Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
LINDSAY
The stone is cold beneath my knees.
I’m in the center of a circle, five robed figures surrounding me, chanting.
The air thrums with power, ancient and suffocating.
A band of magic lashes out, snapping around my wrist, and a scream tears from my throat as pain explodes through me.
Then another finds my other wrist, yanking my arms wide, like they’re trying to tear me apart, one piece at a time.
Tears streak down my cheeks. My bones feel like they’re fracturing under the strain. It’s not just pain—it’s violation. Like they’re reaching inside me, carving something out with their words. Words I can’t even hear anymore over the roar in my ears.
And then—something inside me stirs.
Not mine, not entirely.
Older. Wilder. Angry.
It rises like a tide, cold and unstoppable. The agony vanishes in its wake, swallowed whole. The bindings around my wrists snap, useless now. The chamber trembles beneath me.
One of the robed figures falters. He pushes back his hood.
Councilor Vemir.
“Something’s wrong,” he says, stepping back. There’s real fear in his voice now. “Stop. Stop!”
But the others don’t listen. Their chant grows louder, as if they think they can contain what’s coming.
They can’t.
The sky splits open inside me. The runes etched into the floor fracture with a sound like shattering glass. Light flares. Shadows twist. And I stand.
Magic erupts from my skin in wild, arcing currents—raw, unbound, mine.
It lashes through the air like lightning, painting symbols I’ve never been taught but somehow know in the bones of my bloodline.
Ink. Starlight. Veilfire. They burn themselves into the air, rewriting reality with every flick of my fingers.
One councilor stumbles back.
Another falls to their knees, shaking.
The wall behind the altar splits straight down the center with a high, keening screech—not stone breaking, but reality itself coming undone.
The Veil.
A jagged tear rips through it, splitting open like a wound, and from that wound—they come.
Not illusions. Not shadow creatures like before.
Real things. Born of nightmare and forgotten truths.
They pour from the rift—crawling, slithering, dragging themselves into the chamber on limbs made of bone, smoke, and teeth. Eyes blink where there shouldn’t be eyes. Mouths split open, stretching too far. Magic warps around them.
They smell like rot. Like the end of things.
The Council stares in frozen horror—before they run.
Every single one.
They don’t try to save me. Don’t even look at me.
They flee.
And I am left in the center of the storm.