Chapter Fifty-Eight #2
His glowing amber eyes pierce me at my very soul, unrelenting. Feeling slightly dizzy, I manage to get the question off my tongue. “And what is it you hope to accomplish by being here? By doing all of this?”
“I hope to bring you back with me,” he answers simply. “I hope to teach you the nature of our magic. I hope to provide you with a home and a family—with my own family a home.” He inhales a slow and deep breath, exhaling it loudly through his nose. “But most of all, I hope to die.”
And there is something in the way he says it…
No—I’m not even going to tread down that path.
I straighten my spine and steel my gaze. “I won’t go with you.”
“And if I said I’ll make you?”
“Then I’ll take my own life before you can.”
Casimir nods, as if expecting that. “Unfortunately, I believe you. Which means, to motivate you, I will instead have to threaten to take the lives of everyone you care about after you’re gone.” He steps forward and reaches for me.
I pull away and slap his hand.
He clicks his tongue before frowning. “I guess I’ll have to show you my threats aren’t hollow.
” Casimir turns, dropping whatever sound barrier he created.
The jarring noises of magic clattering and blades clashing funnel into my ears like a jolt to my senses.
“Let me see,” he hums under his breath. “Ah, there she is.”
Within an instant, Casimir opens a small portal and steps through, transporting to…
Oh gods.
He appears behind Marcella, who is fighting off two Abdites while Griff continues to evacuate students.
“Marcella! MARCELLA! ”
But it’s no use. She can’t hear me over the roar of battle.
Casimir slides his eyes to me before returning them to the girl with coppery flames for hair and cobalt eyes, so full of life and personality. He unsheathes the blade from his hip, and he draws it back slowly, as if moving at an intentional pace to make me suffer.
Yet as the blade plunges through the air and into a heart, it is not Marcella’s heart that is pierced through its beating seams.
It is Griff’s, who saw what was happening and pushed Marcella out of the way.
He falls to the ground clutching his chest, crimson seeping through his fingers as blood pools around his lips.
I drop to my knees—agony tearing through me—angry with myself that I’m already wishing my heart away after it just started beating again.
How could it already be broken?
Casimir’s words hum softly in my head. We break. We rebuild. We break again.
Using some twisted feature of his magic, Casimir twirls a hand and cruelly makes it to where I can hear Marcella as she whirls around, realizing what happened—the sacrifice Griff just made .
The fact that the blade was meant for her and not him.
A small rectangular projection blinks into existence directly in front of me, revealing intimately what happens next.
“No…. NO! ” She stares at Griff—who clings to the thinnest strings of mortality—sinking down to her hands and knees beside him, putting pressure on the wound. “Stay with me. Please . Don’t go.” She snaps her head up, looking around the battlefield. “Healer! I need a healer!”
The cracks in her voice gut me.
“No,” she whimpers again when she looks back down at him, her tears spilling over her eyes, streaming down her cheeks. “Stay with me. Hey— hey! ” She taps his cheek. “Don’t close your eyes.”
Griff groans, his eyelids fluttering. “Hey, Marcella?” His voice is so weak. So removed from the bounciness it usually carries.
“Yes?” The word breaks like glass in her throat.
“No tears, okay?”
But Marcella’s eyes won’t listen—tears stream anyway. Still, she nods. “Okay.”
Griff swallows, the movement appearing strained. He reaches his hand up to touch her cheek, but falls short. Marcella catches his fingers and presses them to her face.
Griff smiles, as if content. “Guess what?” he says through wheezes.
She attempts to smile and lighten her voice. “What?”
“I finally beat you.” He pauses, drawing in wet-sounding breaths. Somehow, his lip still manages to curve, despite the crimson encasing it. “I made it to the afterlife first.”
Marcella chokes a laugh through her tears and presses a kiss to his fingers. “You finally beat me,” she concedes.
His eyes sharpen, his expression growing solemn. “Be happy, Marcella. Promise me.”
Her bottom lip quivers. Still, another nod. “I promise.”
“Good,” he breathes. “That’s good…”
Griff gurgles a few, final rattling breaths, and then the light—the beautiful light that shone so brightly within him—fades from his eyes.
A fallen star returning home, assuming its rightful place in the night sky.
Marcella bows her head onto his chest and cries.
Until she just…stops.
When she lifts her head, her eyes are free of tears, sadness instead replaced with a hollow rage—lifeless and cold.
