32. Quill
Quill
But the killing blow never came.
After a few seconds, I dared to open my eyes.
The moment I did, a gasp tore from my lips.
Morgana’s body was no longer surrounded by green magic.
In fact, she was no longer moving at all.
Her body was covered in tiny white filaments, the fungus racing across her rotted skin.
The mushrooms had found her the same way they’d found the other undead, seeping into the cracks of her decayed flesh and taking root.
She swayed on her feet, her hands still raised, still crackling with the last dregs of her magic.
But her fingers had gone stiff and gray, the white filaments crawling up her wrists like frost spreading across a window.
“What—” Her voice came out garbled now, wet and broken, nothing like the sharp, cutting tone she’d used before. “What is this?”
The mask cracked.
A single hairline fracture split down the center of that porcelain white face, and I watched in horror as it began to crumble away in pieces, chunks falling to the marble floor with soft, delicate clinks.
Beneath it was nothing that resembled a face at all.
Just ruin. Sunken, hollowed sockets where eyes should have been, gray-green flesh stretched too tight over bone, sores weeping something black and viscous down what remained of her jaw.
She’d probably been beautiful once, I realized.
There were still traces of it in the shape of her cheekbones, the elegant line of what used to be her nose.
But death and dark magic had eaten away everything fae and beautiful about her, and the mask had been the only thing keeping that horror hidden from the world.
Whatever illusion of composure she’d clung to went with it. Her mouth opened, and a sound came out that didn’t belong to language anymore, something between a scream and a death rattle. She clawed at her own face like she could tear the fungus free if she just tried hard enough.
She couldn’t.
The mushrooms were faster than that thanks to the entire bottle of magical accelerant I’d mixed with them.
They didn’t care about her power, her centuries of careful preparation, her plans for the paranormal world.
They bloomed from her eye sockets, from her throat, from the gaps between her ribs where her robes had come loose.
She staggered, then dropped to her knees, then simply stopped being anything that resembled a person at all.
What was left of her collapsed inward, flesh sloughing away into rich black soil, until there was nothing left but a heap of steaming compost and the tattered remains of her robes settling over it like a shroud.
Nestled in the robes was a shimmering vial of Aeron’s blood, the same blood she planned to use to bring herself back to life.
The silence that followed was deafening.
I hung by my shirt in Thaddeus’s grip, my throat raw, staring at the space where Morgana had been just seconds before.
She was gone. Just like that. After everything, all her plans, all her centuries of scheming and pain, she’d been undone by mold and mushrooms grown in a forgotten basement by someone she’d called weak.
The Purity Front witches broke first.
I heard the scrape of shoes against marble, saw them turning, scrambling over each other in their haste to reach the door, to reach anywhere that wasn’t this foyer full of spores and rot and their leader’s ruin steaming on the floor.
One of them shoved another out of the way hard enough to send her sprawling, and nobody stopped to help her up.
“Stop!” Thaddeus’s roar shook the chandelier overhead, fury and desperation warring in his voice as his own army fell apart around him. “Stand and fight, you cowards! We can beat them! We—”
The witches didn’t listen. Didn’t even slow down.
I saw the moment something in him snapped, saw the purple light gather at his clawed fingertips.
And then he was pointing at them, at his own people, and the light lanced out in three separate bolts.
Three witches dropped where they stood, their bodies crumpling to the floor without so much as a scream, the smell of ozone and burnt flesh filling the already ruined air.
In the next moment, the purple magic swirled around them, raising their dead bodies once more as undead servants.
“Cowards,” he spat. He threw me to the side, my body hitting the marble floor with a dull thud before I came to rest at Aeron’s feet. “I’ll kill you where you stand!”
I’d hit the ground hard enough that the air had rushed out of my lungs, my vision blurring with pain, but I forced myself to look up.
Aeron was right there, chained, his golden eyes burning with a fury I’d never seen from him before, not even in that foyer when we’d first walked into this nightmare.
