Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Selene
Aelira stood in the centre of the atrium, her hands clasped loosely in front of her. The guise of the City Archivist was gone; she looked like a queen in exile, commanding the silent stone of a buried kingdom.
Riven held his ground near the door, rigid as a sentry. His hand remained white-knuckled on the canvas-wrapped iron box.
“We need answers, Aelira,” he said, his voice rough. “We came for your help.”
Aelira’s expression softened. She looked at me, a spark of the familiar warmth I remembered from the Archives passing through her eyes.
“I told you the history would find you eventually, Selene.”
“You knew,” I whispered. “Back at the Archives. You knew everything.”
“I knew enough to wait,” she said.
Goran grunted, stepping past us to stand beside Aelira. He turned his somber stare towards one of the dark archways on the left.
“You can bring him in,” he rumbled.
I frowned. “Bring who?”
Two figures emerged from the shadows. A woman and a man.
They were young, lean, and moved with a fluid, dangerous grace.
The woman had striking silver hair; the man’s was pitch black.
But their faces were almost identical—a similar sharp jaw, the same high cheekbones, and eyes of piercing, identical green.
Twins.
But it was the man walking between them who made my heart stop.
Dane.
He stepped into the light, battered and furious. In his leather jacket and jeans, he looked entirely out of place in the ancient magical bunker.
“Dane?” I choked out.
He spotted me, and the tension in his shoulders vanished. “Selene.”
I crossed the distance in three strides, grabbing his arm just to make sure he was real.
“How are you here?” I demanded. “I told you to go home. I told you to stay away.”
“I didn’t trust him,” Dane said, glaring at Riven. “So I followed. I parked the car three streets away and doubled back on foot to watch the perimeter.”
He gestured to the twins flanking him.
“I was tracking you fine until these two materialised out of nowhere. No sound, no scent. I was crouching by the hedgerow near the gate when they grabbed me.”
The man with black hair grinned. It was a feral expression. “You were loud for a wolf. We heard you dragging your feet from the end of the lane.”
“I’m injured,” Dane snapped.
“You’re lucky,” Goran corrected from the centre of the room. “I smelled a pup at the door. I told them to retrieve you before Korenth’s sweepers found your scent.”
Another door opened, revealing a woman. She was tall, with light blonde hair and a face that radiated a calm, potent warmth.
She ignored the strange company, her eyes locking onto us—cataloguing the dirt on my face, the tension in Riven’s jaw, and the way Dane favoured his back. She carried a tray laden with mugs and a steaming teapot, the china rattling softly as she set it down on the nearest stone table.
“You’re hurt,” she stated.
She moved to Riven first. He flinched as she reached out, clearly not recognising her, but she didn’t touch him. She just hovered her hand over his side, where the knife went in days ago.
“It’s healed,” Riven said stiffly, eyeing her with suspicion. He knew Goran and Aelira, but this woman was a stranger to him.
“It’s knitted,” she corrected gently. “There is a difference.”
She turned to Dane, her brow furrowing. The calm warmth in her eyes vanished, replaced by sharp, clinical alarm.
“But you…” She stepped towards him.
Dane bristled, moving back. “I’m fine.”
“You are walking on willpower alone,” she countered, her voice dropping an octave. “Your spine is a fracture line waiting to snap. The internal inflammation is so high I can feel the heat from here.”
She pointed to the stone bench.
“Please, sit. Your legs are trembling. We don’t want to undo the patchwork holding you together.”
Dane looked at me. I nodded. “Sit down, Dane. Please.”
He gritted his teeth, his pride fighting his pain, but he sank onto the bench with a ragged exhale he couldn’t hide. The woman was at his side in a heartbeat, her hands glowing with a soft, pale light as she began to work on the air above his back.
“I’m Una,” she said, her eyes briefly meeting mine. “We have tea. And I can stabilise him, but he needs rest.”
I looked at Riven. He was watching them—Una working on Dane, the twins watching the door—with a look of total alienation. He knew the place, but he didn’t know the family that had grown here while he was gone.
“You need to sit down, Selene.” Riven said, his voice low. “You’re shaking.”
He was right. The adrenaline crash was hitting me hard.
I sat at the nearest table. Una placed a cup in front of me instantly. It smelled of mint and something earthy, like roots.
“Who are you people?” Dane asked, his voice already sounding less strained as Una’s magic took hold. “Really.”
“We are the Keepers of Vaelor,” Goran said.
He gestured to the empty tables, the rows of silent doors.
