Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Nova
Shaking and breathless, I walked through the remnants of my childhood home.
In a few places, the structures remained largely intact, showing only the normal dust and wear of seven years’ time.
In others, the damage that the combination of Shadow and Light magic had done on the night of my birthday was finally apparent—finally real.
The entire area around the grand veranda, where I’d watched my father meet his end, had now collapsed.
The worst of the destruction swept inward from this point, forming a haphazard trail of cracked tiles, chipped plaster, and crumbling stone.
I followed that trail to the room where my mother had once been frozen.
For seven years, I’d visited this room in hopes of understanding the spell that had trapped her. Of finding a way to break it. A way to save her.
Now, the spell was finally broken.
But she was gone.
I wondered briefly about what had become of her body—was it buried under the rubble, crushed beneath this fatal reality that Rose Point had finally caught up to?
Was she nothing more than dust and bones by now?
In the end, I decided I didn’t really want to know.
After searching through several more equally empty rooms, I dropped to my knees, overcome by an exhaustion both mental and physical. Phantom darted down from the perch he’d claimed on my shoulder, a shadow that materialized into a small dog who bounded from room to room.
He found no signs of any life, either.
Eventually, he returned and sat sadly beside me, his pointed ears pinned back against his skull.
I staggered to my feet, and we kept moving—though to where, I wasn’t sure. Orin caught up and silently fell into step with us. When I finally found the courage to ask him my questions, he tried to help me make sense of the world, as he always had.
They died that night. The manor was wrapped in a protective spell, preventing the fall that should have been. The grove kept feeding into the spell, year after year, keeping it all frozen in time.
It was only an illusion.
“How?” I heard myself ask. “How could the Order have created spells powerful enough to freeze Vaeloran magic in its tracks?”
I drifted in and out of whatever explanation followed. No matter how hard I tried to focus, my mind kept playing the same four words over and over.
They died that night.
The magic I’d inadvertently summoned up from the Below, and its collision with Lorien’s power…
It had killed them.
Nothing else truly registered.
And this must have been obvious, because Orin finally shook his head and said, “We can discuss more details later. This conversation is one we should probably save for somewhere safer, anyway.”
“Is anywhere actually safe?”
His tired eyes looked troubled, but he nodded.
“I have an associate waiting in the wings. We’ll move on as soon as I see the signal from him, telling us that the path is clear and our hiding place is ready.
For now, let’s just lay low.” He scanned the wreckage, and I again got the feeling he was expecting members of the Void Order to ambush us at any moment.
While he ventured off to watch for signals from this ‘associate’ of his, I made my way to what had once been the eastern courtyard. I sat on a cracked bench in the darkest part of it, a tall hedge at my back and a relatively unobstructed view of the manor before me.
Thalia found me a short time later. She leaned against a cracked, moss-covered column, staring in the direction of the manor for a minute before she said, “So…it was all an unstable disaster just waiting to finish unfolding.”
I didn’t reply.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. I could tell she was struggling to find words of comfort; it was another testament to our growing friendship that she stayed and attempted to offer any commiseration at all.
“You know there was nothing you could have done to save this place, right? It wasn’t meant to be saved. Some things aren’t, in the end.”
I shrugged, reaching for one of several withered flowers scattered across the bench.
Holding it flat in my palm, I focused on the decaying energy surrounding it, letting shadows twist from my wrist and latch onto that decay.
As I pulled it out, the flower brightened, its edges perking up.
It was an old trick I used to spend hours performing in these gardens; I could take the energy from dead and dying things, and, in doing so, I could make them look like they were alive again, if only for a moment.
But my magic never lasted very long in this realm.
“This wasn’t even my real home,” I told Thalia. “They weren’t even my real parents.” It sounded harsh, but I just wanted to detach myself even further from these crumbling surroundings and all they represented.
Thalia shook her head. “Real or not…absent or present…they still shaped you. And they’ll go on shaping you, even now.”
