CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO #2
The groping shapes of filth were torn from their anchor points, ripped from the ground as the land itself convulsed and threw them off.
A roar tore from Wickham’s throat as he went on the attack, becoming a whirlwind of motion.
He weaponised the debris, flinging a constant barrage of rock and stone at the Blight's faltering defences.
He hammered at the points where new arms of sludge tried to sprout from the ground and shattered the shadowy claws that tried to form in the air.
It was a desperate, furious assault that gave Elizabeth the opening she needed.
She gathered her air magic in a gust, hurling the battered remnants away from them all.
Darcy fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Georgiana flew to him, her skirts whispering against the ravaged ground.
She didn't hesitate. Her hands hovered over his heart, and from them poured a light that was pure and life-giving.
Elizabeth could feel the healing from feet away, a gentle pressure against the air, a song that vibrated just beneath the edge of hearing.
Darcy’s ragged gasps steadied. The vacant look in his eyes dissolved, replaced by a dazed and wondering focus. A choked word escaped his lips, sounding almost desperately young and vulnerable. “Georgiana?”
“I am here, Brother,” she said soothingly, “Be calm.”
An unsettling cold fell over the clearing, colder than the Blight’s wind. The shadows deepened, coalescing, turning with nefarious intelligence.
The healing had been a beacon. And the Blight came for Georgiana.
It flooded her with the agony of every sick child, the grief of every starving mother. This is your fault. Your healing is a lie. Every life you try to touch, you only prolong the agony. You are tainted, and you taint them. Let them go. Let them have the sweet peace of death.
Through their connection, Elizabeth felt the horrifying assault. And she felt the twin waves of terror that erupted from both Darcy and Wickham an instant later.
Darcy’s magic flared weakly, a guttering flame against the darkness as he tried to protect his sister. “Georgiana, no!” his panic was a sharp command through the bond, a desperate attempt to sever, to shield, to wrench his sister away from the poison. “Get away!”
At the same instant, Wickham's fear broke in a bitten-off expletive. His own magic surged, trying to make the earth beneath them crack and swallow the source of his wife’s torment. “Come for me, you stupid thing!” he screamed, “Damn you, get out of her head!”
The two impulses — to sever and to assault — slammed into Elizabeth from opposite directions.
It clashed into a shrieking dissonance within her.
She was the heart of their union, and their opposed wills were tearing her apart.
Darcy’s will pulled one way, a desperate, icy command to retreat.
Wickham’s power surged the other, a hot torrent demanding to be unleashed.
The pain was excruciating, a magical laceration that threatened to rip her very essence in two.
The Blight laughed in her mind.
The quarry, the wind, the land — it all vanished.
Elizabeth was standing in the suffocating silence of a nursery, the air thick with the scent of herbs and unspeakable grief.
Before her was a small cradle, and within it, a tiny, still form, wrapped in a linen that could not warm him.
The Blight’s voice whispered in her mind.
Your magic does not give life, Elizabeth. It only takes. A chill seized her heart, a grief so deep it threatened to shatter her.
She cried out, a voiceless scream in her soul, and felt her own power falter. But as she staggered under the weight of her own personal hell, she felt the agony of the others bleed through the magical connection that bound them.
From Georgiana, she felt cloying self-loathing.
The image flashed through her mind of Georgiana’s hands, no longer conduits of healing but turning black, her touch bringing rot and decay to a beautiful white rose.
The Blight’s whisper was one of corruption.
Your shame poisons everything you touch.
You cannot heal; you can only spread your own ruin.
From Wickham, it was not despair, but a surge of hot, grasping ambition.
She saw him striking Darcy down and taking his place as Master of Pemberley.
And she heard the Blight’s seductive promise.
I see into your heart, my friend. Why pretend to be what you are not?
They scorned you, they held you back. You have never been enough for them.
Take what is yours before they deny you again.
Pain slammed through her as she sensed her companions pulling away, crumpling under the mental assault. Everything became to unwind within her, the magical bonds unraveling wildly.
This was not the simple, unified horror of Buxton's fiery inferno. Compared to this, Buxton had been a single, snapped string. The ground beneath them shuddered, and a groan echoed from the quarry walls. Without Darcy’s control, wild, undirected power erupted from around them, scorching a patch of nearby earth.
