Chapter 65
A scream lodges in my throat. The blade cuts more than flesh; it’s as if it tears through a part of my raw essence.
Air leaves my lungs as little more than a gurgle. I can’t breathe. I can’t even think.
In the distance is a dull scream. Lucan? It’s so hard to hear. I feel as though I’ve been plunged underwater.
The sword pulses with power that vibrates against my insides. As though it’s alive and pulling itself even deeper—knitting itself into my being. My hands go to the hilt, but I can’t find a grip; it’s too slick from my own blood.
Then the ground beneath me flares with light.
Etherlight, golden and pure, so brilliant and potent that it lights up the entire cathedral, rushes out in jagged fractures from under my feet. It webs away from me in jagged cracks that seem random until they begin to connect. Until the lines merge and a pattern begins to show.
“Wh—Wh—” There are no words. I keep trying to grab the hilt, but my hands don’t have the strength. My fingers tremble violently as my whole body begins to shudder. The only thing keeping me upright is the blade.
The vicar’s voice cuts through my terror.
“It took me years to assemble the pieces required to activate it again. But assemble I did. Valor’s greatest work, the most magnificent artificer sigil ever conceived, will be the foundation by which your power is given to me.
There is nothing gained without sacrifice.
” The vicar looms over me for one moment longer, as though admiring a masterpiece.
And then he releases the blade and turns, strolling casually as though I’m not dying and the room isn’t awash in the golden light of Ether.
I collapse to my knees. My vision blurs, and when it comes into focus again, he’s climbed the altar steps.
There, he lies upon the altar before the statue of Valor, a tether of Ether flowing directly from the sword lodged in my body to his supine form.
There must be some kind of sigil upon it as well, something to connect it with the sword…
I’d figure it out if I wasn’t about to die.
Distant screams rise—identical to what I heard in the Font.
Straining against the pain, hand still on the bloody sword hilt, I look back.
One of the Mercy Knights is wailing, holding his gilded eye.
Molten gold drips between his fingers and fades into stardust before it hits the ground.
It’d be beautiful if it were not horrifying.
More sounds of agony rise from beyond the entry.
The ashborn look on in horror. All except Lucan. He stands perfectly still, eyes on me, shining as though illuminated by their own Ether. Pure terror on my behalf fills his expression.
My lips part, and I want to cry out. To reach for him. But I can’t move. I’m going to die, and I don’t want to die alone. Was this how Saipha felt in her final moments when I pushed her away?
The thought guts me as violently as the sword.
I look back to the vicar, but it’s hard to see him now through the surge of Etherlight.
The world blurs and fades away as Ether overwhelms my consciousness.
It is the same feeling as when the Font exploded, but more complete.
As if my body has been taken into a different time and place where the pain has vanished, as has my physical form.
For a moment, there is no beginning and no end. No me. No Ether. Just…sameness.
Slowly, the world comes back into focus, but I am no longer in the Grand Chapel of Mercy.
I stand in a cavernous space that reminds me of the deep thermal pools of the Undercrust. The clear water is a window to a rainbow of luminescent striations that bathes the space in a pale, off-white glow.
A man in his prime, with fair skin, blond hair, blue eyes, and his upper body as naked as the day he was born, wades into the water. His skin is marked with lines like an artificer’s sigils. The spring is so clear that I can see countless bones of beasts of all shapes and sizes lining its bottom.
The moment he descends into the water, there’s a burst of Etherlight that has me flinching as though a wall of fire assaulted me, bracing like I’m back in the Font.
I lift my hands to protect myself, but no pain comes.
When I lower them, I’m at the top of one of the snow-capped mountains I’ve grown up in the shadow of.
The man is there again—clothed this time. His eyes now glow a brilliant gold. He addresses a group of people beneath him with impassioned shouting. For me, the words are muffled and hazy, as if underwater. I can’t make out a single one. The people listening cheer in reply.
The man before me turns, golden eyes meeting mine as if he can see me.
One look, and the mountainside beneath me crumbles. I tumble backward, falling. For a second, I hear the beating of thousands of wings. They fade away, rising on an updraft. One remains.
Lucan.
I feel him in my blood. He’s right there, next to my heart, where he’s been all along. I reach out for a shadow. My feet meet the edge of a wall, and the world twists. I’m no longer falling but standing at the edge of a precipice.
It’s a tower that will one day become Vinguard’s wall. But the city within is gone. It’s a hollow pit that stretches deep, deep into the core of the earth—to the last remaining Font in the world. More towers stand tall at the pit’s rim. Between them, a crater is filled with…
Bones.
Thousands upon thousands of bones. Bones from what must have been half of humanity piled into this void of nothingness, framing out the depths that will become the Undercrust. The golden-eyed man next to me surveys the work with another, giving direction and input.
Once more, the words are lost—swallowed by the wind. But I catch a glimpse of the parchment.
I’m drawn closer to it.
It’s not plans for a city… It’s a massive artificer sigil. What I know as towers and the roads are all lines to draw Etherlight upon. Even disembodied as I am, my stomach churns.
Etherlight flows within everyone. Humans are the catalyst for it in the world. If one were to pile a bunch of corpses and tie them together with some kind of sigil…
It could make a Font.
“Why?” I think, and the question resonates aloud. The world liquefies at the vibration of my words like a stone thrown into a calm pond.
“To survive,” a new voice answers.
I turn, and everything shifts around me, swaying, coming back into place in a vast plain. Tall grasses sway in a wind I can’t feel. The sky overhead is a blue more brilliant than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. It never occurred to me that the scourge was so thick that it tarnished even the sky.
The man comes into focus once more, this time in simple clothing that is oddly reminiscent of what I’ve worn for weeks in the Tribunal.
