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Book 2: Chapter 4: Gods Cannot Sleep
🕑 Added 2025-07-26 22:10:15 +0000 UTCChapter 4:
Gods Cannot Sleep
The stone corridor unfurled before Grace like an interminable ledger: polished tiles, gilded sconces, and somewhere at the end, a balance sheet of new obligations. She shadowed the maid in silence, matching the woman’s precise heel-to-toe glide because anything less would betray how badly her balance swayed after fifty-two sleepless hours. Each tap of her slippers felt amplified, as if the citadel itself was striking a mallet against her skull.
Midday light spilled through tall lancet windows, stratifying the air into alternating bars of gold and cool shadow. It should have been invigorating. Instead, it mocked her, bright, orderly, awake, while her thoughts dragged like wet sand. If yesterday’s single all-nighter had been manageable, two in a row with Light mana searing through a half-fractured core pushed even her arrogance to its limits.
Had she known her “birthday celebration” would involve founding an empire, awakening a second affinity by melting her brain, and watching her social circle implode, she mused, she’d have dosed herself with nightshade and woken up next year. The joke was hollow, but it steadied her. Hollow things didn’t break.
She trudged behind the maid like a sleepwalker. Maybe she was. Not that anyone would notice, she’d been praised so often for her “composure” lately that she could probably trip and drool on the carpets and someone would just coo about her noble blood. Her legs felt distant, not her own, and if she glanced down she almost expected to see someone else’s slippers shuffling along the tiled hallway, not hers.
Not that she could have slept, anyway. Not in this gods-damned world. Not in Nyras. Everything was wrong; she’d known that since the first memory snapped into place behind her eyelids, the world more broken every time she tried to blink it away. But something inside her felt especially wrong today. Not just the usual existential migraine, not just the voice in her core whispering about Light and Void and all the wonders of being a living paradox, but something physically wrong. Like she was a puzzle with too many missing pieces, being asked to look like a perfect portrait. Maybe it was the Light mana twisting around her soul. Maybe it was just her, finally coming undone after six years and 52 hours awake. Maybe both.
Was that normal for a six-year-old girl? She’d never met one who could confirm it. Certainly not Clara or Elen. Elen, who was somewhere out there right now, running away on legs much stronger than Grace’s, following her own invisible script. Clara, well, Clara could sleep through a parade if she was tired enough, and that, at least, Grace envied. Maybe she could have borrowed Clara’s sleep for a night. Maybe she could have borrowed anyone’s sleep.
She shook herself, wincing at how the world wobbled at the edges. The maid, whose name was probably something like Maris or Melda or Mildred, she honestly couldn’t remember and wasn’t going to ask, glanced back as if to make sure Grace was still following. Grace considered sticking out her tongue, but decided she might actually collapse from the effort. Instead, she let herself drift through the hallways like a wayward spirit. It would be poetic, if it didn’t feel so pathetic.
The Citadel was busy, always, and especially today. Servants bowed and pressed themselves to the walls as she passed, their eyes never quite meeting hers, as if catching the gaze of a little girl in a dress would turn them to stone. Or perhaps they saw the hollowness around her eyes and assumed it was some noble affectation. She made a mental note to invent a new disease—Ashford Insomnia, hereditary in certain prodigies, best treated by letting them avoid all meetings for a week. She almost smiled at the thought. Almost.
Her mind flitted back to last night. She had genuinely tried to sleep. She’d closed her eyes, counted sheep, counted the cracks in her ceiling, replayed every conversation from the day (which was a mistake), listened to her own breathing until it felt like someone else’s, and still, nothing. Just endless thinking: her birthday, Clara’s laughter, Elen’s shadow, her mother’s gaze, the burning weight of her own name, and her core, pulsing and shifting inside her chest like a second heart. Every time she almost drifted off, something would tug her awake again, a flicker of Light mana, a shiver of Void, the certainty that she was missing something important.
And so here she was. One foot in front of the other. She wondered, not for the first time, if maybe she was already dreaming and the past day and night had just been an endless loop. Maybe everyone she passed was a figment, and the only real thing was the exhaustion grinding her bones to powder.
At last, the maid halted before double doors banded in red lacquer. Beyond them lay the upper courtyard, Liliana’s stage for this noon’s tableau. Grace inhaled, checking herself like a general before inspection: spine tall, chin poised, expression set to “serene.” The doors swung open.