“We are what remains of the Aetherkind who chose to hide rather than conquer.”
“It’s empty,” I said, looking around the vast hall. “If you’re an organisation… where is everyone else?”
“There were once many more of us,” Goran said. “Time has thinned our ranks. But we are not gone. We still have eyes on the surface.”
“And right now,” the black-haired twin added, his grin fading, “those eyes are watching a lockdown. The police have been ordered to stand down. Private contractors are flooding the zone.”
“The designation has changed,” the silver-haired sister said. “You are priority targets now. They’re sweeping in a tightening grid with military-grade hardware. They are building a kill box.”
“He wants me,” Riven said, his voice flat. “I deserted him. I embarrassed him.”
“He wants both of you,” Aelira corrected.
She stepped forward, placing her hands on the table. Her expression was grave.
“He knows Selene helped you escape and you are working together. To a man like Korenth, that makes you both liabilities. Loose ends that need to be cut before you can talk.”
The silence in the cavernous room was stifling, the reality of the trap tightening around us.
“Then we don’t give him the chance to find us,” I said.
I reached into my bag. I retrieved the first book—The Echoes of Shattered Dawn—and placed it on the stone table. Then I removed the second item: the thick, hand-bound ledger I had snatched from the Manor desk.
Scrawled across the worn leather cover in fading silver ink was a handwritten title: Explanation of the Dawn.
I placed them side-by-side. The history and the mechanics. The Why and the How.
“My mother wrote these,” I said, running my hand over the covers. “She left them for us to find. We came here for help with a translation.”
I tapped the ledger.
“We know Korenth is planning something. The timeline is less than a week. We have the warnings, but the instructions are locked in this text.”
“I tried to read it,” Riven said, stepping closer to the table. “I can see the calculations, but the logic is locked. I don’t have the key.”
I looked at her, pleading and demanding all at once.
“You knew Liora. You know this history. Help us translate it. Tell us how to stop what’s coming.”
Aelira ran her hand over the cover of The Echoes of Shattered Dawn. Her touch was reverent, fingers tracing the embossed silver title. Then, she opened the leather-bound ledger.
She compared the two—the poetry of the history book and the frantic mathematics of the ledger.
“The Eclipse is a celestial alignment, Selene,” Aelira said softly, looking up from the text. “A window.”
“A window to what?” I asked.
“To the source of the distortions.” She pointed to a diagram in the ledger—two overlapping circles drawn in fading ink.
“Once a year, the orbit of this world aligns perfectly with the echo of another. The Eclipse marks the apex, the moment of absolute contact, but the aftershock lasts for days. During this transit, the Veil is naturally at its thinnest. For centuries, I have felt it—magic seeping in like water through a cracked dam. Just a trickle.”
Riven leaned forward, his hands bracing on the stone table. “Korenth is targeting the apex. He is building a floodgate to capture the full force of the alignment.”
He gestured to the canvas-wrapped box sitting solidly nearby.
“This must be what he was planning over two decades ago. The first murders, the extraction, the experiment on me… he was trying to pry that window open. The explosion stopped him then. But looking at Highspire now, the pattern is identical. He has rebuilt the infrastructure. He has the machine, and this time, he has sourced the power.”
“So now, with the door,” Dane said, his voice tight with suspicion. “If he opens it, what comes through?”
“That is the question,” Aelira said gravely.
She looked at me, her luminous eyes sorrowful.
“The place Korenth is trying to access is the Old World, Selene. Vaelor.”
The name hung in the damp air of the chamber, strange and sharp.
“It was our home,” Aelira said. “It was destroyed millennia ago by a war that broke the very physics of the planet. We—Liora, Eamon, myself, even Korenth and Varessia—are the descendants of those who fled the destruction. We are the Exiles. Our numbers were once great, but time has taken most of us.”
"If it was destroyed," I said, looking at the diagram, "then why does Korenth want to open a door to a graveyard?"
Aelira kept her focus on the open ledger. "Korenth believes a fraction of that world survived the cataclysm. He expects to find life."
"And he intends to prove it," she whispered. "By bringing whatever remains of it here."
"But what is it?" Dane asked. "People? Monsters?"
“We don’t know,” Riven admitted. “But Korenth is preparing for something specific.”
He looked up at me, a dark realisation crossing his face.
“The sub-basement,” he said. “Quinn Tower in Highspire. I’ve never been down there, but I’ve heard Varessia talking. She oversees the maintenance of ‘vessels’ kept in stasis.”
He looked at Aelira.