Page 73 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Fi clawed fingers into his shirt, seeking an anchor. No more running. No more bottling apologies like they’d earn a finer vintage.

“I’m sorry I ran.” Her voice shook. She couldn’t stop. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“I know.” His words only split her further. Soft. Blameless.

“I shouldn’t have gone back. I didn’t know what to do. And Boden…”

“I know.”

“Boden’s gone, Antal.”

There it came, the wound they’d been dancing around—layers of reconciliation and grief bandaged around the freshest cut, trying to staunch the bleeding.

There went Fi’s mortar. There went her wall.

Boden was gone, reduced to a memory of blood choking her nose and his hand too light in hers, of screams sent to the Void until her throat turned raw.

What happened to that fierce woman she’d been, standing her ground against a daeyari?

She could barely stand now, clinging to Antal with whitened knuckles.

“What do I do Antal? How do I make this stop hurting?”

Her chest tightened, scarcely room to breathe. Antal held her against him.

“You don’t, Fionamara. It hurts a little less with time. Not right now. I’m sorry.”

She let him lower her to the ground, let him pull her into his lap so she wouldn’t have to sit in snow, his arms warm around her. She pressed her head into his chest as tears stung her eyes.

Antal always lauded her bravery. She couldn’t let him see her cry.

“Before he died,” Fi said. “Boden said he forgave me. Did you hear?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”

Boden was selfless to the end, using his final words to free her.

Fi didn’t know what to do with freedom, with Boden gone and Astrid gone and only herself remaining.

This persona she’d manufactured out of fear, finally unshackled from the trial they’d endured ten years ago, testing whether she could stand on her own.

Antal stroked her hair, light claws against her scalp. “Do you regret the years you spent with him?”

Of course not. They were good years, good memories of building Nyskya into a home. Fi and Boden did their best with what they had.

“I wouldn’t trade them for anything,” she said.

“Then your time with him wasn’t wasted.” Lower, “Razik looked me in the eyes as he died. My father’s claws at his throat, he looked at me and said it wasn’t my fault.

That he’d choose me again. Then I watched him bleed out on the floor.

” A heavy breath lifted his chest, lifted Fi as she burrowed against him.

“A century later, I’m still not sure I deserved that forgiveness.

But it was given to me. Wasting it would be far greater insult. ”

Fi clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t trust her voice not to crack.

“It’s ok.” Antal tipped her chin up—forced the motion when she resisted—exposing a rebellious scowl and tear-damp cheeks that stung in the cold. “ This is ok.”

He brushed a knuckle beneath her eye, wiping it dry.

Fi only knew how to hiss. To fight. “This has all been an act. I’m a coward.”

Antal scoffed. “Impossible.”

“It’s true. I pretend to be brave. I pretend to know what I’m doing.” The confession rolled out of her, evidenced by tear-stained cheeks. “This is all I really am inside.”

“Have you ever thought less of me? The moments I’ve shown you vulnerability?”

Fi paused. Frowned. “No…” His softness brought them closer. She respected him more for it. She shook her head. “No, but that’s not…”

“Not what?”

“That’s different .”

It wasn’t different. It wasn’t different at all, and Fi’s brain couldn’t process the realization, that the trait she’d found so endearing in Antal was the exact same she’d warred against in herself.

“Strength is easy to fake, Fionamara. Vulnerability is hard. Yet here you sit.”

Fi’s sight blurred behind tears, hot in her eyes, chilling her lashes. She’d felt less exposed when she lay naked beneath him, begging him to put his teeth on her. Yet Antal met her without derision.

Her walls crumbled.

Not just the wall she’d built for Boden, but all of them, every wretched brick she’d piled up when sorrow threatened to choke her, every smear of mortar when the cracks began to show. Down it came with a thunderous crash, and for the first time in ten years…

Fi let herself be vulnerable.

Utterly, shatteringly vulnerable.

