Chapter 9
NINE
Nova
Istood, and then Lorien touched a hand to the small of my back, guiding me toward the center of the room while pointing to a symbol embedded in the floor.
I’d seen this symbol in a few other places throughout Midna—one of a circle divided diagonally by a vine-wrapped sword.
The circle was usually in alternating colors of light and dark; this particular one was stamped in gold and silver—gold throughout the top half, silver in the bottom.
The sword, and the vine and the leaves along it, alternated in color as well.
Despite the way it all gleamed, it was nearly lost underneath the dust.
I knelt cautiously, pressing a hand to it.
A tingling sensation crept up my arm. I blinked, and the room seemed to break apart and scatter around me. It happened slowly, then all at once—like standing at the edge of a cliff as it crumbled, piece by piece, before finally collapsing completely.
I fell.
I tumbled down, weightless, only to land again in the same room we’d just been standing in. Except now, it was whole, untouched, shimmering with brilliance. As my boots hit the polished wood floor, my eyes began to water and burn.
Another hard blink, and I was fully submerged in a vision of the past—actually living it in a way I’d never experienced with any of my other visions. I recognized things I shouldn’t have. Knew details I’d never been told.
Lorien’s power and memories were merging with mine. And though I didn’t want this bond, I couldn’t deny that I wanted to see where it took me.
So I stepped fully into it.
This place we stood in was an opulent sunroom, a favorite dwelling place of Queen Octavia, the last sovereign of Midna.
Its glass walls featured a dazzling array of stained designs, each one casting new patterns of color with every shift of daylight.
Warmth permeated the space, which smelled of honeysuckle and sage.
It was a space reserved for the most honored of guests; few had been allowed to bask in its beauty.
On this day, however, that beauty was marred by blood.
A trail of scarlet wound its way over the wooden floorboards, its terminus the center of the room, where it pooled over the emblem inlaid in the wood.
Lorien stood at the end of this trail, surrounded by bluish-white light, his shoulder bleeding profusely.
He was in his own, original body. Proud shoulders and a powerful stance despite the obvious blood loss.
Dark brown hair that curled damply against his temple, pressed to his beige skin by a combination of sweat and blood.
More blood was speckled across his cold but handsome face.
Luminor floated at his side, tethered to his being by a tendril of light that pulsed erratically.
Calista stepped from the shadows, her raven hair shining in the sun. Her voice was soft. “You’ve made your decision, it seems.”
Lorien turned, startled. His expression flickered between several emotions—anger, uncertainty, guilt—before softening into something bordering on affection.
“Was there ever a doubt?” he asked. “Ever a real decision to make?”
“Maybe not for you.”
Lorien shook his head. “Not only me. I made these choices for us.”
Calista fell silent. She kept perfectly still as Lorien stepped closer to her, though the green of her eyes seemed to deepen as she drank him in, hardening into emeralds darkened by rising Shadow magic.
“I’ve seen the threads of our future,” Lorien said. “I’ve seen what we become—together. The Order vanquished. The Below lifted into light. You love me, and all that we could be…” He stepped past her, moving to the glass wall and peering outside, dripping blood as he went.
“I did love you,” Calista whispered, watching him go. “But your visions are not absolute.”
Lorien didn’t seem to hear her, too lost in his own plans to listen. “The realms will be remade,” he continued, gesturing to the world beyond the glass. “You and I reshape it all. Can’t you see it?”
Calista lifted her right hand. Dark sigils ignited along her palm and spiraled into the air.
Too late, Lorien looked at her.
Truly, fully looked at her.
“What are you doing—”
“What I must.” The words came heavy and thick, wrapped in sorrow but forged in steel. She took a step forward.
Her shadows surged with her.
Light exploded through the room. Not the warm gold of day, but the desperate, harsh brilliance of Lorien’s power.
He cried out as the shadows met it, as the two powers collided in a violent display of blinding brightness and cold, desolate darkness.
The glass walls rattled. The wooden floors splintered and popped. The air hissed.
The tumbling powers dropped abruptly away, revealing Calista and the dark symbols that had now spread beyond her palm, twisting all along both arms and creeping up her neck.
She still didn’t raise her voice. “Lorien Blackvale.”
“Don’t do this.”