I crushed the flower in my fist, watching its brightness fade through the cracks between my fingers.
“For so many years, I was obsessed with saving this place. It’s what led me to Noctaris to begin with.
It was a purpose that kept me moving even when the weight of everything became crushing.
And all this time, there was nothing truly here for me to save.
It was all a lie. My entire life here was a lie. ”
Her brows knitted together in thought. “Maybe not a lie, but more of a…detour. One that ultimately led you to the destination you were meant to arrive at. To the things you were truly meant to save.”
I exhaled a long, slow breath. “…Maybe.”
She started to reply, but we were interrupted by the sound of someone kicking aside debris and muttering to himself—Orin.
Even with the space between us, I felt the tension ripple through Thalia’s body at the sight of him.
“Maybe you should go speak to him?” I urged, softly.
She gave a dismissive snort, turning away. Orin carried on without paying us any mind at first, holding up what looked like a piece of a broken mirror, angling it to catch the dying light and twisting it in deliberate patterns; maybe part of the signals he had apparently planned for.
His daughter was quiet for a long time, just watching him, before she said, “It was easier when he was just a ghost that haunted my memories.”
I nodded, understanding.
She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, warding against the chill of the rapidly approaching evening.
We quietly watched the sun sink more fully behind what was left of Rose Point.
The brilliant display of reds and oranges made me think of fire—of the last vestiges of my old life going up in flames.
Let it burn, I thought. Let it all burn.
As shadows overtook the final rays of sunlight, Aleks and Zayn came into sight, walking close together and talking in hushed voices. They were too far away to properly hear, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to access the mental bond Aleks and I had been sharing, either.
“Aleks is keeping his distance, isn’t he?” Thalia asked. “And here I thought the two of you were inseparable.”
I said nothing, but I couldn’t help replaying the strange moment we’d shared in the woods, just before I’d heard the towers of Rose Point crumbling down. The anger in his voice. The fear in his eyes.
Thalia’s expression darkened. I suspected she was biting back a disparaging comment—or three—about Aleks.
I braced myself, but she only shrugged and begrudgingly said, “I suppose this is hard on him, too. Whatever role he played in summoning the Vaeloran magic that destroyed this place, it can’t be easy to truly see that destruction. To see what it’s done to you.”
I slipped my hand into my coat pocket, feeling for the shard of Lorien’s soul. It hummed against my skin as my palm pressed against it. “I don’t think it’s merely bad memories bothering him,” I told Thalia.
She tilted her head toward me.
“I think it’s…this.” I held up the shard. “He couldn’t stand to be near it earlier, or to even look at it.”
She considered it for a moment, her fingers tapping restlessly along her staff. “Can’t we just destroy it?”
I clenched it back into my fist. “That wasn’t the deal I agreed to.”
She let out a hmph but didn’t argue. We both knew there were consequences to breaking deals with demons—and we could only guess at what they might be.
I slid the shard back into my pocket.
With a sigh, Thalia gripped the edge of the bench, leaning back and lifting her gaze to the sky. “One down, two to go,” she muttered.
We took refuge several miles away, in the home of someone I recognized: Alistair Finch.
This was the same man who had brought me to the entrance of the Nocturnus Road all those months ago.
I’d seen him several times before that, too—mostly while I was halfheartedly eavesdropping on clandestine meetings he’d had with Orin.
Meetings I should have been listening more closely to, I guess; yet again, I found myself feeling like a fool for overlooking so many clues about the grander picture and greater destiny I was apparently meant for.
Finch was aware of who I was. What I was. And there were several other figures like him who had been secretly helping Orin protect me throughout the years—an entire network of connections, a web far more intricate than I could have ever imagined.
It made my head hurt just thinking about it all. So I didn’t focus on it for long; instead, I took the shard we’d obtained in the Hollow Grove and put some distance between myself and the others. The flickering images I’d seen when I first picked it up had been haunting me all day.
I needed to see more.