Free Web NovelChapter 26: Chapter 26. Memories
Lyra found herself adrift in darkness.
Not the darkness of a room with its curtains drawn, or the darkness behind closed eyes. This was something else entirely, a void that stretched in every direction without boundary or end, swallowing distance and depth until neither concept meant anything. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t tell where her body ended and the emptiness began. It pressed against her from all sides, not with weight, but with presence, like it had always been here, waiting, and she was simply the latest thing to fall into it.
She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know why.
And then the memories came.
They didn’t arrive gently. They moved through her like a current, one after another, unbidden and indifferent to whether she was ready for them.
She was small again. A hallway. A door left slightly open, and through the gap, her father’s voice, warm and unhurried, the voice he kept for her brother. She was standing just outside, an old, worn doll clutched against her chest, watching through the sliver of light. Something in her chest pulled toward what she was seeing. She wanted it too, to be held like that, to be looked at like that. But she stood in the hallway and said nothing, because the courage for it never came.
The memory shifted.
She was older now. Ten, perhaps. A teacher had just confirmed what her father had already suspected, she had no aptitude for the sword. None at all. She had turned to look at him in that moment, and what she found in his eyes had no name at that age. She understood it now. It had been disgust. Days later, he arranged for a magic instructor instead. And what did that reveal? That she could only use one element. A single, solitary element.
Lightning.
The disgust in his eyes had deepened into something permanent after that. And somewhere in the space between his gaze and her own reflection, her anger toward herself quietly became hatred, and she carried it forward, wore it inward, until it was simply part of how she understood herself.
The memory shifted again.
The training ground. Laughter directed at her from every side. She had kept her eyes down and her expression still, because she had already accepted long before arriving that this was what waited for her. She had made peace with it.
But then something happened that didn’t belong to that pattern. Someone else arrived with the same element. And that person, in some way she still couldn’t fully articulate, became the first friend she had ever had. In this Academy. In her life. She was almost afraid to use the word. But it was true. And when he had placed a hand on her shoulder and spoken to her not with pity or contempt, but with something that actually resembled appreciation, she had felt, for the first time, genuinely happy.
Necrotize. The God of Destruction.
And then the final memory.
The garden. The ice cream melting on her tongue. His voice, patient and careful, laying out the architecture of something ancient and vast. And then, a hand, driving through her chest. Her heart, crushed in his fist.
She had trusted him. She had genuinely, completely trusted him. She had given that trust without reservation, perhaps for the first time in her life.
Was she truly not allowed even this? Was happiness simply not something she was permitted to have?
The thoughts moved through the void without resolution.
And then she saw something.
Far away, so far it was barely a suggestion, a single point of light at the edge of the darkness. Faint, reddish, almost imperceptible. She couldn’t make out what it was. Only its colour registered, and even that barely.
Then it began to grow.
Slowly at first. Then a little faster. Then faster still, the red deepening, expanding, bleeding outward through the black until it was no longer a point but a tide, washing through the void in every direction, replacing darkness with a deep, burning red that filled the entire space around her.
Lyra still couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
She looked down at her hands.
Her fingers were dissolving, not painfully, not violently, but quietly, transforming at their edges into something small and winged. Purple butterflies, one after another, peeling away from her fingertips and lifting into the red. The dissolution moved up through her palms, her wrists, her arms, then the other hand, then her shoulders, her chest, until her entire body had come apart into thousands of small, violet wings, drifting upward into the emptiness.
What...what is happening to me?
The thought didn’t finish.
There was nothing left to think it with.
*** fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
Necrotize sat watching Lyra’s motionless body where it had fallen against the earth. The smile had not left his face, quiet, patient, knowing something the world around him did not.
He held his gaze on her for a long moment. Then he turned his eyes to his hand.
It was soaked through with blood. Fragments of her heart still clung to his fingers. He turned his hand over slowly, almost contemplatively, and rubbed his fingers together once.
Then he extended his hand outward.
The blood vanished. Every trace of it, gone, as though it had never existed. His hand was clean.
The butterfly that had been drifting nearby was still there, moving in its unhurried circles above the flowers. But the sweet breeze that had been threading through the garden changed. Without warning, it shifted in character entirely, losing its gentleness and becoming something sudden, something sharp, like a held breath released all at once.
Necrotize kept his hand extended before him. His deep violet eyes remained fixed on Lyra’s still form.
And then, slowly, the colour in those eyes began to change.
The violet bled away. In its place came red, not a soft red, but the red of something burning at its core, deep and absolute. The moment it completed, the garden’s stillness broke. The birds in the surrounding trees erupted into noise, frantic, discordant, instinctive. Other creatures nearby followed, their sounds layering into something that didn’t belong in an afternoon garden.
Necrotize drew a long, slow breath.
Then a single word left his mouth.
Resurrect.
A red light bloomed from the wound in Lyra’s chest, faint at first, then steadily brighter, pulsing with something that felt almost like a heartbeat remembering itself. The cavity where her heart had been began to close. Tissue by tissue, the wound drew itself shut, healing with a precision that had nothing to do with mana and everything to do with something far older.
Within moments, there was no wound at all.
***
Consciousness returned slowly, pulling itself together piece by piece.
Her eyelids were heavy. She let them open anyway.
A face was waiting for her. Close, unhurried, wearing an expression she couldn’t immediately categorise, a smile that was warm on the surface, but carried something underneath it that ran considerably deeper.
As her eyes focused completely, a voice reached her, quiet, almost gentle.
"Welcome back, Lyra."
