Ronan shook his head. "Stop. I know it's not him."

    "Not me?" Gideon chuckled. "Come on Ronan, stop being so childish. Get over yourself and start being useful!"

I'm trying, he almost said. It was easy to forget that they were just the shadows, not his brother, or the woman from so long ago, or the prophet he held in his hands. They messed with his mind so easily, so bad that when they opened the doors, he'd forgotten there was a world outside that black vast of nothing.

    "It's her isn't it?" Gideon's voice moved to speak directly into his ear. "It's the prophet. She has you around her little finger."

It took all of Ronan's might not to reply.

    "She's going to die," Gideon stated bluntly. "Which way would you prefer? Do you secretly wish that someone would pierce her heart in this war? Make it quick so you remember her pretty face as it was?"

    "Of course not," Ronan snapped.

    "Or do you want her to grow old? For her face to wrinkle, for her memory to fade, for her age to double, and then triple, and then edd up from there? What happens when she gets so old she can't pair your name to your face, and then your face to your identity?" Gideon laughed. "Come on, brother. You can tell me!"

    "Stop," Ronan repeated. "Just stop."

    "Wait, wait, wait! I got it! You've got an Archai in your hands! A body jumper."

    Nilsa's hands went still in his grip. Ronan supposed he'd been thinking about that aspect of her new Archai abilities more than she had.

    "So how's it going to go, Ronan? Do you want to keep her young and pretty, have her jump into a new girl every decade or so, or are you just going to let her age until the host body combusts on its own? How long do you think it would be until you forget what her born face looked like?"

    "I'm not sure," Nilsa's voice appeared on the other side of Ronan. The shadow's cold fingers moved a piece of fallen hair from his forehead, just as the real Nilsa did when the messiness of his hair would distract her from whatever she'd been doing. "What would you like?"

    Ronan ignored them, taking deep breaths into his mouth and out through his nose.

    "I'm sure he has a preference," Shadow Nilsa added. "What do you think, Gid?"

    Gideon hummed. "I think you're a young soul, Darling."

    Shadow Nilsa giggled, and the two of them walked away while passing incoherent compliments back and forth. It took them what seemed like hours to fade into the distance.

    "Almost done," Ronan's voice assured her, causing his actual body to freeze.

    "Okay," Nilsa answered, her voice nearly breathless.

    "I'm sorry," Ronan heard the voice tell her. "I shouldn't have brought you in here."

    "I wanted you to, Ronan."

    Ronan didn't let the shadow tell her anything else. "Go away," he snapped to the darkness, only receiving an arena's worth of monstrous giggles in reply. "Stop this."

    Nilsa's grip tightened. "Is there another one?"

    "He's using my voice," Shadow Ronan told her. "You can't listen to him!"

    "Listen to who?" Nilsa asked, her voice raising in panic and confusion. "I can't tell the difference!"

"I'm going to stay silent," Ronan said. "Whatever you hear isn't me."

    "Stop that!" Shadow Ronan countered. "Just listen to me, Nilsa. The only way we can get out is if we-"

    Ronan let go of one of Nilsa's hands to hit the space beside him where Shadow Ronan stood, but his hand only swung through empty air.

    "Grab my hand!" Shadow Ronan called out.

"No!"

Nilsa's hand was suddenly pulled out of his grasp, and with nothing else to hold onto, Ronan's body was swept aside by a force with no name, a shadowy witness ready to swoop in at any given moment. Nilsa screamed as her body was dragged to the opposite side of the room.

"Ronan!" She yelled.

"That's not me!" a duplicate Nilsa faught.

His head spun in wild circles. He couldn't tell who was who. He'd made a mistake.

"I've got you!" Shadow Ronan assured her, and that was enough motivation for Ronan to get to his feet and run. Shadows lurked out of the darkness, tripping them wherever they could, and whenever Ronan got close to her screams, they erupted from the opposite direction.

He was running in circles for minutes on end until he slammed into a smaller body and both of them went spiraling onto the floor. If it was Nilsa or not, they had the same idea as Ronan, finding his hands to hold in a tight grip.

"Are they reading your thoughts?" Nilsa's voice asked.

"My fears."

"Can they read mine?"

"No. You're safe." That was debatable, and he was sure she thought otherwise as she was being dragged across the room. "They can only guess." Ronan was yelling over loud laughing that only amplified when he was distressed.

