Chapter 45 #2
Master Rhovan drove both hands downward near the southern side of the hall, and Earth answered with a groan that rolled beneath our feet.
Stone rose from the ballroom in broad angled sections, creating barriers between fleeing guests and the breach.
He didn’t build walls high enough to trap anyone.
He shaped corridors, forcing the panic inward and away from the Shadowkin.
“Balethorn!” he called.
Both Dax and Emrin looked toward him.
Rhovan pointed to a section buckling beneath the western gallery. “Support that arch before we lose the entire tier.”
Emrin moved first. Dax followed.
I barely had time to see them go before claws swept past my shoulder. I felt the attack a fraction before they reached Lyra and shoved her aside as black fingers ripped through my formal jacket and opened the skin beneath.
I caught the Shadowkin by the arm.
Cold went through my palm.
Shadow magic had resistance. Shape. Pressure. I had understood it since childhood well enough that using it felt more natural than moving my own hands.
Shadowkin felt empty, like reaching into a grave and feeling the corpse beneath the soil reach back.
I drove Shadow through its shoulder. The creature shuddered, and then its face changed.
Gray hair spilled across its forehead. A broken nose formed. Blood appeared over one cheek.
Lord Tavren.
My father had executed him twelve years ago.
The Shadowkin smiled with his mouth, and for one second I was fourteen again, standing behind my father while Tavren begged on his knees.
I slammed the creature’s skull against the floor once, then again. The face collapsed on the third strike, bone and black flesh giving beneath my hand until Tavren was gone.
Lyra stared at what remained. “What the fuck was that?”
“They wear the dead.”
Lyra recoiled. “Wear them?”
“Faces. Bodies. Pieces of memory if they fed deeply enough.” I shoved myself upright and caught her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. If you recognize someone who cannot possibly be here, assume they’re dead. Do not speak to them. Do not let them get close. Kill the thing wearing them.”
A scream came from behind her.
Too late.
A girl near the southern tables was sobbing before a Shadowkin wearing the shape of a young boy. A Light instructor had lowered his hands before a woman whose head tilted too far when she smiled. Across the room, another candidate had begun walking toward a man with half his face missing.
Shadowwraiths hunted fear. Shadowkin understood grief.
That was what made them monsters.
“Do not trust the faces!” Halos shouted. Light erupted from him in a broad ring, throwing two Shadowkin away from a group of trapped candidates. “If the dead walk, strike first!”
One of the creatures hit a column hard enough to crack its spine, then stood back up. The other came at Halos low. He caught it with Light, pinned it against the floor, and Mistress Calis drove a concentrated spear of gold through its skull.
“Kaiz!”
Fire took it.
The Sanctum had finally understood the rules.
That did not mean we were winning.
I stopped fighting like an instructor. There was no point anymore.
A Shadowkin lunged for Lyra from behind an overturned banquet table.
I caught it around the middle and pulled until its body split, while Eiryx stepped through my Shadow before the pieces hit the floor, emerging behind a second creature with both knives already drawn.
One entered beneath its jaw. The other drove between the vertebrae at the base of its skull.
It twisted toward him; Eiryx twisted harder, and the head came free.
He kicked the body toward Kaiz’s nearest Fire line without looking to see whether it burned. He knew it would.
A third creature dropped from the gallery. I wrapped Shadow around all four limbs in midair and folded them backward. The sound was wet and splintering, bones breaking beneath flesh that immediately tried to rearrange itself. It struck the floor twitching, and Lidia burned it before I asked.
She looked at me only once. I knew what she saw. I had spent years making certain the Sanctum never saw this version of me—too much power, too little hesitation, techniques learned in rooms where my father punished restraint more severely than failure.
Her gaze moved to the blood running down my hand, then another Shadowkin came through the breach.
Lidia turned and incinerated it.
Good. She could be frightened of me later.
Eiryx came to my right. He didn’t need instructions; he never had.
A creature slipped beneath my first strike and he was already there, knife driving upward beneath its chin while his Shadow bound its arms. I tightened my grip around the torso.
Eiryx released it and stepped aside before I tore it apart because he knew exactly what I intended.
No wasted words. No collision. No need to check where the other stood. There was a reason he was the only person I trusted behind me with a blade.
Three Shadowkin broke through the western side together.
