Clematis and the Queen of the Void: An FF Fantasy Romance by Hiyodori

Author:Hiyodori [Hiyodori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE GRATE BENEATH me crumbled like dried-up mud. The spikes vanished. As I started falling, I missed how they’d anchored me. It was like someone had stuck their hands in and wrenched my bones out.

Wist caught me.

This ought to have been excruciatingly painful. As bad as getting run through in half a dozen different places.

Invisible magic trussed me up like a spider’s prey getting wrapped for storage. That magic muffled my senses, stopped my too-hot blood from gurgling like a skinny waterfall past her arms and all down the front of her body. Before she snatched me out of the air, I must’ve been bleeding freely into the endless sky.

I’d dropped like something rotten tossed down a garbage chute. Wist didn’t fall: gravity would not sabotage her the way it had sabotaged me.

I couldn’t tell if we were still suspended by the cavern exit. I couldn’t tell how long she carried me in that false empty sky. The magic swaddling me made everything sound like the languid curl and collapse of small ocean waves.

Eventually, she ported. My swollen left eye got a blurry glimpse of new scenery. A proper sky filled with motion, with implacable aerials. Water towers and wind catchers on one side, and green hills on the other.

We were on top of the town wall.

Every last barrier—the metal spikes and bars—had disintegrated. I’d followed my guiding primevals all the way to the end of the line. Only to land right on the wall itself. I’d never actually set foot outside Bittercress.

A long braid curled around me, pressing me to her like a binding sling, soaking up blood like white cotton. Only then did I remember she was the Queen.

“No one can leave,” she said to the top of my head.

A steady wind blew past us as she held me. I heard the sound of flowing water.

When I came to, my entire body felt as though she’d dragged me behind the tavern and systematically beaten me up from head to toe.

I was not lying on a soft bed. No one tenderly held my hand. No cool compress on my brow. No IV drip. No gift baskets full of expensive fruit.

Nor did I have numerous gaping wounds retching blood all over the floor like sailors bailing out a sinking boat. I was alive. I could see.

I knew this place. Kind of. We were at the top of the water tank painted to look like a skyward-facing eyeball.

“You have a sick sense of humor,” I said.

“And you don’t?”

The Queen still wore my blood in her hair. It looked much drier, though. A rusty hue.

The pupil of the great eye held up a disc-shaped platform surrounded by a nominal guardrail. Discreet stairs snaked sinuously out of sight down the curve of the tank.

I sat up, my back to the railing. The bars were distressingly similar in diameter to the spikes that had bored now-sealed holes in me.

“Figured you would rescue me,” I said. “Even as the Queen.”

“You screamed and cried for me.

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