FORTY-TWO
Zarek materialized into chaos.
What remained of the corridor was completely unrecognizable. Windows were blown out entirely. Walls were cracked open, stone and timber pieces scattered across the floor and crunched under his boots as he got closer to where the room once stood.
The wind hit him, tearing through the space with enough force to set every buckle and sheathed blade rattling against his armor.
He found Gellar pinned against the far wall, one arm braced over his face against the gale, his shield barely protecting him. While Condorr had hold of Bellus behind part of a column.
Zarek reached through the wind and grabbed Gellar by the sleeve—careful, always careful, to never touch skin, even with his gloves on—and hauled the Commander out of danger. “What happened? Where is Angela?”
“Inside.” Gellar’s hair and beard shifted with the wind. “We can’t reach her.”
Zarek turned toward the cavern that was once a doorway, where a churning wall of wind and dark air filled the room. In the eye of it was the barest outline of the floating dream bed.
Angela.
He called his inner fire.
It rose fast. Red and gold flared hard across his staves, the flames breaking free to dance across his armor, wrapping his entire body in a fireball that was known to clear battle lines. He drove forward into the vortex.
The wind swallowed it whole, only to extinguish it as if it were nothing, and pushed him back.
He stood at the threshold, breathing hard, and felt something he hadn’t felt in centuries.
Useless.
“No.” The word came from somewhere deep.
He didn’t reach for the fire again.
This time he reached for something deeper—the thing he’d been holding at arm’s length since the night he’d first felt it. The thing Bellus had named and Martar had grinned about and Gellar had warned him would destabilize everything he’d built.
The Claiming.
He stopped fighting it.
Without the iron restraint that he’d spent three centuries keeping tightly leashed, he let his magick pour through him like a dam breaking.
Raw power and fire flooded through his blood, bones, sinew, and every nerve ending that he’d spent a lifetime armoring against his curse to finally let the dragon free.
It didn’t roar; it simply became him, and he became it, and for the first time in three hundred years, Zarek felt the edges of himself dissolve into something larger.
The flame that answered wasn’t red anymore…
It went white. A clean and pure crystalline white flame that surrounded him and became a part of him.
Burning along its edges was a thin line of teal blue the same color as his eyes.
The white flame and power didn’t flare, and the wind that had extinguished his fire didn’t touch it.
The vortex parted like the veyll, as if he’d sliced right through it.
Behind him, the wind sealed the outer world tight.
Was this what the Seers had seen? Was this what Katarra had been hunting? That new power? His own magick… just evolved?
He focused on Angela, lying ten feet away, crossing through the wind to the eye. He reached out to touch her—only to hit a bolt of electricity that threw him back.
His boots scraped across the debris-strewn floor to stay upright as he caught the side of the wall and pushed himself up against the howling vortex.
No way in Helviti was he done.
Removing his gloves, he gathered everything he had left—the white flame, the Claiming, the centuries of magick he’d spent his entire life containing—and let it build until his body was burning brighter than he’d ever allowed before.
With heart racing, gritted teeth, and his focus entirely on her, again Zarek battled through the vortex, back to the eye where he reached through the electrical field with both hands and took hold of hers, praying this wouldn’t burn her—instead, trusting in her magick and held on.
The current tore through him. He strained and roared, pushing his own power against it to override it, and felt it short.
But the vortex still whirled around them, churning the air like a voracious whirlpool filled with dark debris, cutting them off from the outside world.
As the adrenaline coursed through his veins, mixed with potent lashings of fear for Angela, Zarek dropped to his knees beside her, keeping her hands in his.
“Angela.” His voice was low as the stench of ash, dust, and burning electricity flooded the air. “It’s me. Wake up. Please.”
Tears streaked her face, which was too pale for his liking.
“Angela. Wake up. Now.” This time he gave the command of a captain, even though he’d learned that this woman did not respond to commands—it made her mad. But to wake her up, he’d use anything. “Angela!”
Still nothing.
