Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Nova
He moved as fast as the light he controlled—knocking my sword arm aside, catching me by the throat and slamming me backward.
I struck the pedestal’s edge, my body bending over it with a gruesome amount of force. As stinging pain shot up my spine and radiated toward the tips of my fingers, my hold on Grimnor weakened enough that Lorien was able to drive it from my grasp with a well-placed kick.
He loomed over me, reaching toward the Sword of Light. I watched, terror blooming in my chest, as he beckoned—and as Luminor obeyed, dropping from the air into his grip.
I tried to scramble after my own sword, but Lorien beat me to it. His movements were graceful yet wild, impossibly fast but entirely controlled.
Inhuman .
“If I can’t have you ,” he growled, “then I will make do with your sword.” He kneeled beside Grimnor, placing a hand over it.
The sword reacted to his closeness with a menacing hiss, the energies swirling within its blade darkening, forcing him to draw his hand back. The sight kindled a spark of hope inside of me; I felt, not for the first time, as if my sword was alive—which meant I at least had an ally in this chamber.
“But, as I suspected…” Lorien said, turning his hungry eyes upon me once more, “…I’ll need to borrow a bit of your magic in order to make it easier to wield.”
“You won’t get a drop of magic from me,” I snapped.
He laid Luminor beside its counterpart and then rose back to his full height, a sly smile sliding across his handsome features. It was jarring, how different those features looked without the warmth he’d been faking over the past weeks. How much sharper. How much crueler.
“I wasn’t planning on asking nicely for it,” he said.
I shifted into a more formidable crouch, grabbing for the knife hidden at my thigh and drawing it out.
He prowled closer, twisting his hand as he came, pulling light from his palm and guiding it out along his fingers—five separate lines of light that curved into sharp points at the end, extending like claws from his hand.
“I borrowed my ability to possess bodies from my dear Calista,” he said, “and that power has endured all these centuries—so I believe I’m fully capable of taking what I need from the likes of you .”
“Stole it,” I said, standing and clenching my knife more tightly. “You didn’t borrow it, you stole it.”
He flexed his fingers, making the light at their ends shimmer and sharpen even further. “Same difference.”
I sized up the distance between myself and my fallen sword, wondering if I could possess it and pull it into my hold quickly enough.
“This will be less painful for you if you don’t resist me,” Lorien said.
“I choose pain, then.”
He huffed out an unamused laugh. “You would.”
He lunged.
I sidestepped, narrowly avoiding his reaching hand. He doubled back in a blink and swung for me again. I stumbled as I avoided him this time, barely catching myself against the wall. Spinning around brought me face-to-face with him at the exact instant he slammed the claws of Light magic toward my chest.
I ducked. His hand—and his magic—struck the wall, leaving burn marks behind, sending sparks sizzling over the stone and dangerous heat washing over my skin.
My shadows lashed violently outward, briefly distracting him. I rose in a rush of cold fury, plunging my knife into his stomach, sinking it as deeply as I could and twisting until my forearms shook from the effort and my hands grew slick with blood.
He caught a fistful of my hair and yanked, throwing me to the floor.
He dove after me, but I managed to roll out from underneath him and stumble to my feet. As I put more space between us, he paused long enough to rip the knife out with little more than a pained hiss, flinging it across the room in the same motion.
Blood seeped from his wounded stomach, quickly covering the bottom of his shirt. He didn’t so much as wince. His breathing remained evenly measured. His gaze was as fierce and focused as ever.
Did he even feel pain?
This monster had endured for lifetimes, and now…
I realized that I didn’t know how much of him was even human .
As if he could hear the frantic questions in my head, he smiled. And then he demonstrated more of his supernatural ability, attacking so quickly that I had no hope of avoiding him. His magic-encircled fist struck my chest. I fell back, struggling to find my balance and trying to will my shadows into something that would protect me.
Before I managed either of those things, Lorien struck again, his fist unclenched, claws of light sinking in and slamming me against the pedestal in the center of the room once more.
I hit harder than before. The painful spasm that shot through my back was so intense that, for a moment, I feared I was entirely paralyzed. The shadows that had started to rise and gather around me scattered, and as their darkness parted, he was suddenly there —a terrifying figure wrapped in golden light that blinded me as he drew closer.
I didn’t even manage a gasp before he sank the sharp strands of his magic into the side of my neck. They pierced like needles through my skin, burning as they delved deeper. I could feel them with disturbing precision, every twist and turn and subtle movement they made. It seemed as if they were hunting, almost, hooking themselves around each strand of my magic they could find, trying to rip it out of me—to separate it from my very soul.
Little by little, they started to succeed.
The pain was… indescribable.
It tore my mind from my body, pulling me away from all rational thought.
I don’t know how much time passed before I became aware of myself again. Aware that I lay dazed and burned and bleeding like a sacrifice upon an altar, overtaken by a death-like stillness.
I wanted to be dead.
But no—I was still alive. I could feel my pulse, my shuddering breaths, my twitching fingers. And I could feel my magic— gods , the way that magic still twisted and curled, resisting every attempt Lorien made to pull it into his possession.
Its resistance did no good, in the end.
Like deeply-lodged thorns, those pieces of me still came out when he applied enough force, ripping painful tears through my flesh as they went.
An involuntary convulsion bent my body into an unnatural angle, and Lorien leaned closer, increasing the pressure on my throat.
“Don’t move,” he ordered.
I didn’t move, because I couldn’t move .
“Good girl,” he said, his voice low and full of the same possessive hunger he’d watched me with earlier. The weight around my throat slid lower, needling and burning its way through my chest. Catching and pulling more of my magic toward him. His own power seemed to settle in the places where mine was ripped out, and my body grew heavier with each violent exchange, becoming more and more difficult to move.