“Red.” His voice came out cracked, desperate, the chains still crushing his jaw so the word barely formed. “Red, are you—”
“I’m okay,” I lied, scrambling to push myself up on shaking arms. My throat felt like it had been through a meat grinder, and every breath scraped raw on the way down. But I was alive. Aeron was alive. That was more than I’d dared hope for a few seconds ago. “I’m gonna get you out of here.”
I didn’t know how, not with the chains still humming with whatever cruel magic kept them locked around him, but I was going to figure it out. I had to.
Around us, the last of the fighting was collapsing into chaos.
Wild had abandoned all restraint in favor of ripping straight into Thaddeus with bursts of raw fae power.
His face twisted with a fury I’d never seen on him before, all that easy charm burned away.
Elias fought at his side, his magic slicing through the reanimated witches Thaddeus had just murdered, though I could see the horror on his face even as he did it.
Atlas had abandoned the undead entirely, his massive wolf form circling Thaddeus now, teeth bared, waiting for an opening.
And Caden’s vines were creeping across the floor toward the dragon’s feet, trying to root him in place.
But Thaddeus was still standing. Still dangerous. Still radiating that terrible calm even as everything he’d built crumbled around him.
I turned my attention to the chains, pressing my palms against the cold metal where it bit into Aeron’s scales.
My magic was nothing special, I knew that better than anyone, but I had to try something.
I pushed what little power I had into the links, feeling for any weakness.
Morgana was gone, so her spell should be weakened.
All I had to do was find a crack in the magic, anything I could force my way into…
There. A seam, thin as a hairline, where the chain looped around itself near his shoulder.
Without Morgana feeding it her magic, the metal had gone brittle in places, the enchantment fraying like an old rope.
I dug my nails into it, ignoring the way it burned against my skin, and pushed everything I had into that single point.
“Come on,” I muttered, more to myself than to the chains. “Come on, come on—”
The link groaned. I felt something give, just slightly, a fraction of an inch, and hope flared bright and desperate in my chest. I wasn’t powerful.
I would never be powerful, not like Elias or Wild or the terrifying dragon currently tearing apart the foyer a few dozen feet away.
But my mother had taught me patience, precision, the ability to find the answer to a problem through exploration and experimentation.
That was potion making. That was alchemy.
And apparently, it worked on cursed chains too.
The link snapped.
The moment it did, the entire chain dissolved into dust.
Aeron surged up before I could even blink, the rest of the chains sliding off his red scales in a cascade of gray dust. He was massive again, unfettered, and the roar that tore out of him rattled every remaining piece of glass in that ruined foyer.
I stumbled backward, throwing my arms up against the force of it, but I couldn’t look away from him.
Couldn’t look away from the pure, molten fury radiating off every inch of his red body.
“Grandfather.” The word came out like a growl now, nothing soft left in it at all. “You are finished.”
Thaddeus turned from where he’d been fending off Wild’s onslaught, and for the first time since this whole nightmare began, I saw something crack in that composed, ancient face. Fear. Real fear, flickering behind those golden eyes so similar to Aeron’s own.
“You wouldn’t,” Thaddeus said, though his voice wavered. “I raised you. You’re not strong enough to hurt me anyway.”
But I could hear the lack of confidence in his voice.
“You raised me on nothing but lies.” Aeron’s wings unfurled to their full span, knocking loose plaster from the ceiling, sending dust and debris raining down around us. “Like a lamb for the slaughter!”
I scrambled backward, putting distance between myself and the two dragons, though Aeron in his fury barely seemed to register I existed anymore.
Wild caught my eye across the room and jerked his head toward the wall, silently urging me to get clear.
I didn’t need telling twice. I dragged myself toward Elias, who caught my arm and hauled me the rest of the way behind the questionable safety of an overturned marble pillar just as Thaddeus shifted, his true dragon form swelling to fill the other half of the room.