Chapter 30
Evie
An interminable fall down an endless pit. The blight swallowed my body whole. When I opened my eyes again, I was standing in a dark place, my feet poised above thick black water. I could hear a pulse, loud, booming, like a colossal heartbeat. I was at the heart of the blight.
In the darkness, I felt nothing. Not the vines that twisted and coiled around me, choking until breath became a memory. I didn’t feel their burns, the pain of being stretched and crushed at once. I knew I wasn’t in the physical world anymore. The blight was in my mind.
Or maybe our minds had converged and become one.
In the far distance, as if miles away yet carried by some impossible wind, I heard Kael call out my name. I heard thunder.
An urge overcame me, and I began walking. The tar rippled beneath each step as I moved toward nowhere at all, only endless darkness.
And slowly, the pulses became whispers, something ancient speaking not in words but in sensations. The darkness began to shift, reshaping itself, and up ahead I no longer saw mere black, but shadows rising out of the tar. Hundreds of them, forming a lattice of unseen souls.
I came closer until the lattice became a crowd, people drowned in oozing tar, dripping and grotesque, yet eerily calm. I couldn’t see their eyes, but I knew they stared at me. I wasn’t afraid, even as my heart threatened to burst out of my chest. I was curious.
I approached until I was within arm’s reach and stared back. After a long, uncomfortable pause, the shadows quivered as one. Then they spoke, low voices rising in layered echoes, folding over each other until they forged a single, resonant sound that throbbed through the vast, hollow dark.
“We are the fallen. You are the one who hears us.”
They repeated it again and again, their voices rippling through my bones.
“What do you want from me?” I shouted, my voice breaking over theirs.
They went silent, eerily so. For a moment they slipped back into the water, then other shapes rose in their stead. Memories, or something close to memories, warped and corrupted by tar.
Drachenfels Keep. The laboratorium. Dark wizards boiling blood.
Kael…
A figure meant to look like Kael, but certainly not him, rose and walked toward me, distorted and furious. It unleashed a storm of black lightning around me. It destroyed the tar-made laboratorium. It killed every subject and cast them into the endless pit.
Then it rushed to me, stood before me oozing instead of breathing. Its hands coiled around my arms and sent a dark shockwave into my blood.
I fell to my knees with a scream, pain becoming the only thing I knew.
When I looked up again, the crowd of shadows stared at me once more.
“This is what he does, and will do it again.”
I wasn’t going to be fooled by this false version of Kael. I knew what the darkness was doing. It wanted me to yield.
I forced myself to stand, my knees giving way before they hardened beneath me.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, voice trembling but firm.
“He is what we once were. You are what we will become.”
Outside the corners of my mind, I heard Kael’s voice again, strained, terrified. I heard his storm, thunder rolling and echoing through some distant cavern. Flashes of light broke through the walls of darkness that encircled me.
His storm was battering the blight from the outside, trying to tear me free. But the blight only anchored itself deeper into my mind the longer I remained here.
The blight wasn’t trying to destroy me. It was trying to join with me.
I felt myself merge with hundreds of dead voices.
A low hum did surface beneath the agony, faint, fragile, nearly devoured by it. Not a scream. A whisper. A plea.
Not pain. A person.
I felt it then, in its heartbeat. A human rhythm, weak and trembling.
Someone was still inside. Hundreds of someones.
The blight wasn’t entirely made of evil.
It was a prison of sorrow.
Another black lightning struck me.
The pain screamed through me, a tide of agony without a name. But beneath it, beneath the roar of thunder and the howling shadows, I heard something else.
“Please…”
The whisper was so faint I almost missed it.
That was a soul.
And another.
And another.
They were not one monster. They were hundreds of lives trapped inside a wound that never healed.
I swallowed, breath shaking.
“If I speak to the pain,” I murmured, “I only feed it.”
The darkness tightened around me.
“But if I speak to you, to who you were, will you hear me?”
The storm outside cracked, and in its flash I saw the shadows recoil.
They wanted to be free.
Not feared.
Not avenged.
Free.
“What happened to you is horrible,” I said. “But this has to stop. You must free yourself from the pain, or you will never stop hurting.”
For a breath, nothing moved. No whisper. No pulse. Only the blight’s darkness pressing against my skin like a second, suffocating flesh.
Then the shadows shivered.
Not in anger this time. In uncertainty.
A sound rose from them, thin as cracked glass. A question, not a threat.
“How?”
The single word struck through me, raw and trembling, as if hundreds of torn souls had spoken it in the same breath. I felt them waver, wavering like children lost in smoke, unable to remember the sky.
My throat tightened.
“You must let go,” I said softly. “Not of who you were… but of what was done to you. You cannot carry that pain any longer. It is killing you. It is killing everything.”
The mass recoiled again, but not from my voice, from what it remembered.
Black lightning rippled across their bodies. The shape of the false Kael flickered beside them, snarling in silence, as if the memory itself refused to release its hold.
Another voice rose, broken and desperate.
“We tried.”
“I know,” I breathed. “And I’m not asking you to forget. Only to stop clinging to the hurt that chained you here. The storm outside—it’s not your enemy. And I’m not. You are not alone anymore.”