The air reeked with the rotten scent of sulphur.
We must hold together, she thought, a frantic plea against the rising tempest.
But amidst the storm of their clashing powers, she felt the venom sharpen. Through their bond, Elizabeth felt the Blight's seductive whisper, the dark temptation to seize Pemberley.
She saw Wickham squeeze his eyes shut, his jaw tight, a man wrestling with a serpent she could now feel whispering in his ear.
Through the splintered thrum of their magic, a cascade of images bled through their connection — not her memories, but his.
The gaunt faces of starving children in the alleys of Newcastle.
Georgiana, stopping to press a few coins into a desperate mother’s hand.
She heard the bitterness in his pragmatic argument: ‘This is not Pemberley, Ana! We do not have a bottomless purse to give away!’ And she felt the simple goodness behind Georgiana’s reply: ‘We have what we have. And tonight, they are in greater need than we are.’
The air became a screaming funnel of power, not of the Blight’s making, but of their own. Brutal wind gales clashed with furious rock and ice.
Another bright image followed: the gritty, triumphant aftermath of a skirmish won.
She felt the sting of dust in his throat, the ache in his muscles, and then the overwhelming roar of his name being cheered by others.
A sensation so unfamiliar it was almost painful. It was the feeling of being valued.
But before she could even process the fragile hope in that feeling, it was violently undercut by a surge of fear from Darcy.
His grief and guilt ripped through her, and she saw the vision the Blight was forcing upon him: the inferno at Buxton, but it was her, Elizabeth, trapped in the heart of the flames, screaming his name as the fire consumed her.
Your control is an illusion, the Blight hissed at him.
You failed to protect your sister. You will fail to protect your wife.
The sky was ripped open by a flash of green, sourceless lightning that cast their struggling forms in skeletal relief. The ground buckled, fissures of raw power rupturing from the earth.
Darcy’s paralysing terror slammed into her, so sharp and selfless that it cut through her own. But what it aroused in her was not fear in return.
It was anger.
A protective fury stirred within her, fury at the Blight for daring to touch him, for daring to use his love for her as a weapon against him.
She saw him in the firelight of their sitting room, his eyes intrigued with possibility as she first proposed a new way of working together. She recalled the ghost of his beautiful smile after their first success in the Peaks. She heard the amusement in his voice as he teased her about billiards.
She felt the brush of Darcy’s hand against hers as he turned the pages of her music, the solid warmth of his body as he held her in the cold inn at Newcastle, the tenderness in his eyes as he had handed her his mother's book of poetry.
Most vividly, she remembered the breathtaking sweetness of his kiss, the whispered reverence of her name on his lips, the feel of his body against hers.
She remembered the magic between them responding in kind, shattering its confines, no longer a simple line connecting them but a soft mantle of warmth that filled the room.
She felt it everywhere, a delicious heat not just where his fingers touched her, but on every inch of her skin, a possessive claim she had answered with a fierce joy.
These were the truths that mattered now. The visceral emotion overwhelmed her own fears. The memory of the cradle did not vanish, but it lost its power, its mournful whisper drowned out by the roar of her love for him.
Wrenching free from the Blight’s despair, Elizabeth threw all of her magical force into the fray, not as an attack, but as a desperate, binding agent, trying to weave the tearing, flailing threads back together.
But the storm still raged. Her individual victory was not enough to quell the chaos.
Not when Darcy, the core to their power, was still in its thrall.
Their magics, still untethered from Darcy’s iron will, lashed out into the physical world.
Waves of searing heat and frosty cold pulsed outwards in succession.
A spasm of power sent spires of rock tearing upward.
From the cracks in the ground, Georgiana’s healing magic bled outwards as bursts of impossibly vibrant flowers that withered to ash as soon as they bloomed.
The strain was excruciating; she felt the dissonance as a physical shearing in her own mind.
And worse, she could feel their clashing powers ripping into ley line below.
The ley line screamed in her mind; she felt its agony as a physical tremor, a death rattle that vibrated up from the soles of her feet.
William, she groaned, her senses screaming, I need you.