Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ELLIE
“What is taken in hatred may yet be reclaimed through love.”
Love Songs of the Mountain Provinces
Sereven takes another step toward me. Sunlight catches the crystal pieces in his face, sending blue light across his features. Blood seeps around each embedded piece.
“Elowen.” My name rolls off his tongue like a prayer, reverent and possessive. The sound makes my skin crawl. “My greatest creation, come home to me at last.”
I take a quick look around the plaza, searching desperately for Corwin, for any familiar face, but we’re alone. Smoke drifts through the air, acrid and thick, carrying the smell of burning wood. Battle cries echo off the walls as Veinwardens and Authority soldiers clash in the distance.
The mist stalker shifts beside me, its eyes fixed on Sereven. The creature’s form grows more solid while I watch, every bunched muscle promising swift death if he comes too close.
“Come home to you?” I force myself to stay steady, despite the way his presence makes me want to recoil. “I was never yours.”
“Of course you were. You still are.” For a moment his features distort behind the blue light reflecting off the crystal shards. “I shaped you, molded you, filled you with power beyond anything this world has ever seen. You exist because of me.”
“You shaped nothing!” Sparks of light crackle along my arms. “You filled a child with stolen power you thought would kill her. But it didn’t. That wasn’t through anything you did. That doesn’t make me yours.”
“It makes you absolutely mine.” He takes a step closer, ignoring the stalker’s warning growl. “Every ability you possess came from me. Every power flowing through your veins exists because I put it there. You are my will made manifest.”
“It doesn’t matter what you caused.” My voice hardens. “I decide how to use what’s inside me. I decide who to help and who to fight.”
“All choices I gave you the power to make.” His smile widens, revealing teeth stained blue from whatever corruption is running through his veins.
“Without the abilities I placed in you, what would you be? Nothing. You’d be powerless.
Insignificant. Every choice you make is only possible because of what I turned you into. ”
The word ‘nothing’ cuts deep. Because that’s exactly what I was before this. Ellie Bennett, invisible in every room she entered. The girl no one adopted. The woman who disappeared from Chicago and no one even noticed.
His manipulations should be easy to dismiss, but the absolute certainty in his voice stops me. He truly believes in what he’s saying.
What if everything I’ve become, everything I’ve accomplished, exists only because of the stolen power flowing through my veins? What if I really am nothing without it?
“I am not your creation. I am not your tool!”
“Then what are you?” His head tilts, lips stretching into a parody of a smile.
“These Veinbloods you’ve found. Do you think they’ll ever truly accept you as one of them?
You contain the stolen essence of their kin.
Every time you use your power, you’re wielding abilities torn from their ancestors’ dying bodies.
How long before they start wondering when you will turn on them and take theirs?
How long before they decide you’re far too dangerous to trust? ”
His words burrow under my skin, finding wounds I didn’t know I had.
Because there is truth there, isn't there? I do carry power ripped from Veinblood ancestors. Every lightning bolt I summon did come from their dying relatives. How long before they look at me and don’t see someone fighting with them, but someone who played a part in murdering their kind?
“They know I would never be a threat to them.” My protest sounds weak.
Through our bond, I can feel Sacha. I don’t know how I can tell, but he’s moving closer, faint hints of worry reaching me. Worry for me, I’m sure.
“Do they?” He laughs. “Or are they simply using you? At least I’m honest about what I want from you, Elowen.
But are they? Think about it. My dear brother gets his throne back through your power.
His people reclaim their capital through your abilities.
You’re handing them everything they lost, using strength that was never meant to be yours. What has he given you in return?”
A memory slams into me. Of the tower when I first arrived.
The way Sacha acted like my being there was a shock to him, when he’d cast a summoning spell to deliberately draw someone who could break his binding.
He’d let me believe I was helping him through choice, when really I was just fulfilling the exact purpose he’d brought me there for.
