Chapter 35 #2
It was the strangest part of this ordeal yet, to hear him admit that he’d been wrong.
“Of course, I didn’t manage to kill you.
” He tilted his face toward me, as if he still couldn’t believe I’d survived, and he needed to see me for himself.
“Something protected you and your brother that night, and I still don’t know what it was.
Only that it broke me into pieces. Then the Order—the Light Keepers, or whatever masks they wore at the time—they took those pieces and tried to feed them into the weapon they were building. ”
“…They wanted you to possess him.”
“Just another experiment they subjected your dear Aleks to.”
I fought the urge to bury my face in my hands again. The last person I wanted to witness another breakdown would be the man sitting beside me. But it was so tempting to just give in to the despair threatening to drown me.
I just wanted all these revelations to stop.
I fixed my eyes on the remains of a fallen statue far below us—a severed head of some lesser god I didn’t recognize—and I forced myself to keep talking.
“That’s the real reason he has some of the power of a Light Vaelora.” It wasn’t really a question; just the theory I’d always suspected but never wanted to fully believe.
“I don’t think it was part of the Order’s plans,” Lorien said.
“They hoped he would just neutralize my magic, I’m sure.
But he rejected the possession, and then hung on to fragments of my power and found a way to channel it instead.
So, to answer your question…yes. He has it because he stole it from me. ”
I thought of all the times Aleks had made my shadows disappear over the past weeks.
Was he neutralizing them, or collecting them?
Could he ultimately wield my own power against me, too?
“He might have been able to balance your magic temporarily, but it was never going to be the true Vaeloran bond,” Lorien said. “He was never going to be your true counterpart.”
I snorted. “And you are?”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to like it.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that makes two of us. But unless you intend to go against the divine plans of the gods themselves...”
“Fuck the gods,” I muttered.
He let out a quiet, bitter little laugh. “And once again, you remind me of her.” He went quiet for a moment. “Or who she was in the beginning, at least.”
It was obvious that something very painful was playing out behind his dark eyes—a specific memory of some kind.
I didn’t dwell on what it might have been. “How can you be sure of all of this?” I asked instead. “The Order’s involvement, I mean?”
“Because Aleks knew it all himself, deep in the back of his mind, even if he wasn’t consciously aware of it.
And so I saw it, too, during that last possession.
I had him much longer this time than I did when he was a child, and he knows much more of the Order’s schemes than he did back then.
It was a very eye-opening few weeks. Not only because of his knowledge, but because I could feel the power that had gathered in him since our last encounter.
I was fighting for control as much as he was, if I’m being honest. And after all of that, what choice did I have but to continue to dig, to find out the truth about the Order?
And about myself, and the things I lost when I was cursed? ”
“Find out the truth?” I shook my head. “By manipulating me into doing it for you, you mean.”
His mouth curved with a hint of a smirk. “And you performed magnificently, by the way.”
I scowled.
We sat in prickly silence for a moment before I said, “Aleks…he changed so quickly. So completely.”
Lorien considered my words while absently summoning a ball of light between his palms. “The events of these past months have shifted everything. Your powers awakening more fully, the battle we had over the Aetherstone…all things that also spurred the Order into movement again. It seems quick, but they’ve been biding their time for years now, waiting for opportunities to strike.
And they infiltrated your palace, didn’t they?
I suspect they’ve been there for months, if not longer.
And once Aleks returned to that palace himself…
” He trailed off, allowing me to fill in the rest.
The thought that they might have been creeping through my halls all this time made my skin crawl. I felt disgusted. Violated.
Worse, though, were the new, even more painful questions flooding my mind.
How much of Aleks was truly…Aleks?
How much of what he’d said and done these past weeks was merely him trying to get closer to me for the sake of completing the Order’s mission?
I swallowed hard. “I still don’t understand how they’re controlling him in the first place.”
Lorien cut his eyes toward me. “You’ve seen the markings on his body.”
“…His scars, you mean?”
“They aren’t normal scars. And wherever he told you he got them from…he almost certainly wasn’t telling the truth.”
