I take a deep breath and stare down at the straight blade at the end of my scythe, and I go still.
I could take my own life.
That thought throbs in my skull like a migraine, nearly blinding me with pain. But...maybe this is the answer.
I can’t choose my mates over my sisters and their loves, but I can’t just blindly follow Morax’s demands either.
Maybe if I turn the blade onto myself, it will be enough to stop the Ophidian. He needs all three of us, I’m almost sure of that. And if that’s true, if he needs our combined Annuli powers to be enough to take down the Devil, then I can still do something to stop him. I can end myself and ruin his plan once and for all.
At the expense of myself. Resigned determination makes my hand tighten around my scythe, and I glance up at Delta’s and Medley’s faces. I pull again on my sisters’ bonds, needing to somehow say goodbye. I know we just found each other, but I’ve felt them my whole life. I’ve been connected to them since before we were born, and I will love them until the universe ceases to exist and my soul is nothing.
Adrenaline pumps so wildly through me that sweat breaks out against my skin. The darkness in my mind rushes up around me in nervous, frantic waves, like it’s trying to find the source of my unrelenting sorrow and dread. I feel it wrap me up as though it wants to talk me out of my decision, whisper promises of how there’s another way, but I know that would be laced with nothing but lies and false hope.
“Almost time…” Morax says with impatient excitement, his eagerness pulling me from my agonized thoughts. His eyes are latched onto Toreon, and my heart aches at seeing my mate’s body looking so sunken and broken, his power faded even more now as he gives the last of himself to the creation of a portal that should never be allowed to exist.
My darkness builds and builds, not knowing what to do, how to protect me from...me. It swirls around in frenzied uncertainty, and then it seems to detect the bonds I’m holding to Delta and Medley, as I try to figure out how to show them how sorry I am and how much I love them all at the same time.
As if it just found salvation, I feel the darkness shoot down our ties, making my body jolt forward, like a painless hook in my stomach. I gasp a little, but then the strangest thing happens—my darkness goes down the bonds, and it seems to...call to my sisters.
And what’s even more surprising, is I feel my sisters’ darkness answer.
That hook in my stomach suddenly seems to attach to Delta and Medley as well, because they both jolt forward the same way I did.
My heart pounds with incertitude as this strange sensation washes over me. I see it all in my mind’s eye, or maybe in my soul, as the darkness in all three of us coils together as if it’s meeting or maybe reuniting in some way.
It’s as though our inner demons, our dark sides, are magnets to each other, and once they join, they start to double, then triple in mass and power. All of a sudden, all that exists is the living and breathing entity inside of us, like all along, it was split up three ways, and now we’ve put it back together again. We’ve unleashed it.
It’s a trifecta of black, pulsing power, and as soon as it converges together, we...explode.
My body jerks off the ground, levitating in the air. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. I can’t even feel. Three screams rent through the air, as black, billowing light purges out of us all at once.
Our power, our darkness, bursts into life like an entity of its own, like a vindictive, omnipotent force that has more rage than Wrath herself.
A shock wave of power detonates out of us, sending a punishing pulse of power through the air and earth, through every molecule around us.
A resounding crack sounds, and then I’m able to open my shadow-stained eyes, but it’s as though I’m watching things through a faraway fog. I can’t move or control my body; I barely even know my own name.
Everything has changed.
The three of us don’t just have the darkness. We are the darkness. We’ve become it. We’ve been unleashed onto the