Treachery Queen (The Callistra Chronicles #1)

THIRTY-FIVE

PART FIVE — QUEEN

The world burned down the day Pasiphae of Eo stepped to her throne.

Chapter Thirty-Five

When Pasiphae's knife went through Arche's heart, she cut off the final tie of the Somnus magic in Medeis. Across the continent, witches jerked to life with a startling gasp, inhaling air like they had been deprived for centuries. Parasitic wing strands peeled from their necks with a gruesome stickiness, dropping to the floor and taking with it several layers of skin.

Some immediately bolted upright and vomited, expelling whatever had last been in their stomachs and internally decaying the entire time. Some turned over to go back to sleep, unknowing of the slumber they had just woken from, exhausted beyond description as their magic starting stitching itself back up.

A few didn't survive. Those at their last breaking points had tipped over the edge when the connection broke, and where their magic couldn't heal and replenish, they simply faded into darkness with a whimper.

It appeared no one else who woke skated on the knife's edge between restorable magic and void death as Pasiphae did. Perhaps the blade was so thin it took extreme power to simply stand still and resist falling.

Meira woke up gasping, her magic entering the room so quickly that the doctors who had been gathered around her were thrown backward and pressed into the wall.

"Please slow down," one advised as Meira glanced around frantically, touching the rip of a wound at her throat.

"My granddaughters," she wheezed. "Where are they?"

***

"I'll be honest, grandma," Pasiphae said, her words muffled into Meira's shoulder, "there were moments where I kind of thought you were done for."

Meira chuckled as she pulled back, holding Pasiphae by the shoulders to look at her.

"You got taller," she remarked in a flippant sort of way.

"I did a lot of stretching."

Meira let go of Pasiphae, and turned to Circe, who appeared as if she couldn't quite return her eyes to their normal size.

"You, my heartling," Meira said, "look like you've been shell-shocked."

Pasiphae watched with a faint amusement as her sister allowed Meira to engulf her in a hug.

"I think I might need ten years of therapy," Circe croaked, catching Pasiphae's eye over their grandmother's shoulder.

Pasiphae grinned in response, for Circe's sake, but her gaze kept moving down to her hands, where Arche's blood still stained the space underneath her fingernails. She scrunched up her fist, forcing herself to inhale levelly.

Every time she closed her eyes, she could feel the rushing wind on her face again. She was crashing the submarine onto the shores of Eo, ripping half her dress as she climbed from the wreckage. The first strange feeling had been the sun on her skin, warmth and light touching the lines and planes of her face. She hadn't seen the sky be a colour other than black for so long, she was almost mesmerised by the oranges and the pinks swirling lighter and lighter as the sun ascended in its arc across the sky.

But the beauty had shaken Pasiphae into reality, making her realise more acutely the dirt on her face and the wrongness in her surroundings.

It was a feeling she never wanted to experience again. There was sweat on her neck, alternating between the heat of her perspiration and the cold of her terror. She had torn through the empty streets—some in states of complete disarray from the disasters that had shaken the continent—with the taste of dread on her tongue, uncertain what she would find when she arrived at the source of fear and death and absolute fury summoning the empty space at her chest.