Chapter 29 #2
“But he miscalculated. I was ten years old, and the magic was feral. Something went completely wrong, and the lab exploded.”
The Rupture.
The pieces slammed together in my head. The explosion that Liora wrote about in her journal—the one that woke my own magic and forced her to bind me—it was Riven. It was him fighting for his life in a lab while they tried to hollow him out.
“That was the surge my mother felt,” I realised, my voice trembling. “The event that destabilised me… it was you breaking out.”
Riven looked away, staring into the dark. “The timing is exact. My explosion… it must have sent a shockwave through the ether. It triggered your awakening.”
His voice dropped, rough with guilt.
“It forced your mother to sacrifice herself to contain you. If I hadn’t broken that machine… she might still be alive.”
“Don’t,” I said, my voice hardening.
He looked back at me, surprised by the steel in my voice.
“None of this was your fault, Riven. You were a child in the hands of a monster. You survived. That is the only thing that matters.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he gave a stiff nod and turned back to the window.
“I learned,” he said quietly. “After that, I learned to be useless to him. I hid the power deep, where his sensors couldn’t track it.
I played the role of the broken experiment, just strong enough to be an enforcer, too weak to be another power source.
I stayed a few steps ahead of him just to stay alive. ”
The car felt too small suddenly, filled with the ghosts of our shared catastrophe.
“But I knew he hadn’t stopped,” he continued. “I knew he was just waiting for another chance. And when I saw your mother’s research… I realised she must have been tracking him before it happened. She saw the path he was taking. She knew he was hunting for an anchor.”
He looked forward as the iron gates of Duskfall Manor loomed out of the fog.
“She wrote those books as a warning. She knew she might not be there to stop him, so she left instructions on how to do it.”
I pulled the car up the drive. The manor stood dark and silent, a fortress against the sea.
We got out. The air smelled of salt and brine.
Riven led the way up the stone steps. He stayed close at my shoulder as he unlocked the heavy door.
Inside, the house was freezing. It felt suspended in time. We started to climb the wide staircase. The stillness was oppressive—the kind that pressed against your ears. We reached the landing. Riven took a step towards the corridor on the left—
And froze, his hand snapping out to stop me, fingers digging into my arm.
“Riven?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. His body was rigid, vibrating with sudden, violent tension. His eyes were fixed on the shadows at the end of the hall.
The atmosphere in the place warped. It rippled, like heat haze rising from tarmac.
A faint, metallic taste hit my tongue. A wrongness in the air that shouldn’t be there.
Riven’s wards. The familiar buzz against my skin had vanished.
They were gone.
Riven’s face went pale, his eyes turning to shards of ice.
“Someone is here,” he breathed.
I looked at him, the realisation settling in my stomach like lead. This was his fortress. His home. The one place in the city Korenth and Varessia couldn’t touch.
And someone had walked right in.
The shadows at the end of the corridor thickened and detached.
Three figures stepped out of the gloom. They were Umbrakynn—tall and lean—but they moved with the jerky, unnerving twitch of puppets on tight strings.
Augmented.
A nausea of stolen magic hit me first. It tasted bruised and angry, forced into bodies that weren’t meant to hold it, vibrating with a frequency that made my teeth ache.
Riven stepped in front of me, his body a rigid line of defence. The shock rolling off him was palpable, quickly hardening into an absolute fury. Shadow curled off his hands like smoke.
The lead guard smiled. It was a hollow, dead expression. His eyes swam with a milky film, the sign of a mind pushed too far by the infusion.
“Varessia sends her regards,” the guard rasped.
His voice sounded wet. He tilted his head at an unnatural angle, answering the question burning in Riven’s silence.
“Ah, you thought you were safe. But she always knew, Ashborne. She knew the day you bought the deed. She knew every time you came here to hide.”
Riven flinched—a physical reaction to the betrayal.
“She let you believe you had a safe space,” the guard continued, his tone mocking, channelling the woman who owned him. “She thought it was adorable. A little boy building a fort. But playtime is over.”
