This was a oneshot written for the mythology heist on tumblr, though I've had the idea of it knocking about in my head for a while now. Hope you enjoy it, and, obviously, the world and the characters all belong to Leigh Bardugo!
Another demon. This one walked with soft feet like she'd drifted in from the next world and no one had the good sense to send her back.
The name Wraith wasn't given to her by the human Kaz Brekker as part of his mocking pretentiousness, or as an uncharacteristic urge to show off, or even as a characteristic fondness for drama. No. It was given to her because it was true.
On the night that a slaver's ship sailed from the coast of Ravka to Ketterdam, a thunderstorm shook the night. The kidnapped children in the hold were left to shiver and press up against each other amidst the vomit and the seawater and the sweat, even as the boat was tossed upon the seas.
You see, no one really knows what lightning is, or where it comes from. So it's entirely possible that the errant flashes of light are indeed tears in the fabric of reality, between worlds, and it's entirely possible that that night, someone slipped through them, and was trapped on the other side.
The world of the slavers and the children and the seas didn't have a name for her. She wasn't human - was more shadow than substance - but when a fourteen year old Suli girl died on the voyage, the shadow occupied her body.
The shadow called herself Inej, and she was more powerful than any human could ever be.
But she wasn't powerful here. She'd barely breathed warmth back into her new flesh by the time the slave ship docked in a harbour and the slavers came into the hold with the first in a pair of horrible coincidences that changed the course of Inej's life forever:
The manacles were made of iron.
Iron, which was the only thing that weakened shadows like her. Iron, which could bind her in this body indefinitely.
She was taken out of them shortly after, and she tried to fight back, but that was when the second horrible coincidence came into play:
The ink in the tattoo they forced on her arm, of a curled, delicate feather, contained traces of iron as well.
And it was stuck to her skin.
So Inej spent months in the Menagerie, several nights scratching her arm bloody in an attempt to purge the iron from her body. But there was always enough left by the next morning that Inej couldn't slip out of her own flesh to avoid the beating that came as a consequence of it.
Until Kaz Brekker came.
Until she drew on the last scraps of illusion she could hold, vanishing into smoke and silence for two moments, and whispered in his ear, "I can help you," in a voice of wind and rain.
When he whirled around, disguised shock evident on his features, she was standing behind him fully formed, the purple polka dots of her outfit painfully garish.
He narrowed his eyes, then left.
Inej knew she'd won.
He came back soon enough, and was smart enough to have her tattoo removed. The last dregs of iron were flushed from her system. When it happened, she was so excited at being free that she almost shifted there and then, almost let the girl's body drop dead where she sat and soar off.
Even when she didn't, she was half sure Kaz noticed the mirage of wings floating behind her back.
She could've left there and then, as well. But Inej wasn't a demon. She came from a realm of saints and deities, and if there was one thing she would do, it was stand by those who'd stood by her.
She stayed with the Dregs. She didn't know how long she would do it for - maybe until her human body was old and grey and could no longer crawl over rooftops or survive knife wounds and gunshots - but she simply knew that Kaz Brekker had saved her, so she would be around to save him, when the time came.
Kaz Brekker was faithless.
Inej was the opposite. While she couldn't in good conscience call it faith when she knew it was true - she'd spoken to Sankta Lizabeta face-to-face on a regular basis before she came to this world - she prayed to her saints and deities every day. She didn't fit in with the rest of the Dregs: she didn't swear, she didn't drink, she didn't gamble. But she was one of them anyway, if only because that was one thing they could have faith in: That she would always try her damned hardest to ensure everyone pulled through, alive and unharmed, no matter the cost to herself.
Kaz was a different story. Inej knew he didn't have faith in anything - not the gods, not other people, and not even himself. And whenever she wondered why, she inevitably remembered moments of a past life, of peering through a veil into another world and watching a little boy paddle back to shore using his brother's body as a raft.
"Men mock the gods until they need them, Kaz," she told him once.
He'd just scoffed. "What have the gods ever done for me?"
She'd just sighed.
"What makes you so sure your saints are listening?" he'd asked her another time.
"Because they always listen," she'd replied. "Whether I was talking to them face-to-face, or through prayers, they always reply."
He'd half-laughed, half-sneered. "You've met them?"
"I'm a wraith, Kaz. Of course I have."
He'd just laughed again. He hadn't believed her.
Despite relying on her as much as he did, Kaz was perhaps the only one in the Dregs who didn't have faith in her.
The incident with Oomen only comes about because he's using an iron knife. It weakens her, but because the iron is quickly removed from her body, that means it frees her in a way, as well.
She's not strong enough to hold herself in her human body for much longer. She's at risk of just. . . drifting away.
It scares Kaz, the way the smoke seems to seep out of her as he carries her to the ship, and it scares Nina as well, when her heart stops for several hours but she wakes up fine the next morning anyway. During the voyage she knows that Kaz thinks he feels Death hovering over the ship, ready to take her away, but it's not Death. It's her, at last, free of her cage of flesh and blood, and she can't honestly say that she wants to return.
But she loves these people. They need her.
And she doesn't regret coming back, not when Nina cries to see her alive, and Jesper cheers, and Kaz tries to disguise his worried fussing over her as planning for their next move. But things change after she does. Sometimes she catches Nina and Jesper giving her odd looks, like they've finally guessed what's been odd about her this whole time.
Kaz still doesn't see it. Still doesn't want to see it, even as he watched the shadows curl around her with his own eyes.
Kaz still doesn't believe.
No one can deny it once she's scaled the incinerator shaft. There was a moment when she nearly slipped and the wings that had been hovering at her back had evaporated with the heat, incorporeal, unable to catch her.
Then the rain hit them, and she soared.
She felt more like herself than she ever had.
So when they're confronted in the harbour, with every piece of might Fjerda had to offer stacked against them, it wasn't Nina who rained destruction on them. It was Inej.
She'd forgotten what it was like, having this power. This freedom. She'd kept herself reigned in for so long that she'd forgotten who she was.
She didn't deserve to be denied it any longer. By anyone - for anyone. She had a family waiting for her back home, and saints to talk to, and people remember.
"Stay in Ketterdam," Kaz whispered. "Stay with me."
I will have you without armour, Kaz Brekker, or I will have you not at all.
She whispered the words, hoping he'd give her a reason to stay. A reason to want to stay.
He stayed silent.
So she left. And all she could do was smile sadly as she left, and Kaz Brekker the faithless watched as the girl (he loved) dissipated into ashes and smoke.
After she was gone, he turned his gaze back to the distant horizon they were sailing towards.
Dawn was still a long way off.