She threw herself against Antal’s chest and cried, earnest tears that drenched his shirt, wretched sobs that stole her breath.

Each time she gasped, he hugged her closer.

She let herself cry, bleeding grief and curled nails against the soft hollows of Antal’s skin.

She cried because she needed to drain this anguish from her bones if she was ever going to stand up again.

And as he held her, as Antal mumbled soft words into her hair and stroked her back, Fi wondered if he’d had anyone to hold him when he’d broken like this a century ago. She gripped him all the fiercer for it.

For a time, her tears seemed endless.

But that was never the case, was it? Eventually, Fi’s breaths calmed.

Her eyes blinked back to focus. Her hands still clenched Antal’s shirt, a hollow but sated feeling in her chest, composure enough to finally look at him again.

The daeyari regarded her with soft eyes, lashes veiling irises of glowing crimson.

Bright. Fresh.

Fed.

There came a fresh pang.

“Was it hard?” she whispered. “Knowing his name?”

Fi was grateful for his pause, the weight he gave her question.

“I think,” Antal said, “I was glad to know his name. Maybe that should become a habit.”

And he’d be stronger for it, strong enough for their confrontation with Verne. Another parting gift from Boden. Not to be squandered.

“We have to see this through,” Fi said. “We have to make this right.”

“We will. As Veshri watches from the Void, I’ll see this through with you, Fionamara.”

A different chill ran down Fi’s spine. A memory of endless black. Red eyes. She swallowed the remnants of her sorrow for now, sitting straighter in Antal’s lap.

“Antal?” Fi’s voice came swollen. Hesitant.

He tilted his head, face half buried in the Void roots of her hair.

“Is Veshri… real?”

Antal paused a long moment. Then a confused, “Of course Veshri is real. He was the first daeyari to achieve immortality, by weaving a body of Void ether. He taught others of his kind to follow, millennia ago.”

“Sure. But what about now?”

“Veshri wanders the Void. When daeyari near the end of their first millennium, it’s common to take a pilgrimage. They travel the Shattered Planes, hoping to intersect Veshri’s path.”

“What does he look like?”

Antal shifted her to arm’s length. “I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but… Veshri is the oldest of the daeyari. More at home in the Void than upon the Planes, antlers sharp and clothes spun from darkness. Why do you ask, Fionamara?”

She’d love to tell him. In a moment. After she remembered how to breathe.

“When I was trying to get away from Verne. I cut a Curtain into the Void—a mistake ,” she added, noting Antal’s alarm. “I panicked and I made a mistake and… I was in the Void, Antal. I should have fucking died. Then a daeyari appeared. I thought I imagined him, but… he helped me get out.”

A ludicrous story, when Fi spun it all into one run-on, tear-muffled summary.

Antal’s eyes went impossibly wide.

“You cut into the Void?” he whispered.

“It was that or get eaten.”

“You met a daeyari. In the Void?”

“He looked really old. And his robes did this weird… wispy thing.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“He… I think so. In my head? He told me to think of where I wanted to be… then I slammed into my porch.”

Antal inhaled. “Voidwalking.”

“… What?”

“Fionamara. That’s Voidwalking. Not just dipping through the Void like daeyari teleportation, that’s real Voidwalking.”

He cupped her cheeks, beholding Fi with concern and no small amount of awe.

“No,” she insisted, for her own sanity. “You don’t think it was him? I thought it was a hallucination. Adrenaline. Air deprivation. Anything . You don’t really think it was Veshri?”

Antal’s smile was melting. His words, whisper soft. “Fionamara. Daeyari spend centuries seeking a single meeting with Veshri. For him to come to you—for him to speak—there’s no greater honor.”

“Why would he appear to me?”

“Veshri comes to those who seek knowledge.”

“But why would he come to me , Antal?”

It made no sense. The concept of a demigod roaming the Void? Sure. Why not. All manner of strange things existed across the Shattered Planes, and Fi had already bedded one immortal, been thrashed by two others.