The shadows trembled like a field of reeds caught between two winds—the new storm and their ancient grief.
For the first time, they did not strike.
For the first time, they listened.
“Free yourself of the past,” I whispered. “Do not become its echo.”
The crowd softened, the tar loosening its grip until it slid from their forms in slow, trembling ribbons.
Faces emerged where only shadow had stood, hollow cheeks, quivering mouths, eyes brimming with sorrow so old it seemed carved into them.
Loneliness clung to them like a shroud, yet beneath it flickered something fragile. Something close to hope.
“That’s it…” I whispered.
Black lightning split the air in two, separating me from the crowd. The false Kael reformed at their backs, rising from their shadows like a vengeful echo dragged out of the dark. Its shape twitched, unstable, its face a warped snarl of his, Kael’s features stretched too thin, too hollow.
It clung to the blight like a parasite desperate not to be torn free.
“No…” I whispered. “You are not real.”
The thing lunged.
Its storm crashed into mine, a torrent of black lightning and twisted memories, slashing across my mind with the force of a blade. I staggered, the air ripped from my lungs as the creature seized my shoulders, its hooks sinking into my skin, pouring cold tar into me.
“You will not take them,” it hissed, its voice layered with hundreds of griefs. “You will not destroy what we are.”
Pain detonated through me—blight, storm, remembrance, all at once. Bursts of black lightning swallowed my vision. It was trying to push itself back inside me, to anchor deeper, to drown out the souls who had begun to listen.
“No,” I gasped. “You are not them. You are the pain.”
The false Kael’s grip tightened, black vines writhing down my arms, forcing me onto my knees again. It bent close, forehead nearly touching mine, lightning cracking behind its teeth.
“You cannot save them,” it whispered. “You are too small. Too weak. You break.”
I felt my pulse shatter into irregular beats. My vision blurred.
“You are just an idle seerling cluttering the halls of a court that was never meant for you.”
The blight swarmed me, trying to devour the fragile thread between me and the souls, and between me and Kael’s storm outside.
But then…
Beneath the agony, beneath the suffocating pressure, I felt something.
Not theirs.
Mine.
A flare beneath my ribs, small as a spark at first, then rising, rising, bright, wild, alive. A current I had felt before but never understood. A force that had always answered Kael’s storm not with fear, but with instinct.
Power rippled through me like wind through tall grass.
I lifted my head.
“No,” I said again, but my voice was different this time—steady, resonant, carrying breath and will and something older than either.
The false Kael froze.
The vines around my hands began to peel back, drawn into spirals of pale light that shimmered beneath my skin. My power—my true power—was not storm, not memory. It was the joining place between them. The space where echoes lived.
“I am not an idle seerling,” I said quietly. “I never was a seerling in the first place.”
And I had never understood what I was. But now, I finally did.
The false Kael recoiled, lightning stuttering across its form.
“I am the echo itself,” I breathed. “Power comes to me, and I send it where it must go.”
The blight shuddered.
The souls stirred.
And the storm outside, Kael’s storm, answered me, not as something battering the walls, but as something I could feel through the veil. Not hurting. Calling.
I reached toward it.
Light burst from my palms, a ripple of echoing radiance, the same storm that lived inside Kael, the same thunder that had always roared in anger but now roared with purpose. It struck the false Kael full in the chest.
The creature screamed, its voice fracturing like glass. Vines peeled from it, tar burning away into nothing. It clung to the blight with desperate hands, but the blight itself recoiled, pulling back, no longer certain, no longer willing to cradle.
“You’re done,” I whispered.
And my thunderstorm took it.
The false Kael tore apart, unraveling into a tangle of black lightning that blinked out in a single breath, leaving only trembling vines behind.
The souls gasped as one.
The blight loosened.
And for the first time, the darkness did not press inward—it exhaled.
The crowd gazed upon me, people in soiled and torn linens, their feet drenched in black tar mixed with their shit and piss. They were bruised, bloodied, some missing limbs.
But then, in one final breath, they each closed their eyes and lifted their faces to the sky, where a bright light shone.
In a gust of wind, they were gone, leaving behind a rain of ash that fell like snow.
I remembered their names, their faces, them. I held their memories of pain, torture, the eyes of their tormentors echoing through me. I would carry their ghosts inside me, to always remember their sacrifice.
My true power, new and curious, settled inside me and quieted now that I had finally seen it for what it was. For what it had always been. I had no name for it, but for the first time, I felt what it was to be whole, to be normal and one with myself.
When I opened my eyes again, I stood at the center of an empty crater, raindrops falling on my skin. No black vines, no oozing tar. The blight was gone.
Around me were the ruins of Drachenfels Keep, destroyed by my echoed storm. The sky, gray and gloomy, loomed above me.
I stood there, naked among the rain and ruin. When my mind fully returned to light, I saw Kael walking toward me. He wrapped his cloak around me, bringing warmth, and I caught myself shivering.
He poured his gaze into mine, uncertain of what I’d done, but knowing I had destroyed the blight.
He did not speak. He only wrapped me closer, letting the rain wash the last traces of black from my skin.
I sagged into him, feeling the weight of everything I’d seen, everything I’d done.
The storm above us quieted, and so did the one inside me.