Chapter 32 #3
“Aetherkind blood refuses to mix,” Karys said in a low voice, taking a seat at the wooden table. “Our mother is Light-born. Our father was a shadow wielder, like Torvin. The magic splits down the bloodline, giving you one or the other.”
“Does your father fight with you?” I asked, sitting across from her.
Karys looked down at her spoon. “He was killed before we were born.”
Orphans. I looked at the steam rising from my bowl, thinking of my own father. I had his memory; I had the certainty that I had been loved. I glanced at Riven. He had been raised by Korenth—a monster who saw him as a tool, not a son. He had been truly alone.
I let a pulse of magic drift towards him, a low hum of comfort meant only for his marrow. His eyes met mine, the silver in them softening as he caught the emotion. He didn’t speak, but the tension in his jaw eased.
We ate the rest of the meal in a comfortable silence. It was just the four of us. Goran had mentioned earlier that he and Dane would eat later, assuming Dane finished shredding the spare clothes they’d found for his shifting drills.
As I scraped the bottom of my bowl, weighted footsteps echoed from the corridor. Goran appeared in the archway, ducking slightly to clear the frame. He looked completely unbothered, though his knuckles were bruised.
“The pup is resting,” the giant rumbled. “Aelira is ready for you. She is waiting in her library.”
The stone corridors shrank with Goran and Dane in tow.
We left the twins at the junction, their footsteps receding towards the surface as they headed out for reconnaissance.
Inside the library, the scent of ink and dormant centuries settled over us once more.
Aelira emerged from the stacks and set two volumes on the table with a dull thud—the leather-bound Echoes of Shattered Dawn and Liora’s ledger.
The image of the twins' tattoos gnawed at me. Torvin's crescent moon. Karys's jagged starburst. I had seen those exact shapes before, bleeding through the margins of my mother's notes. Only Liora hadn't drawn them apart; she had forced them together.
I stepped to the table before she could open the ledger. "Aelira, I have a question," I said. I pulled my mother's history book towards me and flipped it open. "We saw a seal in Liora’s copy of The Echoes. She sketched a design—a dark arc holding a jagged core."
I held Aelira's gaze. “She tried to label it, but the ink was ruined. Do you know it?”
Aelira stayed silent. She walked to the back of the room, retrieved a massive tome, and brought it to the table. As she flipped the pages, I caught the embossed title—an ancient Vaelorian codex.
She revealed a plate of precise geometry. The symbols were unmistakable. One was an obsidian crescent—predatory. The other was a violent starburst of vertical lines.
“What are these?” I whispered.
Aelira tapped the crescent. "The symbol of Dusk. The Dark magic bloodline."
She moved her finger to the starburst. "And this represents Light magic. The symbol of Dawn."
The script beside each isolated symbol was clear, an orthodox historical record completely lacking the union my mother had drawn.
"The archives do not show the shapes fused," Aelira said softly. "But the ancient texts do speak of their collision. A warning from Vaelor."
She traced the faded script and read:
The Aether once beat with a single, unbroken heart.
Light was carried within the Dark, and the Dark anchored the Light.
Jealousy and bitter need severed the bond, fracturing the sky to forge two warring crowns.
For centuries, armies bled the earth to ash, desperate to reclaim a power they had already broken.
The slaughter will not end until the tear of dawn meets the brand of dusk.
When the severed halves collide, the ancient circuit closes.
Together, they shall reforge the balance, silencing the war and bringing salvation to the world.
The words hung in the quiet room. They echoed the history Goran had shared at breakfast, but the promise of salvation carried a terrifying weight.
Riven’s jaw tightened. He dismissed the mythos, his tactical mind hunting for the missing variable. He pointed back to the merged sketch in Liora's notebook.
"But Liora drew them locked together," Riven pressed. "She wrote 'The Seal of...' underneath. What is the rest of that title?"
Aelira frowned. "I have never seen them bound as a single seal in the archives. In Vaelorian history, the Sparks were separate entities. If Liora found a way to unify them in geometry, she took that knowledge with her."
"It reacted to us," I said. "When we touched the drawing in her book, the feedback nearly blew the windows out."
"It shows the depth of the bond," Aelira said, studying the page. "Separate or bound, these marks are the sigils of your existence. Their reaction to your touch confirms the resonance."
Aelira closed the codex and reached for my mother's arithmancy.
