(This scene contains content some might find upsetting. For a list of content warnings by scene, please check the chapter titled “Episode 2.5: Duxon”)

Belle wore Clarix’s blood like a mourning gown. It was Lushalen tradition, after all, to dress in black during the grieving period.

She didn’t know how long she’d been wearing it, though. How long they’d been walking. Was the socially acceptable mourning period over? Would she be expected to be a person again today, instead of this … whatever this broken, limping beast she’d become? Since they’d left Urden, Belle simply walked when Jac told her to walk, stopped when Jac told her to stop, and forced food down her throat when Jac told her to eat. Because inside Belle raged a war, and she wouldn’t be able to really return to the world until it was won.

On one side, Everything.

On the other, Nothing.

Fighting on the side of Everything was hope, rage, pain, joy, magic, memory, love. Order and Chaos. They promised her Everything—a life of raw nerve endings, of cruel and unending awareness, of pleasure so intense it became violence, of songs so sweet her ears bled. They promised her things that could and would be taken away from her.

Fighting on the side of Nothing was Nothing. It promised her Nothing. It asked of her Nothing. Nothing to lose and Nothing to gain.

In the years since Belle had met Nothing, she had tried to get to know it. She had tried to understand, to listen to its story like she always did when she met someone new. Even as it killed her magic, she tried to listen. But it said Nothing.

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And so, she came to fear Nothing more than she feared anything else. She came to hate it for the absolute lack that it was. She named it, to try to lighten some of its weight on her so she might finally be able to shrug it off; she named it Bad, Wrong, Evil. All her attempts were in vain, because Nothing is heavier than Nothing. No matter what you named it.

But then, it saved her life.

When Everything became too much—the nerves so raw that her skin blistered and broke, the awareness so cruel it drove her insane, the pleasure so violent it tore her inside out, the songs so sweet they drove the tip of her knife into her ear—it was Nothing that protected her. She didn’t hurt if she felt Nothing.

Belle named it Good, then. It had to be Good—it had saved her.

Or had it? The longer she lived in that Nothing, the more she questioned if this was even really living at all.

So now, she didn’t know what to do.

Belle had told Jac, as they stood there side by side looking down at Clarix’s grave, that she had to fight, that she couldn’t do Nothing. But that was before they had actually started back toward the castle. Before she’d truly faced the prospect of returning to Richard. And the moment she had, the war broke out.

When she looked at Everything, she saw Clarix’s pale, lifeless eyes. She saw Mama B dying the slowest, most torturous death. She saw Richard turning Belle into something she hated. She had survived Everything before because in it she had also seen hope. Hope that looked like the Traitor Prince. But now, gazing up at that oversized figure and those ice-blue eyes, she only saw another Earthbreaker. A man who broke not only walls and chains, but people too.

Without that hope, she felt sure that Everything really would kill her this time.

And she also felt sure that if she gave in to Nothing this time, she would never find her way out of it. Both options felt like giving up.