath. What I did wasn’t monstrous, it was divine.

I hadn’t committed those acts out of mindless rage, but through the raw, unbridled essence of who I am.

There was a strange irony in being a god born of emotion and yet feeling nothing like I once did as a mortal.

There was no nuance, no shades or gradients to my divinity.

There was Wrath, or there was nothing. And when it rose, it consumed everything else.

I didn’t feel remorse. I felt clarity. Purpose.

I remembered calling on it the night I nearly killed my father. I was only trying to protect my mother, to stop the pain he dealt so recklessly. I would have let him die if I had the power to, but I was young then, still unformed. Raithe’s Vengeance was just as new, just as unruly.

In Rustwood Mill, that changed. Wrath surged through me, and I welcomed it.

I didn’t hold back. I killed a dozen men.

Fathers, sons, brothers. They died under the weight of my fury, and not one of them deserved to live after what they’d done.

Their deaths were not quick, and they were not clean.

They were laced with savagery, with blood and consequence, with the judgment Wrath demands. And I did not mourn a single one.

When the Ossirae showed me what I did in Falhurst, I couldn’t look away.

I watched the carnage unfold. Heard the screams, saw the skies flood with ravens like a baleful shadow.

My Wrath had become a storm. I was stunned by it, overwhelmed by the depth of what I was capable of.

And I wanted more. I needed to know just how far that power could reach.

I’d spent so long resisting this part of myself, fearing what it meant. But that fear was gone. Wrath was not my burden, it was my birthright. Now, I had nothing ahead of me but time. I vowed to carry both until the world gave out beneath my feet.

“Odessa,” Raithe repeated, now just a breath behind me.

Still, I didn’t turn. All that mattered was my ossiraen.

My lifeforce, my god-tree. I scanned the Ossarith, searching for the place where I would root my soul for eternity.

Open fields stretched before me, some already dotted with ossiraen, including Raithe’s, still forming, still stretching outward.

But then my eyes found the crest of a hill, bathed in sunlight.

Few trees had taken root there, and I hoped it would remain untouched for at least a few more decades.

I began to walk, Raithe trailing behind in silence.

After fifty paces, I paused and looked down at the soil, fresh and untouched, ready to be shaped.

I knelt, setting the seedling beside me.

With bare hands, I began to dig. Handful after handful, dirt clung beneath my nails and coated my skin. Still, I kept digging.

Raithe stood nearby, saying nothing. He knew this moment was mine. It was something sacred, something I had to do alone.

I dug until the earth turned soft and rich, full of strength and life.

Then I reached for my crimson seedling. I cradled the pod as if it were the most precious thing in existence.

Sunlight danced across its surface in colors of red, claret, and crimson.

It was beautiful. I lowered it into the soil, deep enough to root, shallow enough to feel the sun’s warmth.

Carefully, I replaced the earth, covering the jewel I’d just planted.

When the ground was whole again, I rose and brushed the dirt from my hands.

Raithe drew in a sharp breath beside me, and then I saw it too.

The soil where I’d planted the seedling began to glow, a silver light rising from the ground.

The air shimmered with magic. Wisps of light curled upward, first gently, then with rising force.

The coils of silver threads wove together, twisting and braiding into the shape of a sapling.

But this was no ordinary sapling. Its form was delicate, its bark glimmering like scarlet ribbons in the light. My ossiraen stood no taller than my knee, yet it rose proudly. It bore no leaves, no sign of age, but I felt an overwhelming sense of self-identity rise within me.

All my life, I had waited for this. For a sign that there was purpose in my existence, a meaning beyond the outskirts where I’d been born. I had always felt misplaced, a girl adrift in a world too vast and unkind. A girl shattered, taken, and used. And in time, a girl who clawed her way to freedom.

Tears slipped down my cheeks, dark, thick, and black. They spilled raw and free. I wished there were words to contain what I felt. It was joy and grief and a bone-deep sense of completeness. I had lived only a wisp of my immortality, yet it had already been steeped in pain.