“The translation of the ledger is complete,” Aelira said, her voice grave. “And it confirms the timeline. The Eclipse creates a dimensional alignment. Vaelor’s echo passes close enough to thin the Veil.”
“To stop Korenth from opening that door,” Riven said, his voice flat, “we need to know the mechanism.”
“He cannot open a door that size with magical ritual alone,” Aelira said. “The energy required to punch a hole through the Veil for physical entities would vaporise a standard conduit. He needs a stabiliser. An Extractor capable of holding an immense amount of power without melting.”
“Silverite,” I said. The answer was obvious. “It is the only thing capable of holding such immense power.”
Goran’s shadow lengthened across the table as he shifted his weight. “A lethal conductor,” he rumbled. “In the old wars, we saw it liquefy entire battalions when the charge grew too high.”
“Precisely,” Aelira nodded. “Korenth has clearly learned from his failures. Exactly twenty-three years ago, the Rupture occurred because his device was unstable.”
“What if it wasn’t unstable?” Riven interrupted.
The sudden sharpness of his tone made us all look at him. “What if it was incompatible?”
He leaned in, planting his palms flat on the surface, the tendons in his hands standing out like wire.
“Assume Korenth didn’t understand the medium,” Riven said, his voice dropping to a low, rough timbre. “He thought he was just extracting magic from a child. He didn’t understand the nature of the Vessel Aelira described.”
He touched the centre of his chest, the fabric of his shirt stretching over the hidden scar.
“He spent ten years raising me in isolation, feeding the power, grooming the magic until he decided it was ripe enough to harvest.”
Riven’s eyes were cold, distant.
“He attached a raw Silverite extractor to my chest. He tried to draw the magic out,” Riven whispered.
Dane went still, his gaze fixed on the table as if he could see the ghost of the machine Riven was describing.
“But if the Vessel acts like a womb…” Riven continued, his voice regaining its edge. “It holds the power only until birth. Once the Spark is awakened, the Vessel becomes rigid. It flows outward. It cannot be forced back in.”
“And that caused the feedback loop,” Aelira realised, her eyes widening. “You think the casing rejected the flow?”
“I think that is the truth,” Riven said slowly, staring at the wood grain as if he could see the fire there. “I was in pain. Panicking. I tried to wrench the extractor off, to stop the process. But my magic was already surging against the constraint.”
He looked up, his eyes dark.
“Infinite resistance meeting infinite force. The structure couldn’t hold the contradiction. It atomised.”
“Like trying to force smoke back into burning wood,” Dane muttered from the sidelines. Goran caught Dane’s eye, a grim understanding passing between two wolves.
The implications hit me hard.
“He doesn’t have the Shadow Vessel anymore,” Riven said. “I destroyed it. The Shard I brought with me is all that’s left.”
“So what is he using?” I asked, looking between them. “He needs a Silverite core to hold the charge for the Eclipse. If Riven’s is in a box…”
“He’s using the other one,” Riven said softly.
He looked at me.
“If you are the Light Spark, Selene, you had a Vessel too. Before you were awakened. Liora and Eamon must have had it.”
The pieces of the past ten years locked together, locking into a terrifying picture.
“My dad…” I whispered.
“Ten years ago,” I said, my voice unsteady. “He retired overnight. I remember the night he came home, his right hand crushed, claiming a raid had gone wrong. He swore he was just getting too old for active duty.”
I looked at Aelira.
Aelira closed her eyes, a look of crushing sorrow crossing her face. “Yes. In a cache far away from the city. And ten years ago, the Dark Ones found it.”
“Eamon tried to defend it,” I realised, the memory of his injury taking on a new, terrible shape. “But he failed. They have the Vessel now.”
Goran bowed his head slightly, a rare show of deference. “He didn’t fail, Selene. He bought you ten years of silence. That hand was a small price for a decade of safety.”
“And now he has used it to build the new machine,” I said, my voice steadying. “The core of the engine at Highspire… It’s my Vessel. An empty casing waiting to be filled.”
“We can’t dismantle it,” Riven said. “Taking it apart requires time we won't get. Korenth will have the core locked down under a heavy guard.”
“Then we overload it,” I said, looking at him. “We do exactly what you did back then. If I touch that device and pour everything I have into it, it will hit the empty Light-Vessel.”
“And if my theory holds, it will reject you,” Riven said. “Violently.”
“Catastrophic failure,” Aelira breathed. “It would vaporise the mechanism.”
“And probably me,” I added.