Chapter 51 Fate Burns
Fate Burns
Desdemona
I
sit behind a tree, watching the tower and waiting for Lucian to climb back down and tell me Qualia is healed. At least then I’ll have kept one of my promises. But Lucian doesn’t show up. I watch the building. Not even a shadow comes out of the fifth-story window.
Standing, I decide it’s time I climb, too. My feet slide into the crevices between bricks. I refuse to look down. By the time I pass the second-story windows, I smile, proud of myself.
It doesn’t last long. Pins and needles press into the bottom of my foot, feeling slowly leaving. I kick my toes against the brick to wake them. No luck. I shove my fingers into the stone until they’re white, clutching tight. Then I lose feeling in my hands, too.
I fall from the second story, landing on my back. The wind tears out of me. Even after dying ten times over—body broken, nerves frayed, heart crushed to pulp—I can’t even manage to cough.
Tears stream down the sides of my face, burning my eyes. But the tears that touch my tongue are thick and metallic, leaving a bitter tang.
Blood.
Not just blood—it’s like my bones have turned to liquid, pooling out through my organs, through every crevice of my body.
The liquid flows from my nose, coating my neck and chest, then drips from my eyes.
Pure pain. My organs are being squeezed dry.
I try to writhe—to move away from the sensation—but my body is hardly my own. There’s nowhere to escape.
“Please,” I whimper—the word hardly makes it out. “St—” I scream. “Stop!”
“I’m sorry,” he says. The pain finally passes, the heat gone. My hands and feet are numb, but at least I can move. I sit up slowly, despite giving it all my effort. Lucian stands over me, blood covering his hands and forearms.
My blood.
I open my hand, close it into a fist, over and over until… nothing. I feel nothing. I reach for Lucian’s blood, for fire. But there is no heat, no blood. My power has drained—pressed away like a wound to a rag.
“What did you do to me?” I ask.
“What this body was made to do,” Lucian says, and my blood swirls around his fingers. “Contain you.”
He sounds off. The cadence of his voice is familiar—but wrong. Not quite Lucian’s, but something older.
Without a word, I rise to my feet.
“Did you imagine our training complete, my child?” he asks. Lucian’s voice, Lucian’s lips, but certainly not his words.
“Mial?” I whisper, releasing a deep, bottled-up exhale. I step forward, and he wraps his arms around me. I drop my head onto his shoulder. Lucian’s shoulder, and Mial’s soul.
“How are you faring here?” Mial asks.
My breath shakes. I’m faring terribly. The Weapon flashes in my mind. Somehow, I am what powers it.
Every catastrophe—the first tremor on Ilyria, the academy collapsing—happened after I used my magic. I am the destruction.
I used such a small amount of blood magic to heal Lucian, and it snowed on Folkara—a place where snow is impossible. I tried to kill Fleur while hallucinating, and an entire wing of Visnatus fell.
They were easy to chalk up to coincidences at first. But the moment I touched the Weapon, I knew. Images, like a dream, flashed before my eyes: I stood within the Weapon as though we were one. Snow fell around me. Trees crashed to the ground. Fires erupted, consuming everything in their path.
And there was Lucian, walking toward me in the distance.
I reached with everything I had. Blood pooled at my fingertips, dripping to the ground below.
Lucian came closer. He tried to reach back.
It could’ve been a hallucination. I tried to convince myself of that.
But when it snowed last night after I healed Lucian, I knew it was all true.
I am responsible for every natural disaster.
Now, I step back, looking at Lucian’s face, but it’s Mial’s eyes I see. His essence has overtaken Lucian’s being. His body stands unnaturally still, his chest rising and falling like a puppet’s breath, his gaze red.
He steps forward.
“You are not alone, Desdemona,” he says. “You have us.”
I swallow hard. I think of what Cynthia told me—about Aurora and what Mial did to her in order to create me.
As I say, “I know,” I’m unsure if it’s true.
“But you do not have Lucian,” Mial whispers.
The truth sinks in like a stone in water. Inevitable. I draw in a breath that catches halfway. I’ve always known. But hope is an ugly and ravenous thing.
Mial raises an arm, the blood spiraling upward like a sleeve, defying gravity.
“This is your power.” He drops the arm, and my blood turns to nothing but light as it moves through the air.
It rushes into my chest, sifting through my skin and back into my body.
I feel the warmth, the strength, filling me by the second.
“Icarthus told the boy once,” Mial whispers. “You’ll never be together.”
