Chapter 34 Things Fall Apart #2
I silently pleaded for him to obey. The Meister held his breath as they locked eyes, but mercifully, Leone relented and turned to the page.
I stifled my sigh and glanced at Sequoia, who was moving to serve the ceremonial tea to each of us, except the Meister, who would remain grounded, his soul intact.
With careful hands, Sequoia poured the thick, velvety liquid into my ceramic mug.
The steam curled toward me like a dark invitation, its scent floral yet earthy.
I took a deep breath and allowed myself to sink into the cushions around the altar.
I reached into my pocket to check the switchbox was still there, relieved to feel its weight.
Sequoia began the chant in a harsh, foreign tongue. I struggled to enunciate the strange words with the cotton stuffed in my mouth, but I repeated them as the others did, shifting the cotton against my gums to keep it dry.
“And drink,” the Meister commanded, his green eyes gleaming with anticipation.
A shiver ran down my arms, and I adjusted my position to hide it.
Around the Circle, everyone raised their cups to their mouths, their waxy lips glistening.
I followed suit, carefully holding the cotton wad on my tongue to absorb the liquid.
Even in that brief contact, warmth flooded my body.
I steadied myself, watching as everyone else pretended to gulp as I had instructed.
The buzzing in my ears grew louder, but my pulse thundered when Aspen took up the athame. He angled it toward his palm and spoke in a low voice. “Shattered Mother of my Blood, Primordial Womb, Creator of Souls, I offer my flesh, my blood, my fire.” He pierced his palm, letting blood pool.
The others followed with their own elemental invocations. When the athame reached me, I looked to the Meister.
I was the Bonder, not an element. But I wouldn’t reveal what I knew.
“Repeat all of them,” he said.
I pressed the tip of the athame into the palm of my hand until it broke the skin. I winced, but did as instructed and recited, “Shattered Mother of my Blood, Primordial Womb, Creator of Souls, I offer my flesh, my blood, my fire, my water, my air, and my earth.”
We joined hands in the Circle, mingling our blood. Nina’s and Sequoia’s palms pressed into mine, our blood seeping between our fingers. This was the part I’d planned for. We needed a shared signal, so I began counting to ten. When we reached it, we’d move to secure the Meister and the Book.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
My eyes grew heavier. The cotton in my mouth was full of liquid, spilling onto my tongue.
Four . . . five . . . six . . .
I held the liquid, fighting the urge to swallow. Despite my efforts, I felt some of its heat course down my throat. Just a few more seconds, and I’d spit it out, right into the Meister’s face. The buzzing building into a deafening crescendo.
Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . .
I couldn’t wait any longer. I tried to signal—squeezing Nina and Sequoia’s hands—but my body felt sluggish, like it was trapped in molasses. I opened my mouth to shout, but no sound emerged.
Ten.
And that’s when I fell.
It was as if the earth had split beneath me, a chasm swallowing me whole.
My body pitched forward, gravity itself twisting into something malevolent, dragging me down into an abyss.
The circle of cards scattered around me, spiraling in my descent like leaves torn from the great oak.
I clawed at the sensation, trying to tether myself to reality, but my limbs were useless.
My eyes rolled back, the world blurring into darkness.
This is it, I thought. This is how I die.
The certainty was strangely liberating. For a brief, fleeting moment, the fear loosened its grip, and I floated on a cloud of warmth. My pulse slowed. I felt myself unraveling, surrendering to the void.
“No. Not yet.” A voice cut through the blackness, sharp as a blade and impossibly soft at once. A woman’s voice. I strained to turn toward it, but my body was unmoored, unresponsive. I was nothing but a thought, suspended in emptiness.
Then came the light. It began as a faint glimmer, like a distant star, but it grew, spreading and spinning until it became a cascade of brilliance, like shards of silver glass raining from above. The spiraling stars congealed into a shape—a form.
A woman.
She stepped out of the light as if emerging from a dream, her every movement fluid and deliberate, like time itself bent to her will.
Sophia? I wanted to say, but the thought dissipated, swallowed by her presence. I couldn’t speak; my body refused to obey.
Her tendrils of hair shimmered like molten silver, cascading around her in waves.
Her eyes—liquid moonlight—bore into me, unrelenting and ancient, carrying a sorrow I couldn’t comprehend.
She moved closer, and as she did, I saw the fine glint of her lashes, the faint shimmer of tears pooling at the edges of her eyes. Was she crying?
“You have to make amends,” she said, her voice resonating everywhere and nowhere, a sound more felt than heard.
The words wrapped around me, a lifeline in the void.
