Chapter 65 #3
The old Druid stood a few paces away, staff braced against the unseen floor, his face turned toward the current beneath the Fold. The slaughter below painted faint reflections across his spectacles.
Beyond him, the entity had gone very still, his pale gaze fixed through the rift on the shore beneath them—watching mortals die.
No—watching was too harmless a word. He drank in their suffering, his expression almost serene as shades tore through the wounded below. Each scream seemed to move through him like a drug. Each death drew some sick pleasure across his perfect face.
Elara’s stomach turned, but the revulsion cut cleanly through her fear.
He was distracted.
And Algernon had seen it too.
A cold thread wound through her chest.
“Algernon,” she said under her breath.
His eyes shifted to hers, but nothing in his face changed, and somehow that was worse. There was no panic there, no uncertainty, no tremor of doubt to seize and widen into persuasion. Only a grave, dreadful calm. The kind that made arguments useless before they were spoken.
Elara understood him then with the sick force of a door closing.
He was still going to do it.
Her hand shot out, catching his sleeve. The fabric bunched beneath her fingers as Ivan pulled at her from the other side, and for one suspended moment she was caught between them: Ivan dragging her toward the living, Algernon standing with the dead, and the whole Fold breathing around them like a thing waiting to see which grief would win.
She did not say the words pressing against her teeth.
Algernon’s eyes softened, and for one unbearable moment, he looked almost fond, almost proud.
Elara saw herself in the Sanct in a sudden, painful flash—the hush between towering shelves, dust caught in the lamplight, and Algernon smiling across the table as he told her he was rather keen to see how her story unfolded.
The same smile lingered there now, and it felt too much like goodbye.
The words he would not speak crossed the space between them anyway.
Go.
Save yourself.
Elara’s throat closed.
No.
The entity’s head tilted, slight enough to be nothing, but Elara felt the moment change. His attention loosened from the carnage below, drawn back by the tension in her hand, by Algernon’s stillness, by the staff braced against the river of souls.
Panic moved through Elara with icy precision. She could not overpower him, could not warn Algernon, could not explain the danger to Ivan without handing the entity every piece of it.
So she did the only thing left.
She gave him a question.
“Did I ever ask your name?”
The entity stopped, his attention snapping to her so quickly the nearest soul-fields trembled, their lights pulling inward as if startled by the force of it.
Elara held his gaze and kept her face still, even as every instinct screamed to look at Algernon, to look at Ivan, to watch the staff, the current, the narrowing seconds between one choice and its consequence.
“In all those lives,” she said, each word measured and forced through the tightness in her throat. “All those times I found you. Did any version of me ever ask what you were called?”
For the first time, the entity’s perfect face lost its polished allure, only for a breath, only long enough for something old and unguarded to pass behind his eyes. Then his mouth curved, faint and unwilling.
“Of course you did,” he said, his voice softening into something almost intimate. “You were always far too curious for your own good.”
The cost opened inside her: another clean absence, another place hollowed out before she could name what had lived there. Seven now. Seven pieces taken so neatly she could not mourn them properly, only feel the missing spaces pressing against her insides.
The entity sneered. “But I never told you. And I never will.”
He opened his mouth, and for one terrible second, she thought he might say it anyway.
Then he stopped, his gaze sliding past her to Algernon who had one hand braced on his staff, the other lifted toward the bloodlit current below, his lips shaping words Elara could not hear.
Draoth sank from the old wood into the unseen floor, dense and earthen, and the Fold groaned as branching veins of power forced their way toward Osin’s hidden root.
The river of souls convulsed.
The entity’s expression emptied of every human imitation, and he crossed the distance between one heartbeat and the next.
The stars fled from him, soul-fields scattering in bright, terrified currents as his robes streamed behind him like night dragged loose from the sky.
Ivan lunged, pulling Elara with him, but the entity was already upon Algernon.
“You dare,” he breathed.
Algernon drove the staff deeper into the Fold, and a vein like burning copper split beneath the force of it, a seam of white opening through Osin’s kingdom.
“You dare trick me at my own threshold?”
Algernon looked at Elara once.
Only once.
Then the entity’s hand sank into his chest and tore out his heart.