Chapter 52
Chapter Fifty-Two
Nova
Little by little, Aleks lost the battle to stay upright. His body slowly collapsed against mine, and I did my best to support it with my numb arms, to at least keep his head off the ground.
Light continued to flare around us, creating a dome that cut us off from the rest of the room. Through the veil of its energy, I saw the vague figures of our soldiers rushing frantically about. I heard my brother’s voice, equally frantic, commanding them to secure the space, to find a way to get to me, to seek out any more of Luminor’s pieces.
But something told me there were no more of those sharp fragments to be found. The ones that had pierced Aleksander’s body were the last—the final, desperate strike.
Six of those shards. And something was happening around the puncture wounds they’d created...something strange: A soft glow of reddish-gold light pooling, a trembling radiating out across his body and pulling that light with it, sweeping an unnatural pallor across his skin.
With a shaking hand, I pulled one of the fragments free. There was hardly any blood to be seen—only a dark rim around the edges of the wound.
A flare of light engulfed it.
And then the skin… healed .
Silent tears dripped down my face, dropping onto his.
“Chaos. Why are you crying?”
My nickname.
But he had spoken it in a different voice.
Lorien’s voice.
“No,” I whispered. “ No .”
His body shook with silent laughter. A great sigh followed—like he was settling into a pleasantly familiar place after a long journey—and the rest of the shards slipped from his body. They were no longer black as they hit the ground; there was no sign of any magic in them at all.
“ Finally ,” he breathed.
I dug my fingers into him.
“Let go.”
I didn’t.
I… couldn’t .
He moved with inhuman strength, snatching my shirt and throwing me down as he pushed himself up. He glared at me, then rolled the stiffness from his shoulders and looked toward the center of the room.
The dome of magic around us expanded outwards, until it encompassed the platform and the Aetherstone. A stone that was alive once more, feeding into the shard of Luminor that had landed in the groove close to it. A powerful current of magic streamed between the shard and the Stone, making the platform beneath it all tremble.
Lorien forgot about me, moving toward the crackling bridge of energy without a backwards glance. As he approached it, he seemed to pull some of that energy toward himself. To absorb it. And for an instant, he appeared to shift, to grow into a beastly, beautiful shape that made the room and all its magic pale in comparison. A god given form and flesh.
It wasn’t just the influence of the Stone creating this effect, I realized—it was all of his power being concentrated into this form, no longer divided between himself and Aleksander and the Sword of Light.
The world shook as he reached into the current of magic before him.
I fought my way to my feet. I had little strength left, and no sword or any other weapon within the dome he’d trapped us in—and I doubted I could have wielded any of those things against him, even if I’d had them.
But I found myself staggering toward him all the same.
He started to swirl his hand through the current, forming some of the energy into a solid shape.
My steps grew quicker. More desperate. More clumsy. I threw myself at him, trying to wrap my weight around his arm and drag him away from whatever he was planning.
He overpowered me easily, slinging me to the ground, my shoulder striking hard enough that I felt something in it shatter. The shard from Luminor flew into his hand. He stepped after me, looming over my crumpled body for a moment before he dropped, pinning me on my back and easing the piece of the broken sword into the hollow of my throat.
“You’ve been so useful to me,” he murmured, “but now you’ve become nothing but a nuisance .”
I closed my eyes. Tightly. I didn’t care about the pain in my shoulder or the sharpness at my throat.
It was his face I couldn’t bear to focus on.
Not while he was speaking in that awful, wrong voice.
He was quiet for a long, horrible moment, dragging the broken sliver of the sword across my skin.
I tried to calm my breathing. To focus, to reach for the essence of Aleks I knew was still buried within him. But it was impossible; I felt him—I could have felt him no matter the chaos between us, I thought—but the heart of him was warring so violently with Lorien’s that it was impossible to truly grab hold of it.
And what would I have done, even if I could have caught him in my grasp?
I squeezed my eyes tighter, sending fresh tears streaming over my cheeks.
“Still crying?” He tsked .
I opened my eyes and forced myself to look at him, to not give him the satisfaction of knowing just how broken—how finished —I felt in that moment.
He leered down at me, tapping his makeshift knife against my skin, his lips curving cold and cruel on his stolen face. “Do you want to know my favorite part of all this?” Another tap. “It’s that he can see everything I’m doing to you.”
My heart seized so tightly, so violently, I feared it might shatter into even more pieces than Luminor had.
“I wish you could hear him begging me to spare your life.” He cocked his head to the side. “He really loved you, you know.”
“He still does,” I whispered. “We are not past tense.”
“Give me a moment to fix that,” he replied, his eyes flickering between shades of gold and red as he lifted the shard, walking it casually, expertly along his fingers and into a more secure grasp.
He plunged it toward my neck.
It struck the ground directly beside me.
How?
How had he missed?
His gaze was suddenly full of a rage unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was so painfully not Aleks that I couldn’t breathe as I looked into it. Combined with the pain radiating through my shoulder, it was too much. I closed my eyes again. I was drifting, fighting just to stay conscious. All I wanted to do was leave this moment.
A whisper brought me back: “Run, Nova.”
My eyes flashed open.
He’d sounded like Aleksander again.
He was still in there.
He was still fighting.
How could I possibly leave him to fight alone?
“ Damn it, Chaos, RUN! ”
I started to shake my head, to reach for him—
He jerked me upright and shoved me into motion himself, throwing me toward the wall of magic that separated us from the others. That magic shifted, closing in on us but then parting for an instant—just long enough to allow me to safely stumble through to the other side.
I immediately spun back around, but I was already too late.
The wall had closed, and I could just barely make out Aleksander’s shape through it. He was on one knee, a hand over his face. His body was shaking with obvious effort. Still fighting, trying to take hold of himself once more.
I had to get back to him.
I summoned every shadow I could. Again and again, I slammed them against the wall of light, trying to pierce it. But they only scattered and fell uselessly away. I was too exhausted. The power before me was too great—and only growing more dangerous, more out of control as the energy around the Aetherstone continued to feed into it.
That stone flared so brightly that Aleks disappeared within the blaze. The ground rumbled, and suddenly it felt like the entire realm was in danger of cracking apart.
Someone was shouting, trying to get my attention— the portal! The portal is closing!
Strong arms closed around me a moment later—my brother.
“LET ME GO! I have to help him!”
Bastian held tighter, dragging me backward.
“NO! NO !” My screams were lost within another violent quake, within the clatters and crashes of falling stone that followed it. Every attempt I made to fight my way free made the agonizing pain in my shoulder worse, and soon I was blacking in and out, losing entire moments to that pain.
Somehow, I found myself on the bridge, tumbling over the edge of it and into the waiting arms of someone down below—Captain Voss, I realized, after surfacing from another moment of blackness.
My next slice of clarity came far too late; we were already at the portal. Its energy washed over me, soothingly cold and familiar. The energy of Noctaris. Of home.
But I couldn’t go.
No, I wouldn’t go—
I managed to twist back toward the Aetherstone’s chamber, just in time to see light-filled cracks forming all over its walls. It was breaking. Collapsing.
I screamed again as someone pushed me forward, and then I was falling, lost in a haze of pain, hoping the impact with the ground would kill me quickly.