“Who are you?” I ask without speaking. Even though, deep within me, I already know.
Before he can answer, he staggers back, turning his face skyward. Screams turn to roars. A swirl of Etherlight consumes him, and he begins to shift. Massive gray wings protrude from his back.
I stumble two steps, recover, and look up to find myself suddenly face-to-face with the mightiest dragon I’ve ever beheld. The statue in the monastery didn’t do it justice.
Its eye alone is so large that I could lay comfortably in its socket.
The silvery hue reminds me of the milky eyes of a great grandparent.
Yet, despite it lacking any pupil—even the slitted one of a dragon—I am acutely aware that it sees me.
Four large, curling horns protrude from its head.
Among slate and silver fans of spikes and jagged scales, long tendrils of white hair extend from its chin, behind where I’d imagine its ears to be, and down its long neck.
Its wings are speckled with holes of ancient battles.
Scars cross and line its body in angry trellises.
My throat is as barren as scourged earth.
The swirl of primeval Ether that radiates off the creature batters me.
I’m awed. I’m humbled. Reminded of just how small I am.
How grand and wonderful and terrifying the world is all at once.
Even though I’ve never beheld this monstrosity before, I know, beyond all doubt…
It’s the Elder Dragon.
I stare into its golden eyes, drowning in the swirl of its Etherlight, the visions continuing to assault me. They batter me like falling stars, too hot and too bright. But they fall into constellations in my mental landscape. Lines connect them to form a word.
I stare into the almost-dead, unseeing eye of the Elder Dragon and whisper a name:
“Valor?”
The dragon leans away. The wind whips up. And the hair on the back of my neck is instantly on edge, as there’s a massive swell of power.
The Elder Dragon opens his mouth, revealing three rows of blade-like teeth larger than my entire body. I realize a breath too late that he’s going to attack. But as he lunges for me, he disappears into nothing more than a whisper of Etherlight.
I exhale, hand still wrapped around the sword plunged through my gut.
I am back in the Grand Chapel of Mercy. The screams return to my ears—a chorus of agony sung by every citizen of Vinguard. Lines of gold are still etched upon the floor. It feels as if the entirety of the Font has been dredged up to where we all now stand.
But none of that matters now. I know the truth hidden from every citizen.
The Elder Dragon is Valor.
Valor is the Elder Dragon.
He made the Font and then changed himself into the Elder Dragon with this place.
Vinguard wasn’t humanity’s last stand. It wasn’t Valor’s fortress. It was never even a city at all.
It was an artificer sigil designed to funnel power into one man. But that power… Something in it was too much. Or twisted. And Valor became the Elder Dragon.
I don’t know how the power in the Font was able to show me all of this. Perhaps it was a piece of its artificer still trapped within it, like a maker’s mark on an invention. Or could it be that the magic itself was crying out for balance?
And now, if I don’t stop this, history will repeat itself. Only worse.
What can you do? The small, doubtful voice of the girl I once was bubbles up to the surface. You’re not Valor Reborn.
I’m not. In the end, I was nothing but a tool in a plan I don’t even fully understand. I thought myself so smart, so capable. But I never had more than half the information while fate mocked me, holding the rest.
I stare at the blade protruding from my stomach.
The only reason I’m still alive must be the Etherlight flowing through me.
Yet there’s even more I don’t understand.
I press my eyes closed, willing it to change, to be different, to wake up back at the start of the Tribunal and find a way to fix all this.
But when I open my eyes again, the sword is still there. As is the tether of Etherlight that connects me to Vicar Darius. My fingers slip again on the hilt as I reach for it, my eyes now solely focused on the man who’s made my life a living hell for years.
“No.” I force the word through gritted teeth. Past the crushing agony and endless doubt that’s tried to pull me down for the past six years.
He took everything from me. My freedom. My future. My hopes and dreams. My friends and my family. I will not let him have this power.
Maybe you’re not Valor. Lucan’s words return to me softly, as though he’s murmuring them right in my ear. I can almost feel his warmth at my back. But that doesn’t mean you can’t save this world. If anyone can find a way, it’d be you.
Vinguard deserves a hero. But all they have is a scared eighteen-year-old girl.
So I’d damn well better be enough.
I grab the hilt of the blade with purpose, my fingers finally closing around it.
Gritting my teeth, I yank on the blade and begin to pull it from my stomach.
Skin pulls and grabs and slices with every inch.
I grit my teeth past the pain, focusing on the vicar and what I have to do.
When it’s on the cusp of being too much, my rage holds me together.
Somehow, not even this kills me. It tries—oh, how it tries—but it cannot. Not with this much Etherlight surging through me.
The blade I rip out is not the same as when it entered my body.
Gone is the steel, and in its place is a sword seemingly crafted of crimson Ether—as if my blood has condensed into a glowing weapon.
Pressing my palm into my stomach, I find my skin has mended.
The wound is no longer there, a merely blood-soaked slit in my clothing.
“Isola!” Lucan cries from behind me as I cross to the dais upon which the altar and the vicar rest, my legs shaking. The sound of his voice empowers me like a surge of Ether.
My focus remains on the vicar alone. I ascend the stone steps to the altar where he lies.
His eyes flutter open as I loom over him, raising the sword aloft, holding it nearly vertical, pommel to the ceiling, point down toward him.
Etherlight no longer connects us. It swells around me alone, and all I see is red.
“What are—” His wide, frantic eyes search me. In his horror, he whispers, “It was supposed to be mine.”
“Nothing of mine was ever yours.” I bring down the blade, stabbing the point through his throat—all the way to the stone below—and killing him instantly.