In my vision, Lucian couldn’t reach me inside the Weapon—and if he could, if he knew the truth, he’d kill me, wouldn’t he? There is no reality where we could be together—not with what I know. Still, I shake my head.
“Why should I trust you?” I ask, my voice low.
“I do not know how much more truth I can lay bare before you,” Mial says.
“You took my mother from me.” I clench my teeth. “Aurora and Isa. And now you want to take away the last person who remembers me?”
“I remember you,” Mial says fiercely. “Aurora was just a girl—your age when she bore you. Temperamental, brimming with power far beyond her grasp—”
I cut Mial off. “Then what does that make me?”
Lucian’s shoulders drop as Mial sighs. He meets my gaze. “Powerful enough for the greater good. Too powerful to ever truly be good.”
Those tears I swore not to shed try to break out of the bars I caged them in.
Destructive. Monstrous. That is what I am—what I’ve become.
And it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is making sure Lucian never sees it—the awful parts of me, the piece of me connected to the Weapon—because I don’t want to die.
I never did. But worse, Lucian can’t be the one to do it.
Beyond that, there’s no point in caring about being good. If fate did this, then shouldn’t fate pay?
Lucian’s arm shudders, and something streaks through the air toward me, shining like a shooting star. My better judgment tells me to duck. Instinct tells me to catch it.
I do.
Looking down at the palm of my hand, I see it’s the pendant from Mom’s necklace. I nearly drop it; I don’t want to carry the thing that stole my memories.
Before I do, Mial says, “The Memorium.”
Clenching the stone in my palm, I feel as if it physically burns—but all that aches are the memories of Isa.
“Did you manage to find the Soul Ruby?”
I take a deep breath. Was the headmistress being honest? There’s no other reason he’d give me the Memorium and ask for the Soul Ruby.
“I did,” I answer. I want to step back—but I don’t.
“Perhaps we might trade?”
“I need it. For the memories,” I say, turning my body away. I don’t want to run from him, and I don’t think I will have to.
But I’m not sure.
“The Memorium should be enough.” He points at my hand.
“Then why tell me to get the Soul Ruby?” I ask.
Mial smiles, nodding Lucian’s head in a way that’s nothing like how Lucian would move. “I’m deeply sorry for the lies. It wasn’t safe for you to know. I require the Soul Ruby for Eira.”
I don’t know if I believe him or not anymore.
“Why do you decide what’s safe for me to know?” I ask.
Mial glances down, nodding once. Then, he steps toward me. I flinch, and he frowns.
“Bring their memories back,” he says, holding my hand with the Memorium.
It doesn’t feel like Lucian’s touch. “Wage your mortal battles. Though don’t forget, I was not, perhaps, the father you desired—yet I was assuredly the father you required.
And this boy”—Mial looks down at Lucian’s body—“he is what you want, yet nothing you truly need. Fix this image in your memory.” With a wave of his hand, the power is sucked from my body once more, hollowing me out like clay molding to his will.
Red rises, encircling Lucian’s shoulders with a simple gesture.
My hands brace on my knees as I struggle to stay upright.
Even my biceps feel weak. “Recall how easily he might unmake you. And come to me, when you are at last prepared.”
Lucian’s limbs twitch, then fall slack, like a hollow shell.
His body crumples to the ground.
?
I sit across from Lucian. Half of me waits for him to wake up, but the other part worries about what happens when he does.
Cynthia said the Soul Ruby could never bring back memories—and Mial agreed.
So how did stabbing him with a piece of it bring back his? Is it more of the same? Fate making sure he knows how to kill me?
I stare at the Memorium, a tiny thing with immense power resting in the palm of my hands.
The boy who could take it all lies across from me.
Mom once told me that love has no limits, knows no bounds.
That when you love someone, you’d travel to the ends of the universe and back for them.
At first, I thought she was talking about me.
I thought she loved me. Now, I wonder if she meant Freyr.
I wonder who I love, who I’d give up everything for.
Because at this point, I’m closer to killing everyone than getting them back.
Lucian stirs. I don’t rush to him, even though I want to. He sits up and leans against the tree I dragged him behind, then looks at me with wide eyes and an open mouth.
Alive.
I wasn’t so sure.
His eyes scan me, a smile tugging at his lips.
I scowl. “What did Icarthus tell you?”
Lucian takes a shallow breath in and lets it out. He doesn’t answer. He’s known all along. It’s the only explanation.
The image of the Weapon plays out in my mind. Its magic responded to me because its magic is mine. I’m intrinsically connected to it. And if Lucian knows, then there isn’t a choice anymore. He would have to kill me for his own conscience.
“Lucian.”