Page 70 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Just a girl, no horse, and the endless Void

Fi saw no stars. No sky.

No rocky Shard landscape, nor sigh of shiverpines. An odd light fell upon her, dim like moonlight but without a source, barely enough to see her own outline. She flexed her fingers, relieved to find them intact. Beyond her body she saw nothing but black. And she was…

Floating.

Fi floated on weightless limbs, hair drifting around her face and nothing solid beneath her boots, as if she’d plunged into a dark ocean.

A cold dread curled through her marrow. She’d made her life as a Voidwalker, traversing Shards and Bridges like a second home beyond her Plane, always with the black of the Void looming overhead.

She’d walked the edges of solid ground, had stood on the lip of reality and gazed into the nothingness beyond.

But what had Antal told her once? She wasn’t a real Voidwalker, if she couldn’t traverse the Void itself?

There was no Shard waiting on the other side of the Curtain she’d cut.

In her desperation to escape, she’d stepped off the Winter Plane and into the abyss.

Fi gulped a breath, but found no air. She flailed, that taste of Void emptiness sharp on her tongue. Was suffocating to death any better than being eaten alive by Verne?

Yet lightheadedness never came. No fire in her fighting lungs. Fi couldn’t breathe, but… for the moment, she didn’t seem to need air. Her entire body hung in stasis. Compressed. Cold and creaking at the joints. She’d never heard anyone describe how the Void felt .

She’d never heard of any human surviving a fall into it.

The plus side: no Verne. Either the daeyari couldn’t follow here, or wasn’t stupid enough to try.

Antal had spoken like even immortals were hesitant to step fully into the Void, after escaping it millennia ago.

Fi craned her neck to view the hideous bite on her shoulder.

The throbbing had stopped, as if that, too, was frozen in time.

Her heart thudded slower with each beat.

That might not be a good sign. One life-threatening danger traded for another.

No need to panic. Just relax. Breathe—metaphorically.

Shards peppered the Void. Fi only had to find one and drag herself out.

How was she supposed to find anything , within an endless liminal space?

Ignoring that metaphysical headache for a moment, she tried to move, as a starting point. She floated, but unlike water, there was no mass to paddle against, no ground to push off. Fi thrashed in place, but couldn’t tell if she was moving in any direction.

How had the daeyari done it? Pulled themselves out of the Void? Probably easier for them, made of energy and whatever Void pudding they’d built their bodies of. Fi’s human flesh weighed like stones thrown into a lake, dragging slowly down, down…

The compression on her skin grew heavier. Her breathless lungs ached. A creeping instinct told Fi: she couldn’t stay like this forever.

She opened her mouth to shout for help. No sound emerged. Of course, she’d need air to scream.

Who would even hear her?

With another flurry of arms and legs, Fi tried to move, to run, to push, to swim. Nothing. The longer she struggled, the tighter the swell in her throat. The cold seeping into her skin was something more than temperature, a haze at the edge of her thoughts.

Fi couldn’t die like this.

One brash mistake. She was supposed to be better than this now.

The Void had touched her as a child and sent her back, a spark of cold on her skin even when she walked the Plane. She begged the blackness to do so again, to let her move. To let her free. Back to frozen riverbanks and starry skies. Back to people who needed her.

Back to make Boden’s sacrifice mean something. If his energy lingered in the Void, Fi imagined him shouting at her, chastisement for being so reckless. For trying to run away again.

She shouted back.

No sound, just a scream in her head: Please! I don’t want to die like this!

Cold raked down Fi’s spine. She kept shouting out of stubbornness, just to keep from giving in to the surrounding black, even if there was no one who could hear.

I get it, this was a stupid idea! This place is stupid! I’m stupid! Just let me go back to being stupid in a place with air, and I’ll never cut a Curtain without looking again—

Static pricked the back of Fi’s tongue.

Baffled, she smacked her lips. It tasted like a daeyari teleport—but that was ridiculous. Desperation making her imagine things. No one could possibly be here with her…

… Right?

With a sluggish torque of her torso, she looked behind her.

Red eyes stared back.