"Off of your thoughts," Nilsa figured. "Fine. Alright, I was convinced from ages five to seventeen that I was deathly allergic to grapes."

Ronan blinked in confusion, wondering what the hell that had to do with anything before quickly realizing, it didn't. Leave it to her to come up with such a thing. "So you're not? Allergic to grapes, I mean."

Nilsa laughed, using his hands to guide her through the darkness and closer to him. "No. I just really hate them." Ronan hoisted her onto his lap, their hands separating for a split second so he could wrap his arms around her waist and hers around his neck. "What about you?" She whispered into his ear. "I don't assume those shadows know much about the ridiculous things in life?"

No. They only knew about his nightmares. "Did you know that Thorin refused to wear anything but polka dotted jumpsuits for an entire year after Chrysies said that she hated polka dots."
    Nilsa snickered. "You're kidding."

"Not at all. And during that entire year, Chryseis started only wearing stripes, and they'd fight about it like children every single dinner we had, and it got to the point where Gideon stopped making plans that involved them in the same room."

"Doesn't seem like something Thorin would do."
    "Course not. Chryseis set fire to every polka dotted garment he had, including the ones on his body. He stopped wearing them because he'd be left absolutely bare when they all burned off mid-meeting."

Nilsa placed a kiss on his cheek while he ran his hands through her hair, needing to make sure that she wouldn't be ripped away from him again. The shadows didn't try anything else, and after ten minutes of silence, their time had finished and the doors swung open. Ronan got to his feet with Nilsa's legs wrapped around his waist and nearly sprinted out of the room. The shadows closed the door for him as he walked down the halls with the prophet in his arms.

Ronan set her down on the bed, lying down beside her as complete exhaustion overcame him. Nilsa sprawled out as well, her hand finding his. She fiddled with their fingers while they let silence wash through the room, a fine replacement for the shadow shrieking.

"It's easier when I'm alone," he said. "I know my own thoughts, and I know the truth. I can't begin to imagine what you think after that."

"I understood most of them. It upsets me that you think I'd ever-"

"-I don't, but the darkness will try anything to convince me that this world hates me. And right now, the world is you."

Nilsa's cheeks heated. "Can I ask who that girl was?"

Ronan had been expecting that question, and it wasn't an easy one to answer. "Someone from my past, someone I knew even before I was immortal." His chest tightened. "I didn't touch her, not like she made it sound."

"I wasn't assuming anything, Ronan."

"It was an accident. I'd just gotten my powers and I didn't know how to use them." He still didn't know how to use them, not completely. "She was touching me, trying to convince me to do things with her." His jaws clenched. "She said that if I didn't go with her that she'd tell the capital that I stole from them, that their new god was a thief and a liar. So, I panicked." Ronan took a deep breath. He remembered those moments with complete precision, and he wasn't sure he could forget them. "All I did was tell her to get her hands off of me, to leave and to never come back."

Nilsa's eyebrows knitted together. "And how does that translate to everything she said?"

    "I still don't know how I did it," Ronan admitted. "But after I said that, her eyes went black, like one of Chryseis' demons, and she did exactly what I said." He sighed. "She was right. I broke into her mind."

    A few of the parts didn't fit together right, not without further explanation, but he'd given her enough details to put aside the worst assumptions Nilsa could have made from the accusations.

    Nilsa rolled to her side, resting her free hand on Ronan's cheek. "She was harassing you, Ronan, threatening you. She is not the victim in that."

Ronan tried telling himself that every time he went into the Dark Room and the girl came up. Usually, she would go farther, crying and screaming. "But I broke into her mind, violated her senses."

    "And what were you supposed to do?" Nilsa asked. "Go with her? Satisfy her needs?"

    Ronan stayed silent. That day, while she'd tried to convince him to follow her into his bedroom, he'd considered it in fear that she'd ruin whatever Lennox had just given him, that he'd ruin it for Rieka too. He'd acted on fear. "I don't know how to control it, Nilsa. What if I accidentally tell somebody to do something and they get hurt? What if I tell you to do something?"

    "Then we will figure it out." Nilsa placed her lips against his forehead in a light kiss. "I'd like to go with you again."

    "After that?"

"Especially after that. After all, we found a way to break the system."

Ronan laughed. "By talking about grapes?"

    "It's the only solution," Nilsa defended.