Sunlight washed across marble colonnades and a fan of clipped junipers. At the center stood Liliana. Golden hair coiled in a coronet braid, black quilted coat over her plate armor, posture so effortless it rewrote the definition of authority. Around her clustered half a dozen unfamiliar nobles in travel cloaks: men with ink-black signet rings, women with ledger-sharp eyes. Assessors, not entertainers.
Grace’s pulse ticked up; she masked it with a languid exhale. New investors in Mother’s coup. Wonderful.
She advanced. The moment her slipper crossed the threshold, Liliana’s smile brightened. “Oh, Grace, don’t be so formal—”
Grace inclined her head anyway, short and exact. “Mother.” The single word tasted metallic; fatigue threatened to slur it, but she forced crispness. She felt the watching nobles cataloguing every micro-gesture: the slight tremor in her fingers, the invisible weight on her shoulders.
Liliana turned to her audience. “Allow me to present Her Imperial Highness, Princess Grace of Ashford.”
Silk-and-brocade spines dipped. Names followed—Viscount Thayne of Ironcrest, Lady Rylond of the Bankers’ Collegium, Magister Voren of the Mage Guild. Grace accepted each greeting with a porcelain smile, cataloguing alliances even as her vision hazed at the edges.
Inside, awareness of her core pulsed like a second heartbeat: fractured violet, threads of blinding white mana knitting through cracks. Every breath drew light, burned it, exhaled heat. No pain now, just the sense that if she misstepped, the furnace would slip its casing.
She offered pleasantries tailored to each title, nothing consequential, everything memorable. A compliment on Guild logistics here, a remark on Ironcrest steel there. Measured doses of charm. Enough to signal she was more than a decorative child, not enough to invite real debate. I’m here to decorate, not legislate, she reminded herself. Keep it simple.
A steward announced Lord Venmar of the southern mines. A broad-shouldered man knelt, gold-tipped pickaxe pin on his cloak. “Your Highness, an honor,” he said, stress fraying the formal cadence. Investors indeed, Liliana must be courting ore to build her armies.
Grace offered him her hand. His palm was calloused, honest; his eyes, calculating. “Your mines kept Ashford’s forges lit through the last two winters,” she said, voice level. “I look forward to seeing what they can do for an empire.”
A flicker of surprise, quickly veiled behind gratitude. She moved on.
Just words, she told herself, though each syllable cost more clarity. Her knees felt liquid. The sun beat across the courtyard canopy, pricking sweat at her temples. Light mana upstairs, exhaustion downstairs, an architectural hazard.
She braced a polite step behind her mother’s right shoulder while Liliana addressed the group. “Gentlefolk, tomorrow we ride for Gatewick. Prepare your ledgers; Princess Grace will grant audience to petitioners once the keep is secured.”
Grace’s stomach dipped. Audience? She needed a healer and twelve hours of unconsciousness, not petitioners.
But her mask didn’t slip. She only nodded once, eyes forward.
Liliana turned, gaze softening fractionally. “You’ve done well, my light,” she murmured, barely audible. It might have been comfort; it sounded like expectation.
If I collapse now, the empire’s first scandal will be medical, Grace thought. Not happening.
She lifted her chin, letting the officials see unclouded ice in blue-and-flecked-pink eyes. “I will not disappoint,” she said, each word precise enough to cut.
The meeting wound down in a blur of farewells. When the nobles at last withdrew, Liliana’s hand brushed Grace’s shoulder, a touch both warming and suffocating.
“Rest, but be ready,” her mother said gently. “Gatewick is only the beginning.”
Grace inclined her head in silent obedience. Then she pivoted, letting the maid fall into step. Every muscle screamed for release, but she forced an even gait until the courtyard’s arch hid the nobles from view.
Only then did she let her shoulders sag a fraction. Gatewick tomorrow, she thought, half-dread, half-thrill. New castle, new chessboard. All she had to do was stay on her feet another dozen hours.
Sarcasm and spite would have to cover the gap until then.
--::--
High above Nyras, where no wind blew and no stars dared to blink, the palace of dawn floated between worlds, a sanctum of impossible light, untouched by time or shadow. Within that incandescent cathedral, Iras—goddess of the First Light, queen of radiance, mother of all mercy—was laughing.
And how she laughed.
The sound should have been glorious: silvery, angelic, a lullaby for saints and a balm for the faithful. Mortals everywhere called her the Lightbringer, the gentle dawn, protector of the weak and healer of the broken. But if any soul in all creation could have truly heard her laughter in this moment, they would have cowered, undone by its wrongness. Her mouth stretched too wide, lips curving into a crescent moon of delight, white teeth—too many, far too many—glinting with a hunger not even the void could match. Her laugh came out doubled, echoed, twisted, as if the universe itself stuttered in terror at the sound.