Eiryx disappeared into the darkness beneath a collapsed table and emerged behind them before most people would have realized he’d moved.
One knife opened the back of the first creature’s neck.
A second blade appeared in his other hand and buried itself into another’s spine.
The third turned toward him too late; Shadow bound its limbs, Eiryx looked at me, and I closed my hand around the thing with my magic until it came apart.
He was already moving before the pieces landed.
Around us, the people I drank with at dinner stopped being the people I knew.
They became something else.
Dax slammed both hands into the floor, and Earth erupted through the ballroom in a curved ridge around a cluster of younger candidates.
It rose chest-high, then folded inward as Dax altered the shape while it was still moving, creating a barricade instead of a simple wall.
A Shadowkin launched itself over it. Dax caught the creature in midair, stone closing around one leg and then the other before the floor opened beneath it and swallowed it to the waist.
It clawed toward a terrified boy crouched behind him.
Dax stepped between them. “Wrong one.”
Earth shot upward through the creature’s chest. Stone burst from its shoulders in a spray of black blood and shredded flesh, some of it striking Dax across the cheek. He didn’t even wipe it away.
“Move,” he snapped at the boy.
The boy moved.
Another creature struck the barricade, and Dax rebuilt the damaged section while crushing the thing beneath a slab thick enough to shake the floor when it landed.
His magic was heavier than Emrin’s. Violent.
Aggressive. Earth made into a weapon by someone who had spent years letting everyone believe being loud meant he wasn’t dangerous.
I should have known better.
Then I saw Emrin. She was on her knees beside a candidate whose leg had been crushed beneath a fallen column. Above them, the western gallery had begun to give way.
“Em!” Dax shouted.
She didn’t leave. The ceiling groaned as Emrin put one hand against the fallen pillar and the other flat to the floor.
Earth answered her in a way it never answered Dax.
The broken stone softened beneath her magic, cracks sealing while weight shifted outward through the floor until the pillar lifted a few inches.
The candidate beneath it screamed.
“Pull him out!”
Two Earth wielders dragged him free. One of them drew moisture from the stone and air into a thin shimmering ribbon that wrapped the candidate’s mangled leg, cooling the swelling and slowing the bleeding while the other hauled him backward.
Water existed here only through Earth now, folded into the element instead of standing apart from it, a remnant of what the wielders of Nytheris still commanded in full.
The ceiling dropped.
Emrin threw both hands upward.
The entire section stopped. For one impossible moment, a woman who barely raised her voice above conversation stood beneath several tons of stone and refused to let it fall. Cracks traveled beneath her feet, and Dax saw them. “Em.”
“I have it.”
“You don’t.”
“I said I have it.” He ran to her anyway and slammed his Earth beneath hers, his power brutal where hers was precise. Brother and sister caught the collapsing gallery together.
Emrin looked at him. He didn’t apologize, and he didn’t need to. “On three.” They shifted the load together. Stone screamed against stone, but the ceiling moved with them until it settled onto the supports Rhovan had raised from below.
Emrin dropped one hand. Blood ran from her nose. She wiped it away with the back of her wrist and immediately turned toward the injured candidate. “Get him to the northern—”
“No!” I shouted.
She looked at me.
“Not north.”
That was enough.
“Interior eastern wall,” she ordered instead. “Anyone who can walk helps someone who can’t.”
People listened because Emrin didn’t need to shout often.
When she did, they knew she meant it.
Lidia was worse.
Fire had always suited her temperament too neatly, enough that people joked about it. Nothing about her looked amusing now.
A Shadowkin caught Raiden from the side.
Lidia screamed his name, and the temperature in the hall changed.
Fire erupted around her, forcing the candidates nearest her to stumble away shielding their faces.
The creature holding Raiden ignited from within, cracks of orange appearing through black flesh as Lidia walked toward it with one hand raised.
It released Raiden.
She didn’t release it.
“Lidia.” Raiden was already back on his feet.
She kept burning. The Shadowkin collapsed to its knees. “Lidia!”
Her head jerked toward him. He was alive. That was all she needed. She closed her fist, and the creature collapsed into ash.
Lidia’s eyes were wet, but nothing else about her gave. Another Shadowkin moved toward the wounded candidates Emrin had gathered. Lidia stepped between them. “Come on.”
It did.