I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

She moved through the miasma as though it were nothing — the screaming dark faces parting around her like fog, unable to find purchase on whatever she was made of, her white kimono undisturbed. She came through the spreading darkness with the casual certainty of something that had never once been afraid of the dark, her hand reaching toward his face, her expression cracking open into something raw and crazed and hungry.

Nathan braced.

Then her face changed.

It happened in an instant — the reaching hand faltered, her fingers curling inward, and something crossed her features that was not pain yet but was the moment just before pain arrives when the body understands what is coming. Her hand flew to her head. Her nails — black and sharp — dug into her silver hair and her body bent forward.

”No—”

The word came out broken. Her voice had lost all its music.

”NO!! STOP!! NOOOO!!!”

She screamed and the sound of it was nothing like her laugh had been. This was not a sound she had chosen to make. She shook her head violently, nails tearing against her own scalp, her face crumpling, the perfect composure she had worn since revealing herself dissolving into something raw and animal and desperate.

Nathan stood very still, watching.

He understood before he had fully processed it — the miasma couldn’t touch her body, so they had found another way in. Through the mind. Through the head. The screaming faces pressed close around her without contact, hovering at the edges of her, and what they were doing was worse than physical harm. He could feel the strain of it through his own connection to them, the feedback of their activity, and he knew he needed to pull them back before the connection collapsed entirely and they turned.

He reached for the leash.

And then the images came.

They pushed into him through the same connection — not his memories, not anything belonging to him, but raw impressions flooding through the link the miasma maintained. He saw what they were forcing into her. He saw what she was screaming at.

Yukihime. Younger, though not by much — a thousand years sat in the image like weight in old wood, but the shape of her was the same. Her face was entirely different, though. Open in a way it had not been tonight, warm, the black eyes holding something they currently did not — genuine happiness, unguarded and complete. She was laughing at something, and the laugh was real.

Kastoria was young in these images. Its edges rough, its cities half-built, its roads still finding their shape. A kingdom at the beginning of itself.

She stood beside a man. Tall, handsome, his hand finding hers naturally, the ease of two people who had stopped thinking about the gesture because it had simply become what their hands did. They were promised to each other, and the promise had been made from feeling rather than obligation.

Then the bandits came.

The town fell quickly and they ran — both of them, her hand in his, moving through snow that was already falling thick across the fields. Nathan saw the moment the man’s pace changed. Saw the calculation enter his face. Saw the apology form in his expression before he had even spoken it, and understood what it meant in the fraction of a second before it happened.

He said he was sorry.

And he pushed her down.

The ground caught her hard, and by the time she looked up, he was already running. Getting smaller in the white. Leaving her alone in the snow with the sounds of the conquest behind her and the cold rising around her body and nothing in any direction that wanted to help.

The bandits found her in the snow.

They had not given up — men like that never did, not when they had already decided what they wanted. They caught her in the open field, her kimono torn and hanging from her shoulders in ribbons, her breath coming in ragged white clouds against the night air. The first one who reached for her died with her knife in his throat before he had finished the motion, his blood impossibly red against the white ground. She did not stop to watch him fall. She ran.