Apathy had become my default. I believed the humanity in me was gone, burned away by everything I had endured. I had moved through the world with fury and sorrow as my companions, believing myself to be something wicked. Something monstrous.

But that wasn’t the truth.

Now, I understood. The rage I clung to, I had wielded it like a weapon, directing it toward what I thought I loved, what I thought needed protecting. But it was always leading me here. To this moment. To be acknowledged.

My shoulders shook with silent sobs, but Raithe came to me. Gently, he turned me to face him, his golden eyes alight with emotion. Pride, concern, and adoration.

He cupped my cheek, brushing away the falling onyx tears with the back of his hand.

“Odessa,” he whispered, leaning in until his forehead rested softly against mine. “You are powerful.”

He kissed a black tear from my left cheek.

“You are fierce.”

His lips brushed the other.

“You are limitless.”

When he pulled back, his eyes were molten gold, burning with something sacred.

“You are everything.”

Then he took my hands in his, sank to his knees, and pressed his lips to each palm. When he looked up at me, it was as though he was looking at his salvation .

“Odessa,” he said reverently, “you are a god.”

I was a god.

What would I do with my immortality? What could I become over eternity?

The only other divine being I truly knew was Raithe, and he had made it clear he would remain by my side through it all. Yet even now, I was uncertain how to feel about him.

Our connection had always been forged in fire.

With passion, intensity, and primality. We only seemed to draw close when our divinity surged, when our godhood and bloodthirst reached its height.

Two emotions, bound and tangled. Vengeance and Wrath.

Raithe once claimed we were two halves of the same twisted whole, and when I look back at our history, it was hard to deny it.

I could never have done what I did without his power. Without him, offering pieces of himself, letting me channel my divinity through the well of his strength. Together, our powers weren’t just combined, they were magnified. Our bond wasn’t born of affection, it was born of purpose.

Perhaps there was no world where Raithe and I could exist apart.

But that didn’t mean my feelings for him would change.

His obsession, his fixation of us, still unsettled me. I didn’t love him. The gods only know how he came to believe he loved me. If he even understood what love truly was.

I did. I had it with Caz.

I knew what it meant to fall into that rhythm, that sacred dance of devotion. But I also knew what it felt like when the music stopped. I had kept twirling, falling deeper, giving more, only to find him gone. He fled to the sway of another song.

And my heart couldn’t survive that kind of ending again .

If Raithe was right, and gods did feel emotion with a ferocity that surpassed all else, then there would be no world in which my heart would open to another. The pain I endured with Caz shattered me. Broke me in ways I would never fully understand.

He was my first love. My only love. My future, my sun and my stars. And then he left.

In the years after him, even sleep offered no rest. My dreams were haunted by what we had planned together.

The life we were supposed to build. I saw us tracing the world’s edges with ink-stained fingers, waking up side by side, me joining the Academy, earning my robes.

We would have had the kind of love others envied.

I would have been his wife. I would have borne his children.

We would have shared a life full of joy, purpose, and belonging.

But to understand why Caz left me, I had to face the ache that maybe I was never enough for him.

That the story I believed in, our story, was not the same one he was living.

I had to ask myself if the words he once spoke were ever true.

I had to wonder if something in me was broken.

Something unworthy. Something unlovable.

Because in the end, he didn’t just leave me. He abandoned us.

Then came Gadriel.

He tore me from my home and dropped me into the unknown.

In Brier Len, I had finally learned to breathe again.

I tried to soothe the aching void Caz left behind with the stillness of the forest. Because before there was Caz, there were the woods, and they had always been mine.

They still were. No man, no love, could have ever severed me from them.

The forest held me in its quiet embrace.

It sheltered me, steadied me. And even then, Gadriel tried to take that from me.

He ripped me from the only place where I still believed I could rebuild myself. Locked me away in his tower of stone. Used me until I was hollow. Until there was nothing left but emptiness inside me.

But I escaped.

I clawed my way out. I found freedom, piece by broken piece. I stitched myself back together with whatever I could find: shattered memories, cracked hopes, fragments of anything.

I made myself whole again.

I became Odessa, demigoddess of Wrath, and I would never be chained again.