Genuine fear did something to his heart as he cradled her soft hands in his as the world went to ruin around them. “Come back to me, Angela. I need you…” He kissed her hands and prayed that whatever had trapped her would set her free.
He’d never needed anyone in his life, for he was a man whose entire identity was built on self-containment, on being the thing that protected everyone from his power.
He’d believed once that need was personal, and it wasn’t about being tough; it was about surviving a world where he lived on the fringes.
Yet, she had become the tangle of thread that wove through his heart that had covered him with warmth like a blanket wallpapering the soul.
And it was that emotion he pushed through to her, not his calming magick or the Claiming.
It wasn’t honeyed words of promises or a love letter that had no ending.
This was an emotion rooted and recognized by his soul, that if loving her broke all the rules, so be it, because he’d be damned if he’d ever let her go.
“Angela, I am here. I need you to wake up and see me.” For she was the only one who truly saw him for who he was.
Even in the middle of the storm came the silence, as if the eye cocooned them from the rest of the world.
Finally, her lips moved. “Zarek?” she whispered in a dreamy voice, as if somewhere else, but she was so cold, trembling from the aftermath of fear.
“I’m here, Min Unna-lys.” The words came from somewhere more ancient than the language of the staves carved into his armor, but it held all the power of what she meant to him.
He held her close to his chest, wrapping his arms around her, and just like the dragon he’d once fought, raw and untamed, he cocooned her in his arms, letting his own power warm her.
“I’ve got you, my Unna-lys. You are safe.
You’ll always be safe with me.” And he would fight for that, for her, with every heartbeat he had left, sheltering her against the vortex that howled around them.
The debris flew in waves of weapons, each circling piece desperate to impale itself on something or someone.
He let his flames swell to create a protective dome of fire. Gritting his teeth, he let it push outward the way he’d done in battle against the vortex. But this was no flame; it was pure, white-hot power.
There was a flash.
And then the vortex died.
Abruptly, the wind dropped, the electricity vanished, and the churning darkness at the edges of the room simply ceased. The debris fell like a curtain, allowing the light from outside to highlight the carnage of the room filled with a silence so complete it rang.
Angela’s eyes opened. One blue, one green, so bright and beautifully clear.
She looked at him—really looked, the way she sometimes did when she’d stopped arguing long enough to actually see—and her face crumpled.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t. I don’t know what—”
“Hey.” He held her to his chest.
Her hands fisted into his leathers as the sobs came.
He held her closer, and sent the calming magick to weave through her body, that her breathing slowed, and the trembling eased.
Only then did he exhale.
When she’d quieted, he brushed the tears from her face with his thumb. “You’re okay.”
“Yes.” She gave a watery half-smile. “Thanks to you.”
“I shouldn’t have left.”
“You’re here now.” She held on to him a little tighter.
Only to blink, as her hand slid over the chest plate of his leather armor, then over his sternum. “Zarek.” Her fingers spread flat, searching as her brows lifted with surprise. “Your staves.”
He looked down at his armor.
The leather was smooth.
Not burned or damaged. Just… smooth. It was as if every rune, and every stave and protective ward that he’d spent countless house etching into his armor, all those centuries refining them, to keep the world safe from what lived inside him—were all gone.
Across the room, Martar stood still with a look on his face that said it all.
They knew what those staves had been created for.
It had to be the Claiming.
Zarek waited for the fear of what he’d done, what he’d become, that lack of control and danger he could pose to others.
It didn’t come.
Instead, there was a lightness, a loosening of all that weight he’d carried so long across his shoulders that he’d forgotten it was there. For the first time in his life—he truly felt like himself.
He unclipped the cuff to see if all the staves were there on his undershirt’s sleeve, but they were all gone. Only the silver threads remained, tainted with a faint tinge of grayish purple. He wiped his hand over the threads with a wave of magick, and they were silver once more.
That earned a nod from Martar, because he’d still chosen his brothers.
Gellar picked his way across the wreckage of broken glass and fractured stone as he approached. “How did you know to come?”
Zarek looked at Angela. “I felt her.”
