Page 105 of Prince of the Phantom Sky

She carried on flipping, and her gut hollowed as the pages darkened, slowly overtaken by splodges of black ink, until they fully turned black.

It was a book of a mad woman.

The scribbles were incoherent and endless. Runes Kora didn’t recognise from her lessons with Aerion were repeated on every page, even with the all-black ones she could make out the faintest mark of a quill nearly tearing through the page.

The second-to-last page made her pause. She’d certainly had a knack for drawing, a talent Kora hadn’t recovered post-amnesia. Amidst the chaos, a cavern had been drawn, depicting darkness leaking from it, with a collection of runes erupting from the middle surrounded by circles. Kora rotated the page, trying to make sense of it, but it was all foreign to her. Would Aerion know these runes?

With a sigh, she flicked to the final page . . . and her heart stopped.

“Lost to the void, power ignites. Torn across the land, harbour the vessel. And sacrifice to the rift,” Kora recited the scribbles, the ink of the quill splashing from writing with haste. A drop of blood stained the following blank page.

Almighty Thanos. Barron’s prophecy, but from over ten years ago. The same prophecy Bree had foretold on board Hell’s Serpent.

Still the same nonsensical gibberish that Barron believed meant sacrificing humans to rule the world. In hindsight, Kora now understood Bree had been working with Barron. But how did Kordelia once know it?

The cold prickle that’d persisted whilst Kora thumbed through the book shocked her, and she jolted back into the chair, dropping the book of scribbles as a soundless scream tore from her lips. Darkness surrounded by a red glow crept into her vision and her limbs numbed, floating away as a cold hand grabbed her neck, followed by a sinister laugh bursting her eardrums.

“Stupid, pathetic human,” that voice echoed from Kora’s own lips. “You could never be the vessel.”

“No,” Kora pleaded in return, the conversation murmuring from her own mouth. “I stopped you. They stopped you.”

The laugh cackled. “Nothing could ever stop me.”

“I will not give in to the dark!”

“You are the dark. I would not be here if you weren’t a terrorising little murderer. I am the voice of your killer instinct. Give in, human.”

Kora moaned, ice consuming her veins, attacking her heart. In the back of her mind, a drip echoed as tar bubbled beneath her feet.

“You shouldn’t have touched what isn’t yours.” Kordelia’s image appeared. Long hair rippled down her back in waves. A dark red dress graced her figure, burnished with black patches, the hem coated in sticky, black residue. She strolled towards Kora barefoot, a wide grin stretching her mouth from ear to ear, and . . . she had no scar.

Kora yelled, her body fused to the chair, tendrils of darkness latching onto her limbs, tying her down as Barron had once done. She screamed into the bond but it was silent, a wall of shadows blocking her from Raiden’s light. Panic set in, her control slipping rapidly. Her water beast growled, but when Kora called upon it, the tar pit at her feet bubbled, spreading across the floor.

“You’re not real,” Kora retaliated. “You’re not Kordelia!”

She paused, red streaks in her eyes flaring with rage. “No, pet. You aren’t real. You’re the fugue, the parasite filling this body. It’s time to give it back.”

Barron’s nickname rolling off her tongue made Kora gag, her neck snapping as she craned away.

No.

She was real.

She was real.

This mirage was the imposter, the darkness, not Kora.

Kordelia leaned forward, a veil of moonlight hair blocking the room from sight. A single cold finger pressed to Kora’s scar and her eyes rolled into the back of her head, the darkness dragging her down into the depths of the void.

46

Raiden

He was losing it. He had to be. Raiden paced his room as he repeatedly pulled on his locks, using the pain to root him in the truth. Kora wasn’t his. Just because she looked like Kordelia, didn’t mean that she felt the same way.

Gods damn it.

He was fucking this up. Kora had made it clear she didn’t want anything to do with him. She’d accepted his training, but other than that, he’d respected her wishes of boundaries—especially the physical ones.