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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A va was standing upon a sea of impossibly thin, silvery webs. It stretched out around her in all directions, chaotic and without pattern—but not without design. She felt like she was standing upon a glass floor, and if she gazed down too far she would see literal eternity.

We are One.

The Web.

Her.

Us.

Them. Part of her still was herself. Still just Ava Cole, Still just the lost human who had been abandoned by life like so many and fell into the spider’s trap.

“Hi.” She stared off into the shimmering infinity. “How’ve you been? Enjoying my escapades?”

Silence. But a sensation in response instead.

Just a feeling, like a smile. It wasn’t the enemy.

It never was. It was always her, from the moment she started on this stupid journey.

From the moment the first shard went into the mirror, she had been a child fighting bedtime.

Delaying the inevitable. Delaying something that wasn’t even that bad .

“Why am I here? Or rather, why are we— you get it.” She sighed.

“Why am I not sucked into ‘Our’ great and cosmic consciousness?” Keeping all this straight was going to give her a headache.

And it was also real hard not to say any of that without an air of sarcasm.

But she figured she had earned it at this point.

We have a choice to make.

Right. She let out a hard exhale. A choice. The choice that the Morrigan warned her about. That she might opt out of consciousness and instead choose to let herself be subsumed by the Web.

All because of some great and terrible truth. A truth that she knew, because They knew it. Because the Web knew it. She was just protecting herself from it. Which…fuck. She’d been doing that the whole time, hadn’t she?

It was always there. Just beneath the surface.

Shutting her eyes, she let out a wavering breath. Serrik and Valroy had been right. She hadn’t been ready to know. Otherwise, she would have just known. But now she was here. And it was time to make her choice.

“What is this, right now?” She gestured between herself and the shimmering forever-ness of spiderwebs. “Meditation? Spirit walk with myself?” She paused. “Weirdest masturbation metaphor ever?”

A shimmer of silvery light passed through the strands. It might have been the Web laughing. Which was really her laughing at her own joke, now, wasn’t it?

A moment to think.

Fair. She could use that.

Part of her was still resisting the knowledge. The thing that everyone told her was so terrible she might choose to just…give up. She looked down at her feet and at the great tangled sea of forever-and-ever spiderwebs that stretched between universes. Stretched between all of creation.

But she was dying anyway, wasn’t she? This was a form of death. Ava Cole, as Ava Cole, was about to cease to exist. Or had ceased to exist. It was all getting blurry. She was dying, wasn’t she .

Yes.

She cringed. Tears stung her eyes. “I’m so scared…” When her mother had died, the morphine just kind of took her away. She went to sleep, and then never woke up. She didn’t look over the edge of a cliff and choose to die. It wasn’t a moment in time.

But that wasn’t true either, was it?

She’d had cancer. She was told it was terminal. Death was coming for her. When she had made the decision to go into hospice and give up the so-called “fight,” she’d made her choice.

But even that was just a delay. Death was coming for all mortals, eventually. It was just a matter of when. All they were doing was bargaining for more time to spend living. To spend with each other, or seeing beautiful things, or doing beautiful things.

The start and the end were fixed. The middle might expand and contrast and change. But what happened—birth, death—it was never going to go away.

Even with her so-called immortality, she was still dying.

She was still saying goodbye to herself. She wanted to argue that “at least normal people got to keep their souls,” but fuck if she even knew if that were true. Was there an afterlife? Was her mom in heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Oblivion? The Elysian Fields? Was she reincarnated as a giraffe?

We do not know. None do. Not even the angels.

Not even cosmic eldritch monsters or freaking angels knew what came after death? Huh.

Ava shouldn’t have found that comforting.

But she did.

There was no knowing. And there never would be. And she kind of really liked that. Wiping away at the tears that spilled from the corners of her eyes, she let out a wavering breath. “I’ll never get to see her again.”

We will in Our dreams.

And it was in that one word. That one, singular word, that it all came apart .

The barrier between her knowing and not knowing collapsed.

And it all came flooding in.

A cold emptiness settled over her.

Ava fell to her knees and screamed.

Serrik felt it, the moment his Weaver became whole.

The moment Ava was no longer…Ava.

It was meant to happen under his care. In his presence. Under his careful guidance. Not in Tir n’Aill. Not with Valroy so close by. Not with his influence and his grubby claws so eager to twist her into a weapon of his making.

