47. Lucy
Lucy
I peel my eyes open. My head pounds, a hammering throb that’s close to a hangover. I must have been drugged. How someone managed to abduct me in the middle of exam day, I don’t know, but then I suppose everyone was too busy with the exams to notice one missing professor.
There’s not much light, though there must be sconces filled with flaming lanterns somewhere because a dim glow illuminates my surroundings.
I’m in some kind of cell. The walls are stone, cool to touch and have a slight silken glaze to them.
Outside the cell seems to be a corridor. I squint, straining to see in the flickering lantern light. I make out the end of the corridor and my blood freezes.
It’s the gateway to the Veil.
An enormous stone archway replaces the corridor’s end wall.
The stone is a mix of pale, shimmering marble, and dark onyx.
The curved stone appears ornate, with finely carved threads twined together like rope—one dark thread, one pale—a representation of the fabric itself.
The oldest goyle on campus, Gardon, sits at the peak of the arch.
He must sense me because he turns to glance at me and scowls.
Beneath him, in the archway, hangs a shimmering curtain.
The most direct way into and out of the Veil.
Though only the most trained necromancers go in and out here.
Up on the surface, whenever you cut a hole in the Veil it’s like opening a thin capillary.
This portal is a floodgate; you’re essentially slicing the Veil’s jugular.
Why the hell am I down here?
“You’re awake,” a familiar voice says.
“Thalia? Oh my gods, Thalia, help me. Get me out of here.”
She emerges from the darkness but something about her is different. Her mismatched eyes glower at me through the darkness. She holds a snarl on her features I’ve never seen before. Her shoulders are tight but wide-set, radiating power and confidence typically reserved for devils.
“Thalia?” I say, quieter this time.
She bares her teeth in a hideous smile, and they seem far, far sharper than before.
My stomach drops out. I back away from the iron bars.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
She stalks towards me, a key in her hand. It clinks in the metal lock and sets my teeth on edge.
“Out,” she says, her voice flat.
I hesitate; Thalia has always been so loving and affectionate towards me. I don’t understand what is happening.
“Move,” she barks and yanks me by the arm out of the cell.
Her grip is a vice. I tug my arm, but her fingers dig harder, pinching my skin where she drags me.
More and more people emerge from the darkness to line the corridor.
All of them bearing pins above their left breast pockets. A symbol that makes my heart stop.
The Societas Mortis Architecti.
They all bow their heads as we pass; it’s reverent, respectful. But I don’t understand. My mind is trying to compute what’s happening.
“What are you doing with them?” I whisper. But as the words fall from my mouth, a rift carves through my heart.
She is not with them . They are with her .
“All this time?” I whisper. “It was always you?” A trickle of cold flows down my back. I tug my arm again.
Her nails slice into my skin where she refuses to let go.
“Always me,” she says.
“But why?”
She laughs, harsh and grating as we approach Gardon’s arch and the Veil.
“You really have no idea who I am?” She shakes her head at me as if dismayed. As if I’m the fool for not knowing.
“Who? What do you mean?” I breathe as she stops us by the undulating expanse of the Veil. She extends a finger to the shimmering surface and draws it down from top to bottom, as if tasting the icing on a cake.
A waft of acrid air fills the corridor; it’s sticky and smoky and makes me cough.
“The real question, Lucy, is who are you .”
And then she shoves me hard. I stumble back and fall between the folds of the Veil.
I’m back on my feet, screaming and lurching forward, but she’s already sealed the Veil shut, the scar healed over without a trace.
I’m trapped.
Fuck, I’m trapped. My heart rate climbs to a thousand beats a second as I frantically search my mind for the magic to cut myself out.
But I’m inside the Veil with no access to the campus’s magic.
I call upon my own magic. Reach for a memory, an emotion.
Anything. But my heart is beating too fast. My mind whirring a stampede. I can’t reach it, it won’t come.
Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh gods.
I scan the area where I’m standing. It’s as barren and desolate as it is hot. Mountainous peaks of dark, craggy rocks and flat ground with barely a living thing in sight. Any plants I see are scorched and brittle, their stems and branches bone-white with skeletal leaves having scarcely more colour.
I’m going to die here.
And that’s when I realise that is the point. If Thalia is part of the Societas, then she wants me dead. Did she trap me here to somehow resurrect Architecti?
Sweat beads on my brow and spills down my temples. Then something moves in my periphery.
Fuck.
I attempt to call my magic. Even though every cell in my body is screaming at me not to, I close my eyes and reach for it. But there’s nothing there. I can’t feel Finis.
Despite the heat, the hair on my arms rises: danger.
I open my eyes.
A group of wraiths stalks towards me. Shit. My body turns icy.
Is this how I die? Demons are immortal if we stay healthy and safe, but just like vampires, there are ways to kill us.
