Chapter 27 Lyra
Lyra
Eres turns back to the shelf, fingers already reaching for that vial that contains the quilling antidote.
“How much of it do you have?” I ask.
Eres hesitates. “Enough for a few doses. I don’t know if it will be enough to clear the effects completely.”
I breathe in. “All right.”
He steps closer and tips the vial to my lips again. “You’ll crash afterward. Your body’s been restrained for days. If you push too hard—”
“I know,” I lie. I try to push confidence into my words.
I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never been allowed to heal, not that I ever thought about it. But I was certainly never trusted with anything but destruction.
But I have to try. Eres pulls a cloth back from Sera’s wound, revealing the path carved by the blade. The bleeding has slowed, scarlet oozing out in a slow seep.
“Internal bleeding here,” Eres takes my hand and points at where I need to focus. “Likely organ damage. And the spine—”
His voice breaks slightly, then steadies.
“The spinal column is severed around the lower thoracic, which is here. She has no movement below that, and her body is shutting down. If you can do anything, focus on structure first. Bone. Then nerve. If the rumors are true, luminth can… harden. Become permanent.”
I nod, throat too tight for words, and lift my hands over Sera’s abdomen. My palms glow instantly, luminth spilling between my fingers. I yank them back, fear filling my throat. I don’t want to burn her.
“Take a breath.” Eres stays beside me, his words low and comforting. “It’s alright. Think about it before you move.”
The luminth is warm and terrifying in my hand. “What if I hurt her?”
Elspeth clears her throat. “You can’t hurt her anymore than she already is, Lightbringer. None of us will fault you for trying.”
Even Valcor remains silent. I close my eyes and picture the spinal column the way I learned it in scrolls I read as a child. Vertebrae stacked, the protective canal and the delicate cord inside it. I picture it severed, broken, wrong.
That’s all too familiar. My studying had nothing to do with healing.
“Do you need an image?” Eres whispers. My head shakes in silent refusal. And the light in my hand grows. I can visualize it inside my hand.
“This is madness,” Valcor mutters, voice tight.
I ignore him as I breathe in and let the luminth sink inside. The sensation is akin to pressure behind my eyes, like my awareness is somehow being pulled inward.
The room around me disappears.
There's only Sera, her body a landscape of heat and pain and fading life. I approach the rupture in her spine like a cliff edge, sensing the nerve endings, frayed and raw. I sense blood pooling where it shouldn’t, organs bruised and split.
The sight, this strange, internal map, shouldn’t be possible. Wonder fills my mind.
It’s beautiful.
A segment of spine slowly forms in my mind, each curve precise and aligned with almost terrifying precision as if my mind's filling in blanks I’m not able to name.
But I can’t quite hold the complexity. It flickers in my vision, attempting to become a spear instead of a spine, because that’s what my body knows.
I grit my teeth. “No,” I whisper to myself. “This is not a weapon.”
And then it hardens, as if it’s responding to me—
My heart stutters with shock.
Darian inhales sharply, somewhere close by. “Lyra.”
“Quiet.” Eres says it before I can. “Please.”
I guide the hardened segment of luminth into place at the rupture, aligning it with Sera’s existing vertebrae as if I’m fitting a key against a lock.
The connection is delicate. One wrong angle, I sense, and I could shatter what's left.
Sweat beads under my hairline. My arms ache from holding my hands steady.
The new bone segment settles.
And it… holds.
My breathing is heavy. Almost gasping. Beside me, Eres murmurs. “More antidote. I can’t overdose you.”
I take the offered dose, Eres tipping it in without me opening my eyes. I can’t lose concentration, or I’ll lose it all.
A spine is not just bone. The spinal cord is only the beginning. Extending my luminth into the severed cord, I feel the frayed ends against my consciousness like broken rope fibers and attempt to coax them together, to weave as I would if I was crafting a weapon between my hands.
Except it’s not like shaping a weapon. It’s like trying to braid air. The nerves twitch away from the light as if they’re afraid of it.
I breathe. Try again, softer this time. And my luminth threads into the cord, wrapping gently and connecting ragged ends, drawing together.
I shape it carefully into fine strands, thinner than hair, each one a bridge to the one beside it.
It takes every piece of concentration I have to keep the pattern from collapsing.
Minutes pass. Maybe hours. The voices around me ebb and flow. Eres, giving instructions. Darian, pacing around the room. Kaelen snapping something at Valcor. Elspeth, whispering Sera’s name over and over again.
I don’t lift my head. I can’t. But I’m so tired. My nose itches and warms. I feel damp against my face. “Lyra, your nose.”
I shake my head, not speaking. At some point, Eres slides a cloth gently under my nose without interrupting my hands. I feel it soak the material, warm and wet and iron against my face.
Blood.
My vision swims. I blink hard, forcing focus.
“Lyra,” Eres murmurs close to my ear, voice strained. “The bleeding is getting worse.”