Light radiated from her in endless waves, a flood so pure it scorched all doubt from the air and left only the razor edge of knowing. There were no shadows in Iras’s halls, no gentle corners or hidden nooks, only brilliance, clinical and devouring. Nothing was hidden. Nothing could hide.
But Iras herself was never still. She leapt down from her golden throne, sunlight pouring from every step. Her laughter echoed like crystal bells shattering in a sacred silence, and she spun on her heel with the abandon of a delighted child, a madwoman, a goddess whose joy knew no human shape. Her curls, each a filament of sunlight, danced and bounced around her shoulders. She grinned, a smile too wide for any mortal face, too sharp to be comforting, and stretched out her arms as if to embrace the whole of creation.
Everything was perfect.
Every piece was now coming together, every player in this cosmic game making their move, and so, why not her? She would play her part, too. Oh, how the anticipation sang in her bones. Her greatest gift, not only to Liliana, not only to Ashford, but to Nyras itself, had done it. Little Grace, so sweet, so fierce, had anchored the true timeline. With her simple act of being, she had forced every possible future to bend, to spiral inward toward the one and only truth. Iras’s truth. A universe woven around a single bright spark.
She could not help herself, she spun again, skirts of light flaring like a nova, laughter bursting out anew. “Oh, how beautiful!” she cried, arms flung wide to her empty halls. “You exceeded everything, little one. You shattered prophecy and made the world anew! Oh, how I adore my children!”
Her love was an endless thing, overwhelming, radiant, consuming. She burned with it. For her faithful. For Liliana. For Grace.
But love, for Iras, was never soft. It was all-consuming, like a flame that leaves no room for anything else.
And there, behind that laughter, a sharper joy: the thrill of what was to come. She could not wait to descend from her sanctum, to break the bonds of patience, to kill her siblings—especially Lirien, whose green and gentle things Iras found unbearably naive.
She paused, then twirled again, bare feet flashing on the shining floor. With each spin, the palace itself seemed to tremble in sympathy, light shivering and refracting, hymns of unvoiced praise rising and falling in impossible harmonies.
A dance. A coronation. A declaration of war.
It was all the same to her.
“Soon,” she sang to the empty air, voice splintering into chords of impossible clarity. “Soon, beloved Nyras. Soon, little Grace. Everything is ready. Everything is perfect. The age of dawn is coming. And it will never end.”
Iras threw back her head and laughed, and all of creation flinched.
--::--
The In-Between was not a place. It was not a world, nor a realm, nor even a dream. No being—god, spirit, or mortal—could ever truly grasp its shape, for it had none. There was Nyras. There were the Thirteen Hells. There was the Veil, and the all-consuming Void. Each had its nature, its rules, its walls.
But the In-Between? The In-Between was something else. Something only the oldest whispers remembered, something only the most daring, or the most desperate, had ever touched. It was the fabric not between dimensions, but between realities themselves. The unmarked borderland where everything that could be, and everything that must not be, brushed together like threads in an unseen tapestry.
Inside the In-Between, nothing truly existed. Or perhaps everything did. Possibility itself flowed here, every story, every outcome, every fractured version of every world drifting just out of reach, accessible only if one could find a path and dared to walk it. A paradox corridor, endless and formless, where time was a suggestion and space a lie. For most, it was unthinkable. For some, it was a prison. For others, a door.
And in that shifting, endless fabric, something lurked.
It did not watch with eyes, nor listen with ears, nor hunger with any mortal mouth. It was not shadow, nor light, nor even void. It was the watcher between truths. The sentinel of the unreal. It had no emotions, no feelings, no coherent thoughts, perhaps, but something had disturbed its endless drift. A ripple, a shudder, a flaw. Someone—some thing—had crossed realities, bridging worlds that were never meant to meet.
This trespass could not be ignored.
So it began its search, slow and patient as eternity, unraveling the weave between stories and worlds. There were travelers, so many travelers, most only dreams, or echoes, or brief blips of intent. But now, there was something deliberate. A crossing that should not have been. An act that drew its attention like a hook sunk deep into the fabric of reality.
It drifted, and the In-Between bent with it, endless hunger awakening a hunger not of flesh, but of order, of returning things to silence. It moved with no sound, no shape, only the certainty of unmaking. Its awareness stretched, questing, searching for the culprits who had dared the forbidden path, who had walked through the In-Between.
Nothing escaped its notice for long.
Soon, it would find them.
And when it did, there would be nothing left.