Slowly, she rises and walks to the center of the battlefield.
Her arm pulses with a green so bright, it looks like an emerald sparkling in sunlight.
The magic funnels up her arm, into her neck veins, where it turns her eyes from a rich cobalt blue to a portrait of sparkling green.
She throws her hand out and destruction follows.
And that is all I am afforded to see as Casimir returns, the projection blinking from existence in tune with the closing portal snapping shut behind him.
He approaches me, and I don’t even realize I’m crying until he attempts to swipe the tears from my cheeks, kneeling down next to me.
“They are not worth your tears,” he murmurs. “This is the fate of humanity. The curse of our existence. You love? You hurt. You do not love? You still hurt.”
I pull away from his touch, flinching. “You’re a monster,” I seethe.
Casimir hums, the sound deep in this throat. “Whether true or untrue, you are the only one who could ever stop me, Lyra. Your magic is made from my own. We are the same, you and I.”
“I am nothing like you,” I growl through clenched teeth.
He studies me with sympathetic eyes. “Regardless, you can die in your quest for stubbornness, dragging all those you love to the afterlife with you, or you can live and spare them.” He frowns. “To be quite truthful, the better option seems glaringly obvious to me.”
I spit on the ground at his feet. “Go. To. Hell.”
“Unfortunately,” he counters calmly. “I’ve already been living there for quite some time.” He rises—swift and quick—and scans the dust-shrouded chaos around us. “But fine,” he sighs. “Let’s see how far you’re willing to push me.”
A sharp warning shoots down every nerve-ending in my body. “What are you doing?” I ask, my unsure voice low and rough .
He glances back at me and shrugs. “Testing you—proving that you and I are not so different, despite what you claim.”
“What does th—”
Before I can finish, he coos, “Ah, there he is.”
Ice slices my veins while venom floods the chambers of my heart, stilling its movements and clotting my breaths.
He offers me a final glance over his shoulder. “Would it be cruel if I asked you not to hold what comes next against me?” Without waiting for my answer, he swivels his gaze in another direction. “I suppose it might be.”
The wrinkle that’s been permanently wedged between my brows deepens, and I trace his line of sight. Whatever shred of warmth I possibly have left bleeds from me the moment I see who he’s staring at.
Gray.
He appears suddenly, as if stripped of his invisible cloak. But he doesn’t seem to notice.
Can only I see him?
I open my mouth, ready to agree to anything— anything at all. But Casimir moves, disappearing into the swirling dust, swallowed by the chaos.
Panic, fear, horror—it all slams into me, sharp and breathless. I lurch to my feet and stretch my hands out, as if I can rip this image by the seams and tear it away, crumpling it into fiction.
Everything slows.
Reality freezes into a nightmare moving moment by moment.
And I watch as the world twists into something unrecognizable.
I shout his name. Scream it with every bit of raw power my vocal cords are capable of mustering. Yet they buckle and crack, unable to carry the weight of my desperate screams.
Just like Marcella, he doesn’t hear me. It seems like nobody can hear me.
Gray plunges his sword directly into the heart of an Abdite, slicing its head from its body after. When he steadies his blade, his eyes rove toward me in the distance, as if hearing me—finding me .
He always finds me.
His face pinches together, and he cocks his head, as if he’s attempting to decipher something.
And I realize my mistake a second too late.
I’ve distracted him.
There is an odd warp, and then Casimir appears directly behind Gray, unsheathing the sword attached at his hip once more and positioning the hilt easily in his palms.
The world stutters, then stops, and I am clawing at gravel before I even realize I’ve fallen flat on my chest. The battle fades to a quiet, buzzing hum—the clattering of swords and clashes of magic dimming into near-silent whispers.
Strangely, I think of Astralis, wondering if this is what it is to live while carrying something dead in your chest.
I fooled myself into thinking my heart had died once before.
It is only now, in this moment, I feel what death truly is.
A scream of sheer agony rips into the world, and I haven’t the slightest clue if it comes from me or not.
All I know is, one moment, I am looking at Gray, the person who has always loved me selflessly—who gave me his best shirts and held me during my worst nightmares—alive and breathing.
Then the next moment, I am watching Casimir tear his blade through Gray’s neck, the metal singing eagerly as it eats skin.
Gray’s head falls to the ground with a gentle thud.