He’d known from the beginning that I was ‘the key’ to his freedom. But he didn’t tell me that for months. He never explained that my arrival wasn’t by chance, but by design. How much of what I felt was real? How much was me responding to his manipulation?
“You could be so much more than being his useful pet.” Sereven’s voice drops. “You have power beyond anything Meridian has ever seen. Why settle for helping others reclaim what they lost when you could build something entirely new?”
“Build something new? You mean like the Authority? Because look at what you helped create? The purges, the torture, the destruction of everything that’s magical in this world.”
Thunder rumbles overhead, and he glances upward before looking back at me.
“The Authority was a necessary step. But it was never the end goal. Sometimes you must tear down the old world completely before you can build a new one. The Veinbloods were clinging to outdated traditions, which made them vulnerable. The Authority proved that. But you … you represent something beyond both failures.”
“Beyond both failures? What does that mean?” The question escapes before I can stop it, and I realize I genuinely want to hear his answer.
What if he’s right about that? What if both the old Veinblood ways and the Authority’s oppression are just different kinds of weakness?
“Think about what you’ve accomplished here. You didn’t just take a city. You inspired a group of people who have forgotten how to be strong. That’s the kind of power that reshapes worlds, Elowen. The kind that creates new order from the ashes of the old.”
The power inside me responds to his words, eager and hungry, and I don’t fight it.
For one dangerous moment I let myself imagine what it would feel like to never be powerless again.
Never be at someone else’s mercy. Never be the girl begging for scraps of belonging from a world that didn’t want her.
The sensation is intoxicating. I could make this world better. I could make it mine. When the power fills me completely, I’m not Ellie Bennet anymore. I’m the storm itself.
And storms don’t ask permission.
“What has my dear brother offered you?” Sereven’s voice turns silky. “A place at his side while he rebuilds the same failed kingdom that fell so easily before, maybe? The chance to watch him make the same mistakes that led to the Veinbloods’ near extinction in the first place?”
The terrible possibility that he might be right sends tremors through me. Lightning flashes, joining the thunder rumbling across the sky.
“I can see the doubt in your eyes.” Satisfaction creeps into his voice, and the crystal fragments flare brighter. Blood trickles from his nose. “You’re beginning to understand, aren’t you? That there might be another path.”
Another path. What if rebuilding the old ways isn’t the answer? What if it does lead to the same problems, the same failures that let the Authority rise in the first place?
“You know I’m right. You’re nothing to them, other than a convenient way to get what they want.
Don’t you want to understand what you really are?
What you could become with proper guidance?
You need me, Elowen. I’m the only one who truly understands you, what you’re capable of.
These Veinbloods will never see you as one of them.
They can’t. You’re something beyond their comprehension. ”
The mist stalker shifts closer, pressing against my leg, its growl vibrating against me.
“You could show them what true power looks like, when it’s not constrained by their narrow thinking. Your power is not that of a follower. It’s the power of a ruler. All your life, all you’ve wanted is to belong. To be seen for what you really are.”
“What am I?” My whisper is lost beneath the crash of thunder, but somehow Sereven hears me.
“You are extraordinary. You could be the new order.”
His words paint visions I don’t want to see, but can’t stop myself from imagining.
What if I didn't have to settle for helping Sacha reclaim his father's throne? What if I built something new instead? Something without the weaknesses that let the Authority rise in the first place?
My eyes shift to the Lirien Spire, and I can almost see it. They would follow me now. I brought them here. I showed them how to take the city. We could take more. We could ensure no one ever lives under the Authority's fear again.
I could build a world where people like me—people who never belonged anywhere—finally have a place. The vision is beautiful. And I want it so much it steals my breath.
“Of course, we’d need to remove the more …
sentimental obstacles first,” Sereven continues.
“My dear brother’s attachment to the old ways has always been his weakness.
He would never stand by and allow you to build something better.
But once he’s dealt with, you will see how much clearer everything becomes without his influence clouding your judgment. ”
Sacha. He wants to kill Sacha.