“She wants the girl,” he rasped, testing the edge of the knife with his thumb. “She said to bleed you dry.”
Riven let out a roar.
A shockwave exploded outward, displacing the sound.
I acted on instinct.
The guard lunged. Riven met him, catching the blade on a shield of solidified shadow, the impact ringing like a bell.
I stepped out from behind him. The Spark of Shadows buried deep in my own chest woke up, answering Riven’s proximity. It was a sliver compared to my Light, yet it was sharp.
I flung my hand out. A dark lash snapped from my fingers, wrapping around the guard’s ankle and sweeping his leg out from under him. As his guard dropped, Riven seized the opening. He thrust his palm forward, and a blast of pure, concussive darkness slammed into the guard’s chest.
It lifted him off his feet. He flew backward, crashing through the banister of the landing.
He fell to the marble foyer below. The impact was a wet, sickening crunch that left no room for survival. He lay still, his neck twisted at an impossible angle.
The second guard was on me before I could retract my hand.
He moved fast—unnaturally so. He grabbed my throat, his grip like a vice. The stolen magic in his veins burned against my skin, cold and searing. I gasped, clawing at his wrist, my vision spotting.
Riven saw it.
“No!” he roared.
He turned, but the third guard intercepted him, tackling him into the wall.
I was on my own. The guard squeezing my throat raised a knife.
I couldn’t overpower him physically; the augmentation made him too strong.
I reached for the Light. My own power flooded my veins, hot and blinding.
But the shadow inside me agitated, answering Riven’s rage across the hall.
I grabbed that smaller, icy thread and threw it into the guard’s eyes.
It acted like a veil—a sudden, localised blindness.
The guard reared back, blinking, his grip loosening just a fraction.
It was enough. I summoned the Light as a dense, solid weight. He was just another victim of Varessia’s needle, so I struck to incapacitate him rather than kill.
I smashed my palm into his solar plexus, releasing a concentrated pulse of concussive force. The impact threw him backward into the wall, driving the air from his lungs with a harsh whoosh. The light scrambled his stolen magic, short-circuiting the augmentation.
He slid down the plaster, his eyes rolling back in his head. He slumped to the floor, unconscious, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged breaths.
Down, but alive.
I spun around, gasping for air.
Riven had the third man pinned against the newel post. The soldier thrashed, trying to bring his weapon to bear, but Riven held him fast.
He was glowing.
His shadows were a storm around him, but beneath the darkness, veins of golden Light flared in his arms, amplifying his strength.
Riven screamed—a sound of raw, absolute rage—and drove his hand into the enemy’s chest, forcing the power out. Shadow to crush, Light to burn.
The man convulsed. The stolen magic in his veins overloaded, unable to withstand the pressure of Riven’s true power. He dropped to the floor, smoke rising from his mouth, dead before he hit the carpet.
The aftermath crashed back into the hallway. Thick. Ringing.
I stood there, chest heaving, my hands shaking uncontrollably. My magic buzzed under my skin, agitated and hot.
Riven stood over the body of the last guard. He was panting, his shoulders rising and falling with ragged breaths. His hands were clenched into fists, dark smoke still curling from his knuckles.
He turned slowly.
His eyes were wild, the silver swirls spinning so fast they looked like solid mercury. He looked at me, scanning for blood, for injury.
“Did they hurt you?” he choked out.
I stumbled towards him. He met me halfway, pulling me in hard enough to knock the breath out of me. His arms locked around my waist, crushing me against his chest.
I buried my face in his coat. He smelled of dark amber, rain, and the terrifying heat of being alive.
We stood there, clinging to each other in the wreckage of his fortress, shaking as the adrenaline crashed out of us.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered into my hair, his voice raw. “It’s alright. I’ve got you.”
I held him tighter, listening to the frantic, thundering rhythm of his heart against my ear, knowing that nowhere was safe, and the war had just walked through the front door.