Page 105 of Sunsplitter

“Fuck’s sake, Avroz,” Syvr said at last. “We’ve got one dead daeyari already.”

Fi decided, then, that she might actually like Syvr.

With a snarl, Avroz pulled his claws free. That hurtmore.

She toppled off him, on her knees for only the moment it took to gasp and stop herself from passing out. Standing up required cataclysmic effort. Fi collected herself on trembling legs, backing away.

Avroz stood with the sleekness of a panther. He watched her in silence. Her sword had left a singe on his neck, healed with a snap of red energy.

Fi couldn’t heal so easily. She risked looking down…

“I’m not sure you’ve made the point you wanted to, vavraesa,” Avroz said.

Her breath quaked. Her silviamesh was shredded, ten red gashes cut deep into the pale skin of her stomach.

Holy fuck, she was bleeding a lot.

Holy fuck. She might be dying.

Fi staggered, legs not just shaking, but weakening. The current she’d been Shaping sputtered in her hand, extinguishing her sword.

Syvr stepped warily toward her. “Fi, sit down. You don’t look—”

Avroz flicked a hand to silence them. “She wants to play alongside daeyari?Let her.”

The world dimmed. Syvr’s worried eyes. Avroz watching for her to fall. Blood on her hands, as she tried to press them to the wounds. She was bleeding too fast.

She needed more time. Needed to slow this down. Needed to get away from…

A weak current sparked on her fingers.

Fi half pushed, half fell into the Void.

It still hurt. That was disappointing.

The black of the Void wrapped Fi like an embrace. Constricted like a vice. Everything fell quiet. Everything slowed. The blood from her stomach dulled to a trickle, but still a mess.

Still a problem.

Fi tried not to panic. She tried not to hyperventilate, this place already airless, her lungs aching with cold pressure. This time, it didn’t feel like floating. It felt like sinking, a slow drift to some interminable depth.

How easy it would be, to close her eyes and let go? Regardless of what Avroz said, she’d made a damn impressive point.

Tragically, it wouldn’t seem as impressive if she died.

Fi inspected the wound. The Void was endless black, yet always, a strange light clung to her, dim enough to see her edges. The cuts were deep. Flayed skin. Flayedmuscle.

A deeper dread bloomed with the pain. Energy Shaping couldn’t heal this. Fi could speed her body’s natural healing, could cauterize flesh. She couldn’t regenerate tissue.

Not like daeyari could.

For the hundredth time, Fi cursed this fragile flesh, this inadequacy she couldn’t shake. She’d tried. She’d learned to Voidwalk. She’d learned to fight. She’dtriedso hard to be more than this mortal body she’d been stuck with.

Daeyari used to be mortal, too.

The realization struck slowly. Hanging in the Void, life slipping away, Fi sifted through what she knew of daeyari myth. They were mortal once, millennia ago. Veshri had died. His energy had returned to the Void, like all living creatures, but he hadn’t passed to the afterlife. Nor had he fractured into waves of aurora, like other souls who failed to move on. He’d woven a new body to hold his energy, using Void ether.

That was how daeyari healed themselves. They could rebuild flesh, not out of nothing.