“No. He wouldn’t have lied about that, he—”
“Maybe not on purpose. I’m sure his tormentors did all they could to hide their true purpose from him.”
I hugged my arms tightly around myself, thinking of those scars. Of how precisely carved so many of them were. They’d always made me feel sick whenever I touched them, but I’d always associated them with his abusive past—so of course they’d felt wrong to me.
I never once thought they might have been the source of something far worse.
“Each one is a spell woven into his flesh. Runes, some call them. Corrupted magic. Nothing divine about it. Very few people in any of the realms would have recognized them for what they are; I doubt even most of the Order members fully understand what they’ve done to him.
Only Severin and the other higher-ups, the ones capable of carving such enchantments, know the true power of such things. ”
“But where did they even learn how to do that?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But this world has had no shortage of beings that have tried to rival the gods we serve. We both know that the Vaeloran Cycle was birthed into a chaotic world, meant to be its saving grace. But darker things have a way of taking root in broken places.”
I fell quiet for a minute, summoning a shadow and watching it coil around my fingers. “How were we ever supposed to balance anything in such a world?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Still so concerned with trying to bring balance and peace?”
“We were made for that, weren’t we?”
“Yes. And look where it’s gotten us.”
I had no response to this.
“Maybe it’s time you tried worrying about power instead.” He stood, stretching.
I shifted the shadow into a dagger-like shape, twisting it around in my hand as I considered his words. I could sense him looking down at me, but I didn’t meet his gaze when he spoke again; I just kept walking the sharpened shadow between my fingers.
“I doubt Aleks would be strong enough to destroy us both, if we were to face him together as one. That’s why the Order tried to sow as much discord between you and I as possible, and why they wanted to stop me from being revived.
Because their little weapon isn’t as perfect as they’d like it to be. Not yet, anyway.”
With that, he left me alone with my thoughts once more, heading into what was left of the Aetherstone’s destroyed chamber.
I let the shadow dagger dissipate as I studied all the other destruction surrounding me. The cracked ground. The tattered banners. The broken bridge I sat upon. A world gone so incredibly wrong because of lies and manipulation.
But it occurred to me, then, that nothing was breaking in that moment.
Not a single rumble had occurred since we touched down here. The sky was overcast, but something about the sunlight diffusing through the ash-colored sky was oddly calming. The air was crisp, almost clean smelling.
Perhaps peace was not a viable option, as he’d said.
But there was no denying that this was the most peaceful I’d ever seen Nerithys. Just as there was no denying that I had truly revived Lorien. That our magic represented two halves of the same whole, that we were connected, and that something had prevented him from killing me twenty-five years ago.
And as I sat there, considering everything, I realized I knew why all of these things were true.
Understanding bloomed like a slow ache through my chest, bringing me to my feet. Even then, it took me a moment to summon the courage to step forward. To actually make a plan with him.
I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about allying with this dangerous, unpredictable man.
The same villain who had haunted so many of my nightmares.
I was desperate, though. I knew I needed help. It wasn’t the way I would have written my story, but that didn’t change the way things were unfolding. Our magic was stronger together and, if the legends about our kind were true, there was very little that it couldn’t accomplish.
So it was time to make another deal.
Without any more hesitation, I made my way over to him. “If I get you your heart, will you swear to help me take the Order down? That you’ll help me take Aleks back from them?”
He slowly looked back at me. That cold, dangerous calculation was back in his eyes. A look that told me he no longer saw me as another living being, but merely as a piece in some greater, more deadly scheme he was playing out in his mind.
I didn’t flinch. “Well?”
“…You know where it is?”
“Answer my question.”
His eyes narrowed. Suspicion was an even more dangerous look on his face—a blink away from violent refusal.
Still, I persisted. “You want your revenge against the Order, don’t you? You made your mistakes, but now you know the truth about what they did.”
“Some of it. There’s more to uncover.”
“We have a common enemy, though. That much is undeniable.”
“It is, isn’t it?” He canted his head, his calculating suspicion twisting into something slightly more…unhinged. A corner of his mouth curved up.
“Take it or leave it,” I said.
“You know I love a good bargain,” he said, holding out his hand.