They advance on me, step by step, their sinewy, leathery bodies skulking and sinister. Their mouths drop open, ringing my sentence out in shrieks and gnashing teeth. I stagger back, desperately searching for a weapon, a rock, anything I can use to defend myself.
There’s nothing.
I am alone.
This is where it ends. The Societas has won.
Ten feet.
Five.
Three.
One long skeleton arm sweeps out towards me.
I shut my eyes, resigned.
But the impact never comes.
I open them, confused. Gossamer wings made of starlight and sky fill my vision, surrounding me, separating me from the wraiths.
They twist and twirl and reform the Veil until I am standing somewhere not quite there, and not quite anywhere.
An in-between.
The wings shiver and shrink and flutter before me until they belong to the most beautiful moth I’ve ever seen.
I try and capture it, but my vision clears, and a translucent form of Finis Tower surrounds me, as if I am inside the ghost of it.
I walk forward, attempting to return to campus, but I stumble into an invisible wall.
Like a window.
Wait. Not a window.
A prison.
Oh, gods. “Architecti?” I whisper. My heart climbs into my throat, my entire body trembles as I realise I’ve found my way into the prison my father created to trap an angel.
“Hello, Lucy.”
“Please don’t hurt me,” I plead. “I’m not my father.” The starlit moth flutters to Architecti and sits atop her shoulder, nestling into her neck as she steps into view.
She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. White wings hover at her back and stretch high above her. Her bronze skin is smooth and ageless, her eyes are bright and smiling. So strange that such a beautiful entity can be so awful.
“You misunderstand. I am not here to hurt you. I am here to explain.”
“Wh—what?” I say, unable to stop my face scrunching.
“I could not let Interitus kill you.”
Interitus? She continues talking.
“There is one more rune you must unlock.”
“How do you know about the runes?”
She glances at the floor, her tone soft as she says, “A contract as powerful as ours needed a sturdier vessel. Parchment can be torn, broken, destroyed. The clauses overwritten as simply as spilled ink.”
My head swims as I parse out what she’s saying. I don’t… No. It’s not true, it can’t be.
“Who am I?” I breathe.
“Not who, what.”
“Wh-what am I?”
“You are everything. A promise. A beloved. You are our words and our meaning. Once upon a time, a demon made a deal with an angel… You are the product of that. The binding of a celestial’s power to a demon’s. You, my blessed child, are the manifestation of my attempt to save us all.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.”
She nods, her wings ruffling as she speaks. “That’s okay, there is still one more rune.”
“Why don’t you tell me what it says?”
She smiles softly. “Do you care for her?”
“Midnight?”
She nods.
“With all my heart. But if I tell her, if I give myself to her, I’ll lose my power, my security, my identity.”
“My sister is going to bring about the end of days. She is determined to eradicate fate. You are the key to stopping that. Ignatius thought he was clever putting me inside this prison. But I knew what he was doing. I agreed to the entrapment because it was the only way to render my sister powerless.”
The beautiful moth flutters off her shoulder as Architecti opens her hand and a second moth, one with dark serrated wings appears. They flutter in tandem, spiralling and twisting as they dance around each other.
The ground rumbles, the tower shakes, the translucent skeleton of Finis trembling all around us.
“There isn’t time for me to explain. You must go. This isn’t how you die. You have another destiny…”
“I don’t believe in fate. We make our own futures.”
Her eyes soften as she gazes at me. “Does it give you comfort to believe that?”
“I know it to be true.”
“For some, that may be so. But you and I… we serve a greater purpose. Our destinies were sealed long ago.”
“Then what is it? My fate?”
She cups my chin with her palm, tipping my head up to her.
“My child, you already know. The question is, what is Midnight’s?”
She presses a kiss to my forehead. It’s like being kissed by every ocean and every wind and every fire in the world. Architect moths materialise, colour blooming everywhere. Wings flutter and kiss my cheeks, my arms, and I am filled with hope and sorrow and wonder and disdain.
Midnight fills my mind, her smile, her piercing blue eyes and slicked back hair. Over and over, she appears.
A million futures, a million possibilities, a million dreams scatter across my vision.
Tears flow down my cheeks as my mind and body are overwhelmed with all her futures. I buckle under the weight of her glorious life. She can change her fate. Hope surges through me, my heart ready to explode.
She can beat my father.
One way or another, she will find a way.
Until I realise there is one thing all of her possibilities share.
My heart plummets.
A single horrifying truth settles like lead in my bones.
Inevitable.
As if this truth were stitched into the very fabric of my being. I always knew. Deep down, this is why I held myself back. Why I never gave myself to her.
Inevitable.
It was always inevitable.
I want to claw the visions from my soul, scour my fate from time with wire bristles and bleach and poison.
But the more I scream, the more I fight, the heavier the realisation settles.
While she is in every future I see…
I am in none.