“I’m fine,” I whisper.
“You’re not.” Kaelen sounds tense, somewhere behind me. When my legs buckle, I feel him slide into place, holding me up. “Can you pause?”
“No.” I rasp. Eventually, I finish the nerve bridge. The moment it locks into place—when that last, carefully constructed strand connects, I feel something shift in Sera’s body. Her breath deepens, just slightly. Her heartbeat steadies under Eres’s fingers when he checks her pulse.
Relief hits so hard my knees almost buckle.
But we’re not done. The blade wound still gapes.
If her spine is whole but the rest of her body fails, it was for nothing.
Shifting my focus to her abdomen, I shift luminth into the torn tissue, attempting to shape it like a seal.
I move slightly faster now, a little more confident.
Closing vessels, encouraging clotting, knitting muscle fibers together.
It’s definitely hours now, but Kaelen doesn’t move from behind me.
My arms burn. My hands cramp, head throbbing. The luminth begins to feel as though it’s being dragged through me from some deeper well, and that well is beginning to scrape empty.
“More antidote,” I rasp suddenly. Panic rises in my chest as my luminth flickers. I’m so close. She’s so close. “Please. Quickly.”
Eres is already moving. He presses the vial to my lips again, tipping it up. His breath catches. “That's all of it.”
Barely a third of what I had before. “It'll be enough.”
A hand runs over my hair. “Your nose is bleeding again.”
At the gruff words, I feel myself lean a little more into him, before I steady myself and carry on.
Sera’s breathing deepens. And finally, I open my eyes.
Her skin color has shifted from gray-tinged pallor to something closer to pink. Sweat still beads on her temples, but her breathing has steadied. My hands shake as I finish the last of the sealing along Sera’s wound. “I think this is it.”
Nobody says anything.
The words burn my throat. “I’m going to stop now.”
The sudden absence of luminth is like falling. I sway, dizziness slamming into me. My stomach lurches. And my nose bleeds harder, a warm, steady flow.
There’s a lot of noise.
Kaelen catches me by the shoulders before I can fold in on myself. “Witch,” he says urgently. “Lyra. Breathe.”
Eres’s hands land on my face. “She’s exhausted. She was already exhausted.”
Silence. And then Valcor speaks. “Will she be all right?”
I blink, slowly. My vision blurs at the edges. “Did it—” I swallow, my throat thick and sticking together. “Check her. Did it work?”
Eres pulls his fingers away. Kaelen shifts beneath me, until my body is laying down.
Oh. He’s… holding me.
“She’s stable,” Eres whispers. He appears in my line of sight, his beam close to splitting his face in two. “You did it, Lyra. She’s completely stable.”
“She’ll live?” Elspeth’s voice cracks.
The words hit the room like a bell. Darian makes a sound that’s half sob, half laugh, and I feel his lips on my forehead. “Impossible.”
“And now she needs to rest.” Eres checks my eyes, his voice firm. “Lyra?”
“I’m fine.” Just tired. I’m so, so tired.
Kaelen’s arms tighten. “I’ll take her back to my room to rest and stay with her. Stay with Sera. I’ll call you if there’s anything.”
Eres wavers, his eyes flicking between me and over his shoulder.
“Go,” I urge him with a croak. “We don’t know if it will hold.”
It will, I think. It felt solid, each strand of luminth I wove inside her body seemingly unbreakable. But we don’t know. Finally, he nods. His lips press against my forehead. “Kaelen will get me if you need anything.”
I rest my head against Kaelen's chest, too weary to move it, but my thoughts whirr with an energy that can’t be contained as the door closes behind us. He’s holding me so gently. Almost… hesitant. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Neither have I.” My eyelashes flutter with the effort of keeping my eyes open.
I was always told I was made for destruction. That I wasn’t capable of anything else. I came here to kill him, to tear them apart from the inside out.
But they don't feel like my enemy. Kaelen doesn't feel like my enemy. Even in his anger and suspicion, he treated me better than my own family ever did. And he still doesn’t know the truth.
“Almost there, witch.”
Witch.
There’s no malice behind the word anymore. He thinks that he knows who I am. But he doesn’t know everything.
I have to tell him.
My eyes close. I’m certain he thinks I’m sleeping as he hesitates again at the door to his rooms, twisting the handle quietly and backing inside.
Every touch I’ve ever received was with the intention of pushing me harder.
Rarely did it come without pain. Being held by him…
it feels as if nothing could get through, and I don’t want it to stop.
My eyes open as he walks across the room, heading for the bed. “No.”
He stops immediately. “What do you need?”
Nobody ever asked me what I needed, either. I breathe him in, the scent of his soap that I wear in my own skin. “Keep hold of me, wielder. Just for a minute."
I want to make the most of this feeling. Because I know that I’m going to tell him the truth of my birth. And when I do, I might never get this feeling again.