The doll's cold burned my hands like living ice. Cracks spidered across its body with every second I held it, and the whispers in my head rose into tearing screams.
"Don't break me! I am you! I am what you have always silenced!"
The shadows in my room churned like a stormy sea. Selene gripped my arm, pleading, while Kaelis kept her sword ready to finish what I might not.
"Do it, Nyx!" Kaelis shouted, eyes locked on the doll. "Smash it before it takes you!"
Selene, tears in her eyes, murmured,"Please—think about it… if it's a trapped soul, what will happen if you destroy it?"
I could scarcely hear. Everything was chaos: voices, murmurs, the unbearable pressure in my chest. With a strangled roar I lifted the doll above my head, ready to slam it down on the stone floor.
Then it happened.
The doll spoke—but not with its childish voice. This time it sounded deep, ancient, a resonance impossible to ignore:
"I… am not a child."
Time seemed to stop.
The fissures along its porcelain flared with dark light, and its cracked smile fell into an expression of pain.
"I was sacrificed," it continued, its voice reverberating in my mind and against the chamber walls. "My soul was used as an anchor, a vessel to hold what my clan could not destroy."
Selene covered her mouth, horrified."A seal?"
"Yes." The doll trembled; its eyes shifted from crystalline violet to absolute black."Inside me there is not only a child… but the echo of an ancient Umbriphage. One that devoured her own people."
A chill ran down my spine. It wasn't compassion I felt—rather the lure of something dark recognizing my own shadow.
Kaelis stepped forward, shouting,"Then there's nothing left to say! Break it now!"
The doll shrieked—a mixture of childlike cry and abyssal roar."If you break me, you will free me! And your soul will be the first I devour!"
The floor split beneath our feet. Frost crept across the walls, and the shadows at my feet stretched up toward the ceiling, answering the entity's call.
I was paralyzed, the doll still held aloft. Did breaking it mean destroying it… or unleashing it?
Selene pressed herself against my back, whispering in desperation,"Nyx, choose with your heart, not with its voice."
Kaelis leveled her sword at the doll, ready to act if I faltered."Decide—now!"
The doll's roar rolled through the room like thunder, its black eyes fixed on me with infinite hunger.
"Break me, Nyx… and we will be one."
My breath caught. In my hands lay the power to free it or to end it.
And for the first time I understood: perhaps those outcomes were one and the same.