Chapter 32 #2
The hush that followed was crushing. We were all just debris, I realised. Fragments of a magic that didn’t belong in this world, washing up on this shore, trying to pretend we were people.
“Well,” I said, breaking the silence before it could crush us. I picked up my spoon again. “That explains why you listen to me.”
Dane let out a short, rough snort of laughter. The tension snapped.
“Don’t push your luck, Rowan,” he muttered, though he looked at Goran with a hard-won respect. “I ignore at least forty percent of what you say.”
“Fifty,” I corrected.
“Sixty on weekends.”
Goran didn’t smile, but the lines around his eyes seemed to deepen, just a little. He picked up a mug of water.
“Eat,” the ancient soldier commanded. “We will need our strength for what is to come.”
The breakfast dishes were gone, but the revelation about the Vor-Kahn still lingered. We relocated to the far end of the atrium, stepping into Aelira’s workspace—a small library enclosed by rune-etched glass, sealing in the smell of ink and dormant centuries.
Aelira stood by a high shelf, her fingers trailing over the spines of books that looked older than the city above us.
I sat at the heavy wooden table. My hands were wrapped around the battered copy of The Little Sun and the Little Moon, my eyes fixed on its exposed binding.
Movement at the edge of the room caught my eye.
Riven stepped out of the shadows. He had showered and changed, trading his ruined suit for simple, dark tactical gear that the Keepers must have kept in their stores.
He looked sharper, colder. The raw, bleeding vulnerability of the tunnel was gone, sealed away behind a mask of professional detachment.
He moved silently to the edge of the table, leaning against the wall, putting himself in the conversation but keeping his distance.
“You have questions,” Aelira said, looking between us.
“We have Highspire breathing down our necks,” Riven said, his voice rough. “Korenth has locked down the district because we embarrassed him. We broke into his tower, we stole his secrets, and we left his elite guards bleeding on the floor of my home. We’re targets because we provoked him.”
Aelira turned slowly. Her eyes held a weight that made Riven’s tactical assessment feel small.
“Do you truly believe that?” she asked softly. “Do you believe he is hunting you simply because you are a loose end?”
“Maybe we are not only that,” I said, my voice low.
Riven looked at me, frowning.
I pulled Liora’s green leather journal from my bag and flipped straight to the page.
“My mother wrote about me,” I said. “She wrote about me like I was an event.”
I looked up at Aelira.
“She wrote: ‘We have awakened her. Gods help us, we have woken the sun.’”
I closed the book gently.
“What does that mean, Aelira? Eamon was terrified of what would happen if I was ever discovered. He loved me, but he kept the truth locked away to protect me. He never told me what I was.”
“He wanted you to be safe,” Aelira said.
“He wanted me to be human!” I snapped. “But I’m not, am I? Humans aren’t ‘awakened.’ Humans don’t have power that scares their own parents.”
Aelira sighed. She walked to a nearby shelf—a section protected by a rune-etched glass door. She tapped the lock, her finger shining with a faint, pale light, and the glass swung open.
She slid out a book. It was enormous, bound in cracked black leather, the spine ridged like a dragon’s back. She placed it on the table and opened it.
The pages were vellum, thick and yellowed. It showed two distinct spheres of energy—one blindingly white, one pitch black—encircled by protective runes.
“The magic of the universe seeks balance,” Aelira began. “It is a fundamental law. When the Veil—the barrier that separates Aurathen from the void—is threatened, the Aether responds. It creates a counter-weight.”
She tapped the white sphere.
“At the beginning of our time here, when the Exiles arrived, two Sparks were brought into existence. One of pure Light. One of pure Dark. They were created to ensure balance.”
She looked at me.
“These Sparks were not born like humans are, Selene. They were created as a failsafe,” Aelira said. “A final counter-measure designed to restore balance if the wars between Light and Dark threatened to destroy this world as they did the last.”
She tapped the page, her finger resting between the white and black spheres.
“They were encased in Silverite structures woven into the metaphysics of your bloodline. We called them Vessels. They were like wombs, Selene, made of star-metal and deep magic, designed to hold the Spark in stasis until the world needed them.”
She looked up at me.
“You are the Light, Selene. You were created to prevent the destruction of the world. But the mechanism requires two poles. A circuit cannot close with only one contact point.”
Aelira turned her gaze towards the place where Riven stood. “But the Dark Spark was lost. Stolen long ago by the Dark Aetherkind to weaponise it. To twist it.”
