Chapter 36 #2
“No!” The word was torn from me by pure instinct. I lunged, my hand snapping out to grab his vest, but my fingers caught only empty air.
His scream was swallowed by the wind.
I stood at the edge, my pulse hammering. I was a detective. I was sworn to save lives. Guilt tightened my throat as his shape vanished into the smog and neon below, but I shoved it down. Behind me, the Extractor hummed—a threat that if I failed, thousands more would follow.
I forced myself to turn away from the ledge and face the machine.
Silence returned to the roof, broken only by the terrifying churn of the Extractor.
I reached the construct, an industrial engine built for a singular purpose. At the bottom sat the reservoir, a reinforced tank churning with my father’s harvested essence. The fluid inside thrashed against the glass, spiralling upward.
Above it, clamped to the foot of the chrome spire, sat the Silverite shard. A jagged slab of dark metal locked in a magnetic vice, it vibrated with tension, focusing the volatile fluid into a blinding beam that pierced the sky.
I stepped forward.
The Eclipse reached its zenith.
The black disk locked perfectly over the sun, strangling the morning light.
The world plunged into a premature, suffocating night.
Below, the streetlights of Ravenholt blinked on in confused waves, but up here, the only light came from the bruised violet tear in the sky and the blinding, relentless throb of the construct.
I holstered the dagger and reached up, pressing my palms flat against the Extractor’s glass casing, directly over the shard.
The restraint snapped—an unconditional surrender to the power stored in my blood. Light poured from me, flooding the Extractor.
The moment my Light hit the Silverite core, the construct screamed.
A mechanical shriek of metal under torture tore through the air. The chrome spire vibrated violently. The Silverite shard flared white-hot, trying to reject the foreign energy just as Riven had predicted. It wanted to explode.
But it didn’t. Korenth had armoured it.
The explosion I tried to trigger didn’t shatter the spire. It hit an invisible wall—a secondary containment field clamping down on the reaction.
It compressed my power.
The energy I poured in had nowhere to go. It rebounded off the barriers and crashed back into my body. The pressure was excruciating. I had detonated a grenade inside a diamond vault, and I was the only soft thing in the room.
My muscles trembled. The heat singed the hair on my skin.
Above me, the sky tore open further. The beam shooting from the spire widened, piercing the Rift and anchoring the two worlds together.
Our plan wasn’t working. The restraints were too strong. The vessel rejected me, but the cage held it all in.
“Break!” I screamed, throwing every ounce of rage, every spark of the golden fire living in my blood against the shield.
I pushed until my vision blurred. I pushed until I felt the bond with Riven stretch thin, draining the very last dregs of my reserve.
But the spire held.
My knees buckled. The backlash threw me off the spire.
I slid down the hot glass of the casing, leaving streaks of sweat and ash. I hit the gravel hard, slumped against the cold metal side of the reservoir tank at the bottom.
I lay there, gasping, my chest heaving.
I reached for the Light. Nothing.
I reached for the Shadow. Nothing.
I was empty. Burned out.
Above me, the Rift heaved—a widening maw of violet darkness.
The hum of the Extractor grew louder, triumphant.
I had failed. I was letting Vaelor’s collapse happen again—the same Schism between Light and Dark that had broken the physics of the Old World and turned it into a graveyard.
If Korenth brought those ancient horrors through, Ravenholt would become the next site of that endless slaughter, and I would be the reason this world burned just like the last. I was a hollow shell, failing my team, failing Riven, and wasting the sacrifice my parents had made to keep my Spark alive.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my head lolling back against the metal of the tank. “Dad… I’m sorry. I’m not strong enough.”
And then I heard it, a crack.
The sound was small, but in the silence of my defeat, it sounded like a gunshot.
I turned my head.
The reservoir tank next to my ear—the one holding the fuel—had a hairline fracture in the reinforced glass. The pressure of the core working so hard to contain me was crushing the fuel supply.
The silver fluid inside paused in its swirling. It pressed against the glass. Seeking me.
I lifted a trembling hand. I reached out and touched the crack.
The barrier gave way.
The silver fluid surged out of the tank in a luminous wave that crashed directly into my chest.
It didn’t hurt. It felt like breathing after holding your breath for twenty years.
Eamon’s magic flooded my veins, filling the hollow spaces where my own Light had burned out. It was memory.
The roof vanished. The storm vanished.
I was five years old, sitting on a rug that smelled of dust. Sunlight streamed through a window, catching the dust motes. A hand, large and calloused, brushed my hair back.
“You are safe here, Little Sun. Always safe.”
The smell of cedar. The scratch of a wool jumper. The sound of a deep, rumbling laugh that vibrated against my ear as he held me.
I saw Liora. Not the photo in the frame, but alive. She was turning from a bookshelf, her eyes bright with a secret joke, smiling at Eamon in a way that made the air feel warm.
I felt the love between them—a solid, unshakeable foundation that had held up the sky for as long as they lived.
And I felt their love for me.
It grounded me with a crushing certainty—absolute, unconditional, and fierce. This was the joy of the beginning.
My Little Sun.
The memories swirled, becoming fuel. The silver magic knit itself to the embers of my golden fire, doubling and tripling in intensity. This was his final gift.
My eyes flew open, burning and streaming with tears, as a new heat radiated through my limbs. I grabbed the rim of the tank and hauled myself up. The combined power of two souls—the Light of the daughter and the Light of the father—surged through my veins, screaming for release.
I aimed for the heart. I raised my hands and drove them into the Extractor’s containment field.
“Go home, Dad,” I whispered.
The barrier buckled. It was built to hold one, and I was giving it two. The chrome spire turned white-hot. Glass shattered, raining down in jagged sheets. The beam shooting into the sky destabilised, twisting into a violent explosion of white fire that tore the Extractor apart from the inside.
Above, the violet tear in the sky convulsed. The darkness recoiled from the blinding light.
With a sound like the world cracking in half, the Rift snapped shut.
The feedback loop slammed into me. I was thrown backward, airborne for a second, before hitting the gravel with bone-jarring force. I rolled, coming to a stop near the edge of the roof.
The quiet that followed was total. The wind had died.
I lay on my back, staring up at the sky. The violet was fading, replaced by the leaden, natural grey of storm clouds.
My chest was still. My limbs were numb.
My vision began to tunnel, black creeping in from the sides.
It’s done, I thought. The thought was slow, drifting like a leaf.
Movement at the periphery.
A figure sprinted across the roof, emerging from the access hatch.
Riven.
He was running, stumbling over the debris of the shattered machine. His mouth was open, shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him. The sound had been scrubbed from the world.
He looked terrified.
I tried to lift my hand, to tell him it was okay, but my arm wouldn’t move.
The blackness washed over me, total and soft.
Just before the dark took me completely, I felt a touch on my cheek. Not Riven’s cool hand. It was warm. Rough. Calloused. A phantom thumb brushing away a tear.
Goodbye, my daughter.
I closed my eyes, and the world went away.