Chapter 19 #3
“I knew the location,” he said quietly, the admission leaden. “When I saw the address… I knew. The Blackwood Mill is a known Highspire drop site. A disposal ground for problems they want to erase.”
He looked back at me, his eyes dark with a mixture of anger and regret.
“But I assumed it was a graveyard. Ruin and rust. I never expected a heavy-grade Augmented sentry. To station something that lethal on the surface…”
He trailed off, the implication clear. You don’t guard a graveyard. You guard a vault.
“You’re lucky to be breathing,” he said, shifting and wincing as the movement tugged at his newly healed skin. “That thing was built for slaughter. And the dead zone… it wasn’t natural, Selene. It was engineered. They built it to suppress magic while he—and things like him—operate freely.”
A chill slid down my spine, more bitter than the draft from the hall. “Engineered by who?”
“By people who view magic as a raw material to be harvested and distilled.”
“Highspire,” I whispered.
His silence was confirmation enough.
“You knew what he was,” I said, stepping closer to the bed. The sun hit my back, warming the shirt sticking to my skin. “You knew exactly how to fight him.”
Riven met my gaze, his expression locked down tight. “I suspected.”
“You suspected?” I laughed, a short sound devoid of humour. “You nearly died over there, Riven. You took a knife to the gut knowing exactly what that thing was capable of. You’re hiding something.”
“I was managing a risk,” he countered, his voice dropping to that lethal register. The words were cold, a wall erected between us. “I neutralised the threat. Do not mistake tactical necessity for sentiment.”
The dismissal stung, brutal and immediate, but I forced myself to ignore it.
“I don’t need tactics,” I snapped. “I need answers. If that’s what they’re building in Highspire—if that’s what killed the others—I need to know.”
He looked at me then, really looked at me, with an expression that sat somewhere between frustration and a terrible, ancient weariness. The sunlight washed out the colour in his face, making him look like a statue carved from stone.
“There are things I cannot tell you,” he said.
It sounded like a confession.
“Cannot? Or will not?”
“Both.” The word hung there, final and immovable. My anger spiked, hot and bright, but before I could unleash it, he shifted, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed with a deliberate, slow-motion grace that looked like it cost him nothing.
He grit his teeth, his expression tightening as the movement stretched the freshly knit skin of his side. He remained silent, but the sudden, rigid set of his shoulders betrayed the effort. Even healed, the trauma of the blow remained deep in the marrow.
“Idiot,” I muttered, moving before I thought.
I reached out, my hand landing lightly on his forearm as he pushed himself off the bed. His skin was burning hot. He didn’t flinch; his muscles turned to rigid stone beneath my palm as he locked his knees, absorbing the shock of his own weight with silent precision.
For a second, we were right back where we were ten minutes ago—too close. The hum of my magic reached out, brushing against the dark weight of his. The sunlight seemed to vanish, leaving only the heat between us.
I looked up. He was staring down at me, his eyes wide and unguarded. I saw the fear there again, rooted entirely in this. In us.
I snatched my hand back, the heat stinging, and forced the sensation down.
“You’re still healing,” I said, my voice shaking slightly.
“The wound is closed,” he said, his voice hard as iron. He took a slow breath, letting his mask slide securely back into place. “Staying in bed solves nothing. If you want answers, Selene, come with me. There is something in the study you need to see.”
He nodded towards the door, effectively shutting me out. I crossed my arms, wanting to argue—wanting to push him back down and demand the truth about the guard, his scar, and the way he had just looked at me.
But he was offering a thread.
“Fine,” I said.
I stepped back, giving him space to move. He grabbed a clean shirt from the wardrobe and put it on. A momentary pause in his hands was the only sign that the movement stretched the new skin at his side; his face remained a blank, porcelain mask.
The dark fabric fell into place, hiding the ink, the scars, and the silver glow. Armour back in place.
He walked past me towards the door—slower than usual, but moving under his own power without a slip. He paused at the threshold, the dry, detached mask of the consultant fully restored.
“Lead the way.”
He pushed open the double doors at the end of the corridor. The room remained exactly as I remembered it from my sleepless wandering—dark wood shelves, the scent of old parchment, and a towering stillness.
Last night, it had been a tomb of shadows and moonlight. Today, it was a reservoir of blinding gold.
Golden beams sliced through the high windows, cutting through the floating dust motes like solid bars of amber. It illuminated corners I hadn’t seen in the dark—stacks of leather-bound volumes, intricate brass instruments on the mantle, and the sheer, overwhelming scale of knowledge gathered here.
The rest of the house held the stone-cold bite of the season, but here, the sunlight trapped behind the high glass created a dry, ancient warmth. It smelled of preserved paper and time—a stark, welcome comfort after the metallic chill of the Industrial Crescent.
He gestured to the oak table. It was already scattered with books—some bound in leather that looked older than the city we were standing in, others simple cloth.
We sat down close to the books, and to each other. The sunlight hit my back, soaking through my shirt, untying knots in my spine I didn’t know I had.
“What is this?” I asked, running a finger over the spine of a text titled The Chronicles of the First Era.
“Context,” Riven said. His voice was stronger now, slipping back into that lecture-hall cadence he used when he was trying to control a situation. “You have power you do not understand. Power that reacts to emotion, to danger… and to me.”
I flinched, just a little. He caught it, his eyes darkening, but he didn’t stop.
“You need to know what you are looking at,” he said. He pushed a book towards me. It was open to an illustration—a depiction of figures standing amidst a landscape that didn’t look like Ravenholt.