Leaning his hands against the stone mantle of his fireplace, he gazed into the fire. What a detestable hypocrite he truly was. He loathed Valroy for wishing to fashion Ava into a weapon, yet that was precisely what he himself was eager to do.

But his priorities had changed, of late. Now, the idea of Ava gazing at him with vacant, empty eyes? It twisted a knife in his chest. A question raged in him, all the same.

All his life—for nearly two thousand years—he had one goal. Eliminate the fae. Destroy them all. Including himself. If he even still had the ability to control her, to turn her into his mindless slave, would he do it?

Would he destroy what was left of Ava Cole if it meant he would have his revenge?

He…could not say.

He could not answer.

He loved her. He loved her.

But the hatred in his chest burned so strongly beside it. And it was far older. Its roots far deeper.

Grimacing, he slammed his hand into the stone mantle, again and again. Pain arced up his arm. He did not care. It was less than he deserved. It did not matter. None of it mattered. His hope, his love, his rage, his revenge.

It was all outside of his control, now. All of it lay in her hands.

But that was the one thing he could take some solace in. It lay in her hands. Hers, and no one else’s. For he could not sense Valroy near her. Could not feel the sensation of his putrid, sneering visage.

Neither was she alone. Not truly.

Puck was with her. The imp. Which spoke of the magnitude of the moment, and little else.

And as for the others…?

Well.

All was about to unravel.

Because as he felt the doors of his library blast open, slamming against the walls of hallways that previously had not existed? As he felt the world around him shift and warp with the arrival of the Weaver into her domain?

He knew the time had come to face what he had done.

Gripping the mantle, he felt his jaw tick. The power that hummed at his back was unknowable.

“Hello, Weaver.” He paused. “Welcome home.”

A lie.

A lie.

It was all a lie.

It flooded into her mind, crashed down around her, rang through her whole being. Every hint. Every veiled comment. Every clue. Every moment that didn’t add up.

The mirror was not a door. It was her.

Serrik’s prison was not a place. It was a state of being.

The Web’s complete and utter lack of logical existence. The way it linked together in ways that made no sense.

Because it was a dream .

His dream.

And mine. And the dream of all those who were trapped within the Web…who were real.

Ava screamed her throat raw as the full understanding crashed into her. The Web wasn't some inter-dimensional space. It wasn't a physical prison.

It was a dream . A vast, intricate, complex, endless dream.

He had no body. Not anymore. When he had tried to trap the Morrigan within his prison, she had turned it on him, destroyed his physical form, and trapped his consciousness in an endless dream. For nearly two thousand years, he had been bodiless, formless—a mind adrift in a sea of its own creation.

A fate that met all those who were cast within it.

And everything she had seen, everyone she had met…

Some cast into its oblivion.

Some…born of dreams.

“Oh, god,” she sobbed, curling in on herself. “Oh, god .”

Book. The grimoire. The all-powerful tome that had saved her life so many times. It wasn't real. It was a fictional totem of power that Serrik had dreamed up long ago, a prop in an elaborate performance that had been for the benefit of whatever poor sorry son of a bitch he got to play his game.

And the others…?

Bitty.

Her tiny, frightened friend who had stood by her.

Ibin.

The one who had seemed so kind at first.

Lysander.

The flirtatious fae cat who had protected her and guided her.

None of them…

None of them were real.

None of them had ever existed.

They were figments of Serrik's imagination, or Nos’s imagination. Or hers. Characters in a dream, puppets dancing on the strings of their consciousness.

That was why the Web continued to consume her when she left it for Tir n’Aill. Because she was still manifesting dreams around her, wherever she went. Nos. Ibin. Lysander. Bitty. The grimoire. The fish in the pond.

And herself.

The person she'd been—Ava Cole, graduate student, orphan, failed suicide—was dead in a way she'd never anticipated. Not just changing, not just evolving, but fundamentally unreal, a consciousness suspended in a dream not even of her own making.

Not a dream. A reality. Different. But no less real.

The Web—her own voice—tried to comfort her, but it was too late. The horror of what she had become, what she had always been since entering the Web, was overwhelming.

She had never had a physical form in this place.

She had been dead since the moment Serrik had pulled her in.

A lie, all of it, from the very beginning.