A horrid image flashed in my mind—myself, sprawled over the stone, flayed open like a fresh kill with my heart and everything else laid out for him to feast upon.
I kept trying to move despite the heaviness. Until finally, finally , I felt something other than the pain, something beyond the blood and the cold stone underneath me…just the slightest itch upon my wrist.
The bracelet my father had given me, reminding me of its presence.
I closed my eyes, trying to remember his face.
Seven years .
Seven years with nothing but a memory of that man and the kingdom I once called home, all because of the beast who loomed over me now.
My hand was already shaking, my fingers still twitching from pain, from shock. I shook it all harder—on purpose—scraping my wrist against the stone pedestal, sliding the bracelet off, bit by bit. In that moment, I no longer feared what would happen if I removed it; it couldn’t be worse than what I was already enduring.
It slipped over my hand, and almost instantly I felt a surge of cold power—a pulling, desperate power that urged me to lift my head, to turn my gaze in the direction of my fallen sword. I could see the energy sleeping within that sword, all of a sudden. The glow of it pulsed like a heartbeat that seemed to speed up to match my own.
I sensed Lorien moving above me.
Excruciating pressure followed, cutting toward my heart.
I summoned every ounce of strength I could to turn back to him, to meet his gaze without flinching as I growled, “Get your fucking hands off me. ”
Knocking his touch away, I reached toward Grimnor and beckoned my fingers, bringing the sword hurtling toward us.
It nearly impaled him between the shoulder blades, but he twisted wildly aside at the last instant.
The sword flew over my head, clattering against the ground several feet away. Before I started crawling after it, I stretched a hand toward the knife he’d thrown away earlier. It was lighter than Grimnor. Easier to grab. It flew faster under my command, too, striking Lorien in the neck before he even realized it was coming.
As he stumbled away with a furious sound—still more from annoyance than actual pain, I feared—I again focused on Grimnor, crawling a few feet before reaching out and trying to pull it into my hand.
The sword hovered in the air, tipping toward me. But though my hold on it was firm, my control was shaky. I’d lost too much magic. Too much blood. I was too weak. Too slow. Too unbalanced. My attempt to reel it more precisely into my grip failed, dropping it at the feet of Lorien as he stepped back to me.
I tried to stand and ended up falling to my knees instead, the jolting motion making the blood flow more freely from the wounds along my neck and chest.
The room spun.
I would have vomited if I’d had the energy for it. Instead, I braced a hand against the floor and closed my eyes again, desperately trying to focus, to find another surge of power like the one I’d felt moments ago. It was swirling deep in my gut, like a deep, dangerous current hidden beneath calm waters. If only I could have reached it without drowning. Somehow, I had to reach it—
Lorien took a step toward me. A single step that echoed through the chamber. Through my very being. Then he stopped, and a strange noise escaped him—a sort of strangled laugh, full of disbelief and some other charged emotion I couldn’t readily name.
I heard him… retreating .
I blinked my eyes open and gasped.
I was surrounded by shadowy figures. No less than a dozen spectral men and women had appeared in front of me, and they continued taking shape as I watched. Their forms shifted between solid and ethereal, like the lingering afterimage of a dream. But their eyes—those started sharp and stayed that way, gleaming with a bright, otherworldly clarity as they took in their surroundings.
After a moment of staring, mouth agape, I realized I recognized the one in the very center. She stood taller than the others, her silhouette sharp and distinct against the swirling mass of figures, her long, dark hair dancing unnaturally, as if caught in a phantom wind…
Judging by the way his face had drained of all color, Lorien recognized her, too.
Calista.
And all the others around her…were they all past Shadow Vaelora? Had I summoned them here, somehow? The weakness rapidly overtaking my body suggested as much—that they were made from, or at least tethered to, the shadows within me.
This was staggeringly powerful magic.
But I could already feel my hold on it slipping.
Lorien no longer seemed interested in trying to cut me apart. His attention had shifted to the shadows moving over his skin. Similar to the ones that appeared on mine, because they were caused by the same magic — the magic he’d stolen .
He didn’t dare cross the line of my predecessors to resume his torture of me, but with my stolen shadows wrapping around him like armor, he managed to pick up Grimnor.
He looked to the door, calculating.
I struggled to my feet. Fear of letting him escape with that sword made me oblivious to the pain racking through my body. Indifferent to my exhaustion, my dizziness, to the dangerous amount of power I could feel building around him.
But as soon as I staggered forward, Calista’s gaze jerked toward mine. Like the others around her, her eyes were the only part of her that remained focused and bright. As I stared into them, I stopped moving, as though under a spell, overcome by a sudden urge to save my strength. To focus on surviving and nothing else. And I would have sworn I heard a voice, soft and determined, though the shadow-specter’s lips never moved—
This is not how it ends .
Calista turned away. She lifted her hands. The other figures followed her lead, and a veil of darkness rose up with the motion, driving Lorien farther back, pushing him more violently toward the doors.
Protecting me.
Reluctantly, I sank to my knees once more, reaching for my wounds. My hand came away covered in crimson. My breath caught in my throat, and I couldn’t seem to resume my normal breathing, no matter how hard I tried. Every gasping attempt sent another wave of agony rushing through me.
The sentinels before me began to lose their shape, bleeding into the dark wall they’d created.
My chest felt as if it was cracking apart from the effort of trying to inhale.
So much blood.
So much darkness.
So little air.
The last clear image I saw before succumbing to the pain was of Lorien fleeing from the shadows, a fierce, wild expression in his eyes and both swords of legend gripped tightly in his hands.