“That means…” Bellus scrambled upright from behind a section of fallen wall, spectacles ruined—but his eyes bright with his excited smile.
“You have inter-planetary calling with the Claiming! Do you realize no one has documented this before? The capacity to sense across realms without a ward or a sigil—”
“What happened?” Zarek demanded from the Sleep Wizard, sheepishly peering into the room.
“I…” The wizard’s mouth opened. Closed. His eyes wide on the wreckage. “I… don’t entirely know.”
“You told me Angela wouldn’t be in danger.”
“She wasn’t, my Lord.” At least the wizard had enough sense to keep his eyes down rather than meet Zarek’s—who wasn’t entirely sure what his eyes would do now if anyone looked too long.
“It was the rest of us that were in danger,” muttered the Sleep Wizard. “Angela was always protected. But she had someone else with her in that dream state.”
“Who were you with?” Zarek turned to Angela.
She blinked. And then something moved across her face, as if assembling pieces of a puzzle into a picture so big she got to her feet.
“Him.” She took a step toward the space that once held a wall of windows. “That was him.”
“Angela?” Zarek could read the energy coming off her. She was no longer in distress, only now bordering on fury.
He’d seen her angry before, but this was different. Enough to approach her the way you’d approach something that might bite. “Who are you talking about?”
“Him.”
“Who?” If the staves were still on his armor, they’d be glowing about now.
Angela held the medallion sitting on the chain he’d given her only this morning. She lifted her chin and spoke to the air. “I know you can hear me.”
A male figure appeared, leaning against the last standing remnants of the blown-out window so casually he might have been there all along. He was in a black priest’s suit with a white band at the collar, his dark hair threaded with silver, arms folded, smiling as if amused.
Instantly, Zarek’s hand went to his sword, keeping Angela behind him.
The stranger in the suit was standing in a secured wing of the Vanguards Keep, in a locked down area, heavily warded for the Sleep Wizard’s session.
Condorr lifted his palm to test the air, just as Zarek tried to read the magick this stranger possessed. But there was no magical signature, and no residue from the Keep’s protective wards, which still held.
There was nothing that marked this stranger as a threat, or anything other than a mortal man who had simply appeared in a place, where no uninvited stranger should have been able to reach. Which was impossible because mortals didn’t even know this realm existed.
Around him, Zarek heard the low scrape of steel as the others reached the same conclusion.
Condorr. Rocharde. Martar. Gellar. Bellus—whose hand went to the bridge of his nose to push up the spectacles that were no longer there.
Every Sworn Exarch present came to attention with their weapons half-drawn, the instinct to defend their house already moving faster than thought.
At least the Sleep Wizard had enough sense to flee.
“Calm down, little one,” the priest said to Angela, ignoring the armed men surrounding him like they were just part of the scenery. “Losing your temper won’t help anything.”
“Angela…” Zarek kept his voice low, his fire already dancing along the edge of his awareness in partnership with the Claiming.
But Angela was pointing as she took a step closer to the stranger. “It was you. Why? After all this time, why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was forbidden,” the priest said it as if he’d found the question mildly amusing.
The only reason Zarek’s hands weren’t around this stranger’s throat was that Angela wasn’t afraid. She was furious, though. From what Zarek could tell, she was still searching for answers. It was why this experiment with the Sleep Wizard had been allowed—to find answers.
It just wasn’t working as predicted.
“You had to ask the right questions,” the priest said to Angela, who looked liked like an ordinary man.
Zarek still couldn’t detect any thread of magick from the priest, hitting the same blank wall he got when reaching for Angela’s power source.
“And your answers were always riddles,” said Angela, stepping closer to the priest.
“You always worked them out eventually.”
Before she could get any closer, Zarek blocked her, the protective fire already dancing along his armor—with no warning glow from the staves. “Who are you?”
“Zarek.” Angela’s fingers closed around his. “Stop.”
She looked at him with a certainty that hadn’t been there before she’d gone into that dreamscape. Something had happened. She had found an answer.
“What is it, Angela? Who is he?”
“This is my father.”