Fi screamed with a gusto that would have been embarrassing, had it made any sound. Her gaping mouth was little more flattering. She lashed her arms, fighting to pull away. To no success. Faced with futile struggle, she had no choice but to fall still and confront the apparition in front of her.

It wasn’t Verne.

It wasn’t Antal.

There in the endless black of the Void, Fi faced a daeyari she’d never seen before.

And she’d remember a face like this . Sharp-cut, cool gray skin over high cheekbones, eyes carved with age uncanny for an immortal.

His irises glowed like backlit carnelian.

His antlers, tall and curved and wreathed in ten sharp points each side, enough to make Antal seem a young buck, a crown of black lacquer and carvings too dense for Fi to parse, dark hair a wide plait between the antler roots and tied back at the sides.

The daeyari was upside down.

No… she was upside down, floating, while he stood on nothing, staring up at her with head tilted.

If this was a hallucination, it was one of her more creative ones.

Fi tried to ask who he was. Couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. For all the insults of this place, being unable to speak was the worst. Didn’t matter. He couldn’t be real. She gritted her teeth against the dulling beat of her heart, the creep of ice through bones and—

Calm .

The word filled her head. Fi didn’t know where it came from. And how was she supposed to be calm ? She stoked energy from muscle, fighting the cold, but her heat sputtered.

Calm .

Fi twisted to look around, but she saw nothing, no one—except the apparition staring up at her. Maybe this was her subconscious trying to tell her something, conjuring this strange daeyari.

And how had she learned to stand her ground with daeyari? Not by being passive. By being bold. Never giving in.

She couldn’t give in now. The Void was part of her, and she’d find a way out. Fi had to believe that to that last thud of her heart.

She armed herself with all her bristles and faced the daeyari.

Hey, you ! she thought hard at him.

His brow arched. A good start.

Get me out of here , Fi ordered. Now.

The daeyari’s eyes flicked wider, motes of carnelian fire in the dark. So Fi could surprise her own hallucinations? She wasn’t sure if that was something to be proud of.

He pushed off from nothing. For a moment, they floated together, Fi taut as a loaded crossbow, the daeyari drifting to her side in an effortless swirl of tail and black robes that wisped at the edges. Like fabric woven from the Void. He offered a clawed hand.

Why not?

Fi grabbed it.

Weight latched onto her limbs, yanking her down. She lurched as something solid hit her boots. Then, she and the daeyari both stood on nothing, black beneath her feet that felt like stone.

A very creative hallucination. Fi shivered, her hand anchored light in his.

Where do you want to be?

Fi couldn’t place if it was a voice, or just an urge in her head, her desperation to be gone from here.

Whatever the source of the question, Fi didn’t hesitate to answer. She pictured herself in bed that morning, wrapped in Antal’s warm arms and soft twilight through the window. Ozone on her skin. Before everything went wrong.

The daeyari’s brow lifted higher. A tail flick. As if Fi needed snark from her own—

More specific.

A voice. It was a voice, smooth as midnight in her head.

Fi thought of the quarry where Nyskya’s citizens sheltered, the people who needed her now that Boden was gone. She shouldn’t have run. She should have stayed with them, not fled this grief like she always did, should have stood to face it no matter how it hurt.

More specific.

A demanding voice. Fi glowered at the daeyari, but he stared back with a face carved of granite, tail a slow swish and robes drifting without a breeze.

If he wanted specific…

Fi thought of her cabin outside Nyskya, her home and safe haven for seven years.

The home she’d built with Boden. She thought of the porch, of timber she’d felled herself and dragged to the mill on Aisinay’s cart.

She thought of the knotted grain of the wood.

The dark stain dusted with snow. The gouges in the beams where she and Boden had gotten drunk off Autumn Plane cider, then challenged each other to an energy dagger throwing contest that ended with—

Fi was gone in a rush.

Falling, though she couldn’t tell what direction, careening through black as blood roared in her ears. Her chest tightened to the verge of bursting. A rake of cold across her skin.

She slammed into something wooden.

Then sucked in a breath.

One deep, blissful, snow-cold breath.