Chapter 48 #5
No hesitation. No shame. No apology. My chest cracked open all over again. “So would Kaelros.”
Kieran’s gaze turned lethal. “I am not him.”
“I know.” He stilled. I folded the warrant. My hands had stopped shaking. “I never loved him.”
For the first time all night, Kieran had no answer.
Nothing. Not one brutal truth. Not one defense.
Not one terrible certainty. I watched the words reach him.
Kaelros could torture me. Hunt me. Use me.
Break bones and spill blood and crawl through my memories until I no longer knew which pieces of myself belonged only to me.
But Kaelros had never held my heart in his hands.
Kieran had. And I had given it to him willingly.
I stepped around him. Toward the lights hidden deeper within the Blackwood. He did not stop me.
“Where are you going?” Lidia asked.
“I don’t know.”
The truth felt cleaner than anything I had heard all night.
I walked. My legs shook. My shoulder throbbed.
Vareena’s blood still covered my skin. Behind me stood the people who had burned every road home by coming after me.
And Kieran. Especially Kieran. I had loved him yesterday.
Gods, maybe some ruined part of me still did.
That was the wound I could not close. Because love had not died when the truth arrived.
Trust had. And they were not the same thing.
Love was not forgiveness. Love was not trust. Love did not make what he had done smaller.
It did not turn control into protection merely because the man controlling me had been willing to die for me.
Kieran Nyxara had decided my survival mattered more than my hatred.
Fine. He had me alive. He could live with what remained.
I made it several steps before a presence brushed the inside of my skull. I stopped. Not pain. Not a voice. The Codex.
What?
Nothing answered.
Then the Blackwood disappeared. There was no forest. No grass.
No Kieran. No body beneath me. Only darkness.
Not Shadow. I knew Shadow now. I knew the cool slide of it against my skin.
The way it gathered around Kieran when he was angry.
The way my own answered when I stopped treating it like a source of shame.
This was not Shadow. This was absence. And through that impossible absence stretched lines of light.
Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe more. They crossed above me and below me and through distances my eyes could not understand.
Some blazed bright enough to hurt. Others were thin and faint, trembling at the edge of sight.
They disappeared so far into the dark that I could not tell where any of them began or where they ended.
I had no name for them. No memory of seeing anything like them.
And yet some part of me reacted as though I had been looking for them my entire life.
Codex?
Nothing.
Then I saw the broken one. It ended in the middle of the dark.
Not faded. Not thinning. Cut. The two ends drifted apart, spilling pale light into nothing.
My stomach dropped. Beyond the severed edge hung a sky.
Not mine. I knew that immediately. The stars were wrong.
Too many. Arranged in shapes I had never seen.
Some burned red. Others blue-white. A wide band of pale light crossed the heavens from one horizon to another.
Beneath them stood ruins. Enormous ones.
Towers split open from top to bottom. Bridges collapsed into streets buried beneath gray-white ash.
Blackened trees stretched toward a sky that no longer seemed to belong to anything alive.
A city. Or what had once been one. Nothing moved.
No birds. No people. No flame. No wind. Nothing.
The silence of it entered me like cold water.
Where is this?
The Codex did not answer.
Movement flickered among the ruins. I strained toward it.
A figure. For one heartbeat, I was certain there was someone standing far away beneath the dead sky.
Then the darkness behind them shifted. The darkness there was wrong.
Not the absence surrounding the lines. Not Shadow.
A presence given shape only by the way the world around it seemed to disappear wherever it passed.
The figure turned. I could not see a face.
Could not tell if it was a man or a woman.
But somehow—impossibly—they looked directly at me.
My breath stopped. Their mouth moved. No sound reached me.
Then the darkness behind them closed. The severed line jerked.
And the entire sky went out. Not darkened.
Gone. The strange stars vanished. The ruins vanished.
The figure vanished. One moment an entire place existed beyond the broken light. The next there was nothing.
Who was that?
The Codex did not answer.
What was that?
Silence. Anger cut through the terror.
The darkness shifted. Another line brightened.
Whole. Alive. It stretched past me through the impossible dark.
The Codex forced my attention toward it.
“No.” I did not know whether the word left my mouth in the Blackwood or only inside my own head.
The line pulsed once. I followed it. Past points of light that might have been stars.
Past colors that could not exist in any sky I knew.
Past other lines stretching toward places hidden too far away to see.
Until a world appeared at the far end. Mountains.
Forests. Water. The silver scar of the Veil.
The shapes of realms I had traced across maps in the Sanctum. Alareth.
My heart stopped.
“No.”
The line trembled.
A sound traveled through it. Tiny. Almost delicate.
Crack.
A fracture appeared in the light.
My blood turned to ice.
“No.”
The fracture was barely longer than my finger. Nothing. Almost nothing. Except I had just seen what waited beyond the severed one.
Codex.
Silence.
What are these? What happened to that place?
The fracture widened another fraction.
“ANSWER ME!”
The Codex answered. Not in a riddle. Not in one of its maddening half-truths. Four words appeared across the darkness.
IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.
The vision shattered. I came back screaming. My knees hit the grass. Hands moved toward me and I threw up both arms. “Don’t!”
Everyone stopped. My breath tore in and out of me. Blood ran from my nose onto my mouth. The warrant had fallen beside me.
Emrin stood closest. “Lyra, what happened?”
I could not answer. I looked up. The stars were still there.
For one second, relief nearly broke me. Then one flickered.
Once. Twice. And vanished. Every person in the clearing looked up.
Another disappeared. Then another. A black line opened across the sky where light had burned seconds before.
Kieran moved beside me. “What did you see?”
The Codex stirred inside my mind.
NOT STARS.
My heart stopped.
Then what are they?
The answer came immediately.
WORLDS.
Another light went out.