The room stilled. I looked at Riven, recalling his scars. The dream he mentioned once—tables, needles, extraction. The way he spoke of being a “specimen” in a lab at ten years old. Stolen.
I held his gaze. “It’s you,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Aelira said gently.
Riven pushed off the wall. He walked slowly to the table, staring down at the black sphere on the page.
“Eamon told me,” he said quietly. “The night he gave me the journal. He called me the Shadow Spark, but I refused to believe it.” The realisation turned his voice hollow. “That’s why Korenth never killed me. He kept me close all those years.”
“He knew what you were, or at least he suspected the truth,” Aelira confirmed. “Varessia and Korenth arrived in this world along with us. They remember the old ways. They assumed that if they could control the Shadow Spark, they could control an immense power.”
She shook her head.
“But they missed a fundamental truth: without the Light, there is no Dark. Your power was incomplete.”
She looked at him with sorrow.
“You were never meant to be imprisoned, Riven. The Dark Spark was meant to be a guardian. They were trying to turn a shield into a sword.”
Riven stared at the book. His hands formed tight fists at his sides.
“So we’re weapons,” he said bitterly. “That’s it. We’re just biological failsafes created to clean up a mess we didn’t make.”
“In a sense,” Aelira corrected. “But you are also the hands that wield them. You have a choice. You can let the power consume you, or you can master it.”
“The design required absolute unity. Your sparks were held in the Silverite structures for millennia to preserve that purity. You are two halves of a whole, kept apart by time and malice. Light and Shadow. Sword and Shield.”
She shut the tome with a dull thud.
“And now that you have found one another, the alignment between you is the only thing strong enough to stop what’s coming.”
I looked at Riven. His eyes locked on mine, the silver in his irises tracking my every breath.
The connection between us—the singing in my marrow, the quiet that settled over my magic when he was near—it wasn’t just a coincidence of war. It was a terrifying symmetry. It was a pull that made me want to cross the room and press my hands to his chest, just to feel the circuit close.
According to the texts, we were an archaic counter-measure forged to keep the world from unravelling. But looking at the tension in his jaw, I knew we weren’t a completed machine. We were simply two people holding a power we barely understood. I stood up, pushing my chair back.
“If we are the weapon, we need the firing mechanism,” I said. “How much longer on the ledger translation?”
Aelira gathered the leather-bound ledger from the table. “Liora’s arithmancy is brilliant, but incredibly dense. I need a few more hours to decode the mechanics of the Eclipse. Eat. Rest. I will find you when I have your answers.”
My brain struggled to process Aelira’s revelation. Halves of a whole. Sword and shield. The weight of it should have consumed me, but as we walked through the dim corridors, my stomach interrupted with a loud growl. Even waiting for the apocalypse, people needed to eat.
“You’re pouring half the bag in there! It’s tomato soup, Torvin, not a pudding!” Karys shouted from the kitchen.
“I am balancing the acidity, Karys,” Torvin fired back. “Which you would know if you didn’t consistently burn water every time you tried to boil an egg.”
I leaned against the stone frame of the kitchen. Their bickering breathed life into the bunker’s dead air. Riven claimed a chair in the corner, his posture rigid. He didn’t relax, but he let his gaze drift towards the steam.
“Need a hand?” I asked.
“That’s the plan,” Torvin said, “provided you stop Karys before she ruins the batch and we all go hungry.”
Karys rolled her eyes, but stepped back to let me stir. As Torvin reached for a spice jar on the high shelf, his sleeve slid down. A small tattoo sat on the inside of his wrist—an upturned crescent moon.
“What’s the ink?” I asked.
Torvin paused, turning his wrist over. “This? Symbol of the Dark-born Aetherkind. I’m a shadow wielder.”
I looked at Karys. “You have one too?”
She wiped her hands and flipped her wrist. A jagged starburst sat mirrored on her skin. “I carry the Light.”
Riven stood, the chair legs scraping the stone. He came closer, eyes locking on the marks. “Have you ever seen them together? Bound as one seal?”
Torvin shook his head, ladling thick red soup into four bowls. “Never. These marks have existed separately since the early days of Vaelor, thousands of years before the Exiles crashed onto this world.”
“How does that work?” I asked, taking the bowl Torvin handed me. “You’re twins. How do you end up with two entirely different magic types?”