I tried to respond, to ask her what she meant, but my lips wouldn’t move.
Yet she understood. I felt it—our thoughts entwined.
Hers vast and deep as the night sky, mine a flickering ember.
“They have strayed,” she continued, her expression darkening, and the warmth around her turned sharp.
“They do not worship me. They worship a false God—the demiurge.” Her features twisted into a grimace, and her rage erupted in silver streaks of light, radiating outward in jagged, chaotic waves. It was beautiful and terrifying.
“The worker I created to shape the material world,” she spat, her voice trembling with fury, “he is the one who fed Khorvyn false lies and created The Book of Skorn. He is the one who demands blood. Not me.”
The demiurge. The lion with the serpent’s tail, the symbol on The Book of Skorn. The creature my father had become in my nightmares.
I nodded, though I barely understood, but somewhere deep inside, the answers had been buried within me all along, waiting to be unearthed.
Sophia wasn’t the God they worshiped, it was the demiurge.
“The knowledge I offer,” she said, her voice softening to something almost tender, “does not lie in books. It lies within you.” She raised a hand, her fingers as delicate as threads of light, and pressed a single finger to my chest. The Universal Truths, represented by the cards, accessed through our subconscious.
A searing pulse radiated through me, igniting something dormant within. Heat bloomed in my core, spreading outward, filling every corner of my being. For the briefest moment, I felt whole—truly, unimaginably whole.
And then the light vanished.
I was falling again, the warmth replaced by the cold rush of reality slamming back into me. Darkness claimed me, but her words burned in my mind, bright as stars.
“Dahlia,” my father’s voice sang in my ear. “You haven’t figured out the trick yet.” He shook a jar of dirt in front of my face. “Think. Your mind is your greatest resource.”
I was ten years old, back in my father’s laboratory, sitting on his metal stool, heels digging into the spindle. “I don’t know, Father,” I said. It was me, but it wasn’t—it was like I was both observing and living as the little girl. “I don’t like this game.”
“The primacy of fact should prevail over the caprices of feeling—fact, not feeling, Dahlia,” he said.
“What could make the stone disappear?” His face was angled toward me, close enough that I could almost reach out and touch him.
My heart lurched with grief. I saw it in him then—the matte of his eyes, the depth of his sorrow—mirroring mine.
The trick of the disappearing rock. It hadn’t been Sophia, after all. No, it was . . .
Suddenly, my body became lighter, and I started to float. I drifted out of the lab and reappeared in my bookshop. There I huddled over the front desk, working on the ledger. It had been a grim day with very few sales. My father stood across the store.
“We didn’t make much today,” I said, defeated.
He puffed his pipe in great clouds, pinching his beard with his forefingers. “They’ll come. When word gets out, they’ll come.”
“What word?” I asked in frustration.
“That all the knowledge in the world is here,” he said, pattering his fingers across the spines of endless books. Something stirred within me then, but I only recognized it now, as I hovered above, watching.
I had disagreed with him.
Some knowledge, I thought, couldn’t be found in books.
I watched myself running out of ink on the ledger and opening the bottom drawer—the drawer no one had touched in years. Inside, I found the pen, and beneath it, a deck of Tarot cards waiting for me.
When I touched the deck, I transformed again, this time to a point above the room.
It was my father’s office. He entered, wearing a wet overcoat and hat, as if he’d just returned from a rainy day on a case.
The falling cards surrounded him, but he brushed them off like raindrops.
He approached a painting of The Destruction of Pompei and opened it on hidden hinges, revealing a lockbox.
He entered the combination, and a loud click followed.
I knew what should have been behind that safe.
I watched his last moments through his eyes. He stood there, staring at the open, empty space. He realized Julian had taken it.
I screamed at him. I knew it was futile, but I tried anyway, anything to stop what he was about to do. When he reached into his desk for the revolver, my heart could have burst. The cards continued to fall around him, rising to his ankles.
He must have known.
He must have known Julian had stolen the Book.
Blood of my blood.
Which meant he thought he had corrupted his own son with The Book of Skorn.
“But what about me?” I wanted to shout. “I did everything to be just like you. Why didn’t you leave me anything?” The anger caught in my throat, and I tried to swallow it. I was beside him now, my arms desperately reaching for him, only to pass through air.
I couldn’t reach him.
My heart shattered when he looked at me—gun loaded and cocked against his temple.
“I pray, Dahlia, that you turn out to be nothing like me,” he said, his fingers trembling.
At the sound of the gunshot, the world erupted into black. But not before I caught the glint of two green eyes, piercing through the shadows.