Her face remained unchanged. Resolved. Her hands clasped together over her chest, and she spoke her next spell into existence as if reciting a lesson, tight and without feeling:
“I unmake your Light
and all you covet,
Your only hope now bound
to Shadow’s forfeit
Mind carved into one realm,
Heart into the next,
Body to drift where gods forget…”
There were more words spoken, but they were lost within the sound of warring magic.
Lorien’s light flared again, a final push, trying to drive Calista back. Her shadows pressed relentlessly through. Over and over, their divine magic collided, until she finally forced him to his knees.
His breath shuddered, his light dimming to a singular fragment in the center of his chest. He clutched that fragment so tightly its light was nearly lost within his fist. “You think this will end me?”
Silent tears slipped down Calista’s cheeks. “No.”
The fragment slipped through his fingers, hovering between them for a breath.
“But that is not my intention.”
The light splintered and shot up like three arrows through the circular skylight in the middle of the ceiling, shattering it.
As glass showered the vision, I flinched, jerking back to the present with a gasp. The first place I looked was to the ceiling, noting the glinting, jagged teeth in the center—all that remained of the once impressive skylight.
Shattered so long ago, but the evidence still remained.
What other lingering effects of that day still haunted this world?
I knew the stories of Lorien and Calista’s doomed love.
Of how she’d chosen the human king, Argoth, over him.
And then Lorien had supposedly murdered her in a fit of jealous rage, and he’d spent the following centuries making certain Noctaris paid for her choices—that no Shadow Vaelora would easily rise up and take her place.
Everyone in the Rivenholt Palace and the royal city knew these stories; they’d been reciting them to me ever since I’d crash-landed among them months ago.
None of them had mentioned the scene I’d just witnessed. They didn’t speak of curses, or of Lorien being struck down while bleeding from…what?
What exactly had happened that day?
My head was swimming. No part of me wanted to see Lorien as a victim of any kind, yet I heard myself ask, “Why did she do it?”
Lorien hesitated.
“She must have had a reason.”
“…I wanted to change the way our kind were treated. She—or that foolish human king she loved, rather—didn’t agree with my plans.”
“Which were…?”
“Unimportant.”
They seemed important to me, but I had far too many other questions to let the conversation stall there. I looked to the center of the room—to the circular symbol in the floor—and asked, “When she spoke of scattering your flame…that fragment I watched split into three, was that your…your…”
Soul.
The word was right on the tip of my tongue, but that was where it stayed. Maybe I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that he even had a soul—much less one that Calista had so viciously ripped away from him.
He folded his arms across his chest, tapping his fingers against his bicep. “It’s why I’ve been unable to move on, even after all this time. Why I’ve been forced to crawl from body to body, like some fucking parasite, rather than the divine creature I was meant to be.”
“Why didn’t she just kill you?”
“I assume because she was afraid it would violently disrupt the magic of Soltaris, and then her beloved King Argoth might have suffered the consequences. So I was made to suffer instead.”
I shifted uncomfortably under the weight of his words, trying to settle on the meaning behind them.
I’d never considered his immortality might be a curse.
“Of course, it ultimately disrupted the flow of magic anyway, didn’t it?” Lorien looked to the broken skylight, his eyes glazing over. “The balance was forever altered that day…likely in ways she didn’t intend.”
I thought of my current struggle to bring life back to Noctaris. A chilling possibility struck me: Was this another reason why the Aetherstone would not release more magic, no matter what I did? Why everything felt so…messy?
She had cursed him.
He had killed her.
Even though I was stepping more and more fully into my power, the Vaeloran Cycle still felt damaged in ways I couldn’t understand, and I was afraid I was only beginning to grasp how ruined our world and its magic truly were.
I gave my head a little shake, trying to rid it of a creeping sense of despair. There had to be some way to salvage things. Some spot of hope, however tiny.
Hope.
“She mentioned a hope bound to Shadow’s forfeit,” I said. “What did she mean by that?”
Lorien tilted his face toward me expectantly, as if waiting for me to answer my own question.
Realization slowly dawned. “Shadow…magic? Like mine? That’s the only thing that could restore what she took from you?”
He looked back to the sky. “Of course, you pale in comparison to Calista. But one assumes even a weak little Shadow such as yourself could manage to figure out something.”