But why bother with her? Why pause to help a lost human floating within the Void?

Antal frowned. “What’s so insignificant about you, Fionamara? You already have a gift for walking Shards.”

“I slipped into a river. I nearly drowned.”

“You survived Verne. Three times now.”

“I ran away. Every single time. That doesn’t—”

Fi fell silent when Antal pressed a kiss to her temple.

“Do you know what I see, Fionamara? I see a woman who was nearly devoured in the woods. Instead, she turned into a hunter. Death tried to claim her, but she returned to walk the Shards as if they were home. Now, even Veshri sees potential in you.” He chuckled against her hair.

“Or perhaps, he was as intrigued by this brazen human as I was.”

Fi recalled the lift in Veshri’s brow when she’d thought of Antal, as if he’d glimpsed her memory of them tangled in bed. Surprised to find his kin with a mortal? If Fi ever ran into him again, she’d guard her intimate thoughts more closely.

“But what does it mean?” she pressed. “I’m on some… divine mission?”

Antal laughed. “Nothing that dramatic. Veshri’s no god, only wiser than most of us. Take it as a vote of confidence.” He grinned, a flash of fangs too close to normal. “And a story worth bragging about.”

That seemed more manageable.

Fi rested on Antal’s chest, measuring the world in the rise and fall of her breaths. In the beat of his phantom heart. Her eyes were swollen but dry. Her grief burrowed, not gone, satisfied with her penance for now.

Antal brushed his fingers through her hair. “You’ll survive this, Fionamara. No matter how it hurts, you’ll survive. I don’t need Veshri’s wisdom to assure me of that.”

She’d been given more second chances than anyone deserved. Fi had emerged from that icy river as a child. She’d evaded Verne’s claws, then Antal’s, turned that enemy to an ally. Now, she’d escaped the Void itself. She couldn’t waste a demigod’s favor, whatever it meant.

She started by standing up. Two solid feet on the ground.

Fi wiped tears from her cheeks then appraised her half-finished pyre of wood.

“On second thought,” she told Antal, “I’d appreciate your help. It’s more work than expected.”

That night, the residents of Nyskya gathered in a forest that wasn’t theirs, come to honor the man who’d brought them together. They grouped around the pyre, snow blushed green from the aurora overhead. No energy lights. Candles flickered in gloved hands, golden hues catching misted breaths.

They wrapped Boden’s body in oil-soaked cloth and laid him atop the platform. Fi moved through the procession with pine sap sticky on her hands, tar acrid in her coat. She’d not been there for Boden when he’d burned their father. He’d said he forgave her. She had to trust him.

Antal kept watch from the treetops.

Kashvi handed Fi a torch soaked in pine resin.

She snapped a current to her fingers, a spark to light the flame. When she tipped the torch against the pyre, the wood hissed. Lighted.

One by one, the villagers came forward. Each person tossed a candle onto the pyre, small flames of remembrance, building to an inferno.

Fi stepped back as the roar of burning timber filled the clearing.

Flames wreathed Boden’s body in gold. His ashes would return to the dust of the Plane.

His energy, already gone to the Void. Beyond the Void, if the old tales were true, another land beyond the Shattered Planes, an endless forest to walk for eternity.

Perhaps Boden would find a sunlit meadow there, sweet browse for his aurorabeasts.

He’d told her to see this through. He’d forgiven her.

More than that: he’d asked Fi to forgive herself. To stop dwelling on mistakes and finally move forward. She swallowed a scratch in her throat. Wood smoke clung hot in her nose.

Beside her, Kashvi stood equally still, dark eyes glistening in the light of the pyre.

“We need to move soon,” Fi said. “While Antal’s strongest. Verne knows we’re coming.”

“We don’t have many fighters left,” Kashvi returned. “But those who’ll join are ready. Give the word.”

Fi nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”

With the plan set, Fi cleared a spot to sit in the snow, a sentinel to watch until the last ember of the pyre burned out.