“The Aetherkind,” he said quietly. “The old stories call them myths. Gods, in some cultures. They weren’t.”
“I’ve heard the name before,” I said, testing the waters. “They were a civilisation. Powerful.”
Riven nodded, his gaze fixed on the page. “According to these texts, they were architects of a magic capable of reducing armies to ash. They commanded power on a celestial scale, vanishing long before the first stone of this city was laid. A lost empire.”
He looked up, and for a second, the mask slipped. He looked tired. And lonely.
“I believe,” he said, the words measured, “that I might be one of them.”
I stared at him. At the sharp lines of his face, the human weariness in his eyes.
“Does that mean…” I hesitated, doing the maths in my head. “Does that mean you’re thousands of years old?”
A trace of something dry touched his mouth. “No. I believe I was born thirty-three years ago. Which makes me… an anomaly. A ghost of something that should be dead.”
My heart thudded against my ribs. The truth about Eamon rose in my throat, desperate for air, but I swallowed it down.
Riven served the very institution that had forced my parents into the shadows. Eamon had begged me to drop the Calysteri investigation, terrified of exactly this—of Highspire turning its gaze our way.
If the murders, my parents, and Riven were all strands of the same knot, pulling it tight might strangle us all.
I could risk myself. I could trade my own secrets for Riven’s knowledge because I needed to understand the monster in the mirror.
But Eamon? No. I refused to paint a target on his back before I even understood the war we were fighting.
I looked down at the books. My hand drifted to a slim volume near his elbow.
I slid it towards me. My fingers trembled with the collision of thoughts racing in my mind as I opened it to the title page.
The Echoes of Shattered Dawn by Arin Brightleaf.
I recognised it instantly. This was the book Riven had pocketed at the City Archives, the one he had refused to show me while he played the part of the untouchable consultant.
“Selene?” Riven’s voice was sharp.
I looked up, the air in my lungs suddenly thin. “Arin Brightleaf,” I whispered, shaking my head. “This is my mother’s book.”
The secret was out, raw and irreversible.
Riven went completely still. He held his breath, eyes fixed and unmoving. He watched me, his face draining of what little colour had returned to it. His shadows, usually so controlled, gave a violent shimmer against the wall, betraying the shock he refused to voice.
“Your mother,” he repeated, the words weighted.
“She wrote this. This is her pen name.” I touched the page, panic tightening my chest. I had crossed a line I couldn’t retreat from; I had to use the opening to my advantage. I hardened my voice into an accusation.
“You took from the Archives… you knew exactly what you were looking for. You stole my mother’s work.”
Riven’s eyes widened. It was the first time I had ever seen him look truly caught off guard. The silence stretched between us, heavy with dust and secrets.
I could see the gears turning behind his eyes—connecting dates, connecting names, realising that the woman he had been training, the woman he had been binding himself to, was the daughter of the very mystery he had been chasing.
“I didn’t know,” he said softly. And for once, I believed him.
He reached for the book, then stopped short. His hand rested on the table, inches from mine. The sunlight gleamed off the pale skin of his knuckles.
“If she wrote these,” he said, “then she knew about the extractions. Selene… she knew what they were doing in Highspire before anyone else did.”
“And now I’m in the middle of it,” I murmured.
The weight of his gaze was intense, almost unbearable. The air between us hummed—that familiar, electric tension that had nothing to do with the books and everything to do with the way he was looking at my mouth.
He cleared his throat, pulling his hand back. The moment shattered, but the shards were still sharp.
“Look here.” He reached over, flipping the book open to the last page, and tapped a symbol. “Focus on this.”
I turned the book over, my fingers brushing the worn paper.
There, sketched in a hurried, familiar hand—my mother’s hand—was an intricate geometric design.
A dark, upturned arc held a central core of jagged lines that resembled a weapon forged of light.
Vertical rays pierced the curve of the arc, interlocking to form a single, reinforced seal.
There were no names written beside the symbols, only a few fragmented notes in the margins that had been crossed out and rewritten, as if she were struggling to translate a dead language.
My gaze dropped to the bottom of the sketch, where a formal title had once been written. The ink here was a mess of charcoal-dark smudges, as if she had tried to erase it or time had simply worn the truth away. Only the first few words remained legible.
The Seal of…
The rest was a rough blur of grey, leaving the true nature of the union out of reach.
The image looked old. Dangerous.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A resonance seal,” he said. “It interacts with raw magic. If you are what I think you are… it should react.”
I leaned forward. As I did, my arm brushed his.
The contact struck with the force of an impact.
A searing arc of light bridged the gap between us, bright enough to bleach the dust motes in the air.
My shoulder—the scar—responded with a powerful, eager throb that felt like a heartbeat trying to break through the skin.
A buzz ran down my arm and settled in my fingertips.
I reached out, my finger hovering over the central shape as Riven’s thumb anchored the black curve of the arch.
The air between our hands thickened, vibrating with a pulse that made my skin prickle.
I looked up and caught the raw, unguarded shock in his eyes; he felt it too—the same ancient recognition striking straight at the marrow.
I looked back down, my breath hitching as the sigil ignited.
A flood of golden light erupted from the centre, rushing to meet a cold explosion of dark from the arc. The two colours clashed within the ink, vibrating with a force that rattled the oak table before vanishing.
I jerked back, staring at it.
Riven looked at me instead of the book. His eyes were dark, the swirls moving like smoke.
“You see?” he whispered. “It recognises its own.”
I didn’t know if he meant the sigil, the magic, or the fact that in this massive, sun-drenched room, he was the only thing I could feel.
“I see,” I said.
And I was terrified that I did.