Twenty Six #2
He hauls me upright with his remaining hand and drags me to the stone pillar. He slams my back into the rock, and the impact knocks the air out of me. He pins me there, the stump against my throat, the other hand pressing into my sternum, holding me in place.
He begins to talk, his cadence slow, like a sermon.
“You don’t understand any of this, do you? The Blood Rites, the world, any of it. You believe in goodness, in what’s fair and just. You are a child.”
He waits, as if expecting me to argue, but I only stare back, the taste of the ocean still in my mouth. He shakes his head.
“I have watched centuries drown in blood and fire, Luceris. I have seen children like you die for nothing. The Veins must be fed.”
He leans in, his mouth close enough that I can taste cinders on his breath. “The alternative is chaos. The Fire Dominion is a barren desert as it is. Nothing will grow there. Without the Rites, the Dominions would collapse.”
He glances at my wrists, at the scars from bands that chafed for too long. “I bet the manacles took you right back,” he says. “Your people fear power so deeply they chain it at birth. Pointless, really.”
He lets out a long sigh. “‘The light only protects.’” His smile twists. “Well... not in every case.”
He lowers the stump but keeps his hand on my sternum. He stares at me, waiting for the fight, but I have nothing left. My limbs are numb and my mind is a haze of visions and voices.
He snarls, real emotion flickering across his face. “Say something!”
I try, but the words catch in my throat. I think of Marissa, of Alaris, of the cruelty this man has wrought here. I think of the Shardfather, chained and forgotten at the bottom of the world.
Atheron raises the stump, the flesh cracking, white-hot embers floating from the wound. “If you won’t fight for the Crown,” he says, “you can at least add to the count.”
He draws back, ready to strike.
But something in me snaps.
I grab his ruined arm with both hands and push as hard as I can. The pain is immediate, the flesh of my hands searing, but I refuse to let go.
“You talk about Crowns and chaos,” I spit, voice slurred from blood pooling in my mouth. “But all you do is kill children and call it birthright.”
He laughs, genuinely amused. “We’re all monsters here, Luceris.”
“So finish it.”
He cocks his head. Then he presses fiery fingertips into my chest, hard. I can smell my own skin cooking.
“How noble.”
I lock eyes with him. “You’re just afraid,” I say. “But you’ll die here. Kael will end you, and you’ll be forgotten.”
The words land—something shifting behind his eyes, gone too quickly to name.
A voice cuts through the dark.
“Don’t you dare lay another hand on him.”
Kael is back. The words hang in the air, heavier than the fire, heavier than blood.
A promise of violence.
Atheron turns to Kael’s voice, and his grin is so wide it might as well be a mask—a performance of fearlessness, the false virtue of his overlong life.
“Fool boy,” he calls out, “you cannot both survive. Better I do it for you.”
Kael walks into the firelight, soaked to the bone, hair streaming with salt and blood. Shadows leak from him with every step, pouring from his arms and shoulders in slow, deliberate coils. No performance, just his presence.
His voice is even, as flat as a blade. “Your head will hit the sand before your hand even reaches him.”
Atheron laughs, as if he has heard this joke a thousand times. “Be reasonable, Prince. I’d be saving you the misery of doing it yourself.”
Kael cocks his head, mouth flattening with disinterest. “I have no intention of doing anything myself.”
Atheron’s smile flickers. He glances at me, calculating how quickly he can kill me and whether Kael’s threat is a bluff.
“Pity,” he says, and moves.
He lunges for me, faster than thought, his good hand igniting in a pure white ring of fire. He closes the distance and seizes my throat, flame coiling around my neck, hotter than anything I have ever felt. I feel the skin crack, the blood in my veins boil, the bone flex to the point of shattering.
I scream, but only once. Then time breaks apart.
It is not a shield that forms. It barely feels like Mana.
The fire simply forgets what it is—it dims, losing its appetite, and recedes.
The world around me rearranges itself in a single shuddering moment.
The air warps, the sand shifting as though the Mana of the world refuses to acknowledge the flames.
Atheron’s hand is still on my throat, just a hand now, but still a weapon. He blinks, and for the first time he looks afraid.
He tries to crush my windpipe with brute strength, but his body is failing him—the tendons in his arm twitch, the muscles spasming, every movement slows like it’s weighed down by a thousand invisible hands.
Atheron’s face is caught between fury and terror. He starts to back away—
But Kael is behind him.
There is no warning. No monologue. Just a blur of shadow, a flicker of darkness so thin it might have been a trick of the light.
Atheron’s expression slips. He tries to say something, but blood is already trickling down his neck.
His head wobbles, tips forward, then slips clean off, rolling across the sand.
The rest of his body staggers, trying to remember how to stand before collapsing in a heap, staining the sand a colour I cannot name.
A stream of golden-red light tears out of Atheron’s body, so bright I have to shield my eyes. It spirals up, and the Mother Shard takes it without pause.
The counter pulses: fifteen, fifteen, then—sixteen.
I stand on the beach, blood pooling at my feet, my hands shaking so hard I cannot hold them still.
Kael is at my side in a breath. He grabs me, hard, hands on my arms, the back of my neck, as if letting go would allow the world to take me.
I’m not going anywhere.
The world shakes and the sky above us splits.
From the rift, dozens of Overseers pour down.
They do not float; they drop, as if the strings holding them aloft have been cut.
They stutter and twitch, their bodies bending at strange angles.
Their glass faces refract the light, and for a moment, every mask is Atheron’s, then Marissa’s, then my own.
They chant, not in unison, but in overlapping, broken waves.
Until the count is true. Until the count is true. Until the count is true.
Each line is off by a fraction, the whole world echoing with dissonance.
Kael pulls me closer, and our foreheads touch. The world is ending around us, but he is steady, solid, a fixed point in the spiralling dark.
He kisses me, once, desperate, tasting of blood and salt.
“I won't let go,” he says.
I nod. I have no words left. My mouth is full of the last, secret words of the god at the bottom of the sea.
The Overseers close in. Their bodies fracture, segments splitting, then merging, as if they cannot hold their own shape. Their hands point at us, then away, then back again, like even they don’t know what to do.
The Mother Shard’s voice erupts from everywhere at once. But it is not the warm maternal voice from the Embrace. It is a scream, an animal shriek, cracking at every edge.
“My Light. My Shadow. Only one may survive.”
The world shakes again as the death counter pulses, gold and crackling.
Her voice is a thunderclap. “The Veins must be fed. Balance requires devotion. Perfection requires completion.”
Kael and I stand on the sand, hand in hand, facing the army of Overseers, and the broken voice of a god.
I look up at the counter, locked at sixteen, where it will stay.
I look back at Kael, and I see a broken boy, fighting for something.
A wound remembering itself, just as the Shardfather said.
I raise my voice, so loud it tears my throat.
“Your count is wrong.”
The world stops.
And the death counter blazes red.