Chapter 18 Esme
ESME
My eyes are fixed on the altar, on the hulking slab of dark stone that is Merlin’s final resting place. The air around it is so cold it feels like it’s pulling the heat from my skin.
Dayn's presence, behind me, burns into my back like a brand. I'd braced for him to intervene, to grab my arm or growl some command. But instead he just... waits. Watches. I’m not sure why I find that more disconcerting.
“The old communion rites are insufficient for our purpose,” Warden Blythe begins, her voice low, arresting my thoughts.
She gestures to the slab. “We are not merely seeking guidance. We are attempting to channel a fundamental force, the very Ide of a progenitor of our line, and anchor it to our failing spiritual grid. To do that, the conduit must be… tempered.”
She turns her assessing gaze on me. “The old trial system, long since abandoned, will be repurposed. Three trials, Esme. Each one designed to stress and strengthen your connection to the bloodline, to the very essence of what it means to be a Salem. To make you a vessel strong enough to contain a god. To prove yourself worthy of it.”
“The old trial system was abandoned because it was deemed too psychologically destabilizing,” Brynn cuts in, her voice strained. She takes a step toward me. “Esme, they literally drove witches insane with—”
“As I explained,” Blythe interrupts sharply, “while following the template, this will not precisely be the old trial system. The conditions now are different, not least because of Esme’s particular… configuration.” Her gaze locks on me. “I am confident you’re strong enough to succeed.”
I nod, lips pressed into a line, keeping my focus fixed on the elder darkblood—on those bird-of-prey eyes, her severe, silver-streaked hair—and no one else.
The soldier in me is sick of the preamble.
All the forethought and second-guessing.
“Let’s just get the first stage done,” I say dryly. “Then we’ll see if I’m still alive.”
“The first trial is the Grave Recall,” Blythe says, her voice steady, her cool gaze never leaving mine.
“In this, you will not simply commune with an ancestor, you will become them. You will inhabit their final moments, feel what they felt, wield the magic they wielded as they died. It is a powerful test of empathy and control.” She places a shallow silver bowl on the floor before me.
“The connection must be pure. We will select the one whose presence runs strongest in you… Esther.”
My stomach clenches. Esther. My grandmother. My namesake. The formidable spirit I’ve communed with my entire life. I wasn’t even able to reach her earlier, but now I’m about to see through her eyes as they closed for the last time… if this works.
“Kneel,” Blythe commands.
I obey, sinking to my knees on the cold stone. The fabric of my robes pools around me. My heart hammers a steady, disciplined rhythm against my ribs. This is it. No more stalling. Just duty.
I narrow my eyes, determined to block out every other presence in the room as the ancient yet formidable darkblood begins to chant in the Old Tongue—that primordial language of darkbloods few have mastered, said to predate written history itself, born when magicals first split into light and dark.
Blythe’s voice rises and falls in a hypnotic cadence.
She sprinkles a fine black powder into the silver bowl.
It ignites with a flash of violet light, and the scent of burnt sage and something ancient, like petrified lightning, fills the room.
The light from the bowl casts dancing shadows on the walls, twisting the familiar chamber into something alien.
“Esme Salem, blood of her blood,” Blythe intones, her eyes locking with mine. “Let the river of time bend. Let the veil between souls thin. Recall the grave. Remember the end.”
The violet light surges, spilling from the bowl and rushing toward me.
It hits me like a thousand icy needles piercing my skin, my mind, my very soul.
The chamber dissolves. Brynn’s horrified face, Dayn’s burning golden eyes, the stone walls—they all melt away into a screaming vortex of color and noise.
I am unmade, torn apart, my consciousness scattered like dust.
Then, just as suddenly, I am re-formed.
The first thing I feel is pain. A deep, grinding agony in my left side, as if a white-hot spear has been driven through my ribs.
The air is thick with the coppery stench of blood—my blood—and the acrid smell of spent spell-fire.
I’m leaning against the rough bark of a massive, black-barked tree, the same kind that surrounds Darkbirch, but older, wilder.
My own hands—no, her hands, slender and pale and stained crimson—are pressed against the wound in a futile attempt to hold myself together.
Magic thrums in my veins, a familiar, powerful current, but it’s frayed, exhausted. My vision swims.
Around me, the forest is a slaughterhouse.
Darkblood bodies lie twisted among the roots of the ancient trees, their robes stained dark with their own lives.
The air rings with the clash of enchanted weapons and the shriek of dying magic.
I can see them through the haze of my failing sight—clearbloods, moving in disciplined formations, their armor gleaming with silver purification runes, their hands blazing with white light.
They are winning. They have already won.
But fear is distant, a faint echo behind the roaring wall of pain and a cold, unyielding fury. I am Esther Esme Salem. I am the matriarch of my line. And I will not die kneeling.
With a gasp that feels like swallowing broken glass, I try to push myself up, to find my feet, to raise a hand and call the darkness.
My mind screams the incantations, but my body—Esther’s body—refuses to obey.
The hole in my side is a gaping maw of agony, and I can feel other, smaller wounds weeping blood down my back and legs.
Five of them are coming for me now. Their faces are grim masks of certainty, their steps measured. The end. They see a wounded matriarch, a prize to be taken, a final nail in the coven’s coffin.
The warrior in me, the part that is purely Esme, rages against this broken vessel. I want to fight. I want to tear the shadows from the trees and wrap them around their throats. I want to feel their bones snap in my hands. But all I can do is kneel, my breath a ragged, wet sound in my own ears.
But Esther… she is not finished.
A different kind of will takes over, ancient and absolute.
Her hand, trembling with resolve, dips into the pool of her own blood gathering on the ground.
My fingers—her fingers—trace a rune in the dirt.
The first stroke is a line of sacrifice.
I feel a tug deep in my core, a giving away of life force that is both terrifying and exhilarating.
Another wound on my arm, one I hadn’t even registered, splits open wider, feeding the spell.
The pain is a secondary concern to the intricate, lethal mathematics of the magic taking shape.
The clearbloods are closer. Ten feet. Their light intensifies, a cleansing fire meant to scour me from the world.
Another rune. A symbol of binding, of connection.
It links my life force to theirs. A third, a final, vicious character that means unraveling.
Annihilation. The cold of true death creeps up my spine, a lover’s icy hand closing around my neck.
The spell is complete. It is a suicide bomb powered by a soul.
The lead clearblood raises his hand, his mouth forming the first syllable of a killing curse.
Esther smiles. A bloody, triumphant, terrible smile. And I feel her let go.
The world implodes. The magic I’ve drawn in the earth ignites, not with light or fire, but with a profound and absolute negation. A wave of unmaking rushes out from me. I feel my own heart stop, my lungs collapse, my very bones turn to dust.
But I also feel their shock, their terror, as the spell latches onto them.
I feel their bright light snuffed out like a candle in a vacuum.
I feel their life force unraveling, torn from them and consumed by the void I have created.
I experience five deaths at once, on top of my own.
It is a symphony of endings, a final, perfect chord of mutual destruction.
And then… silence. Nothingness. The trial is over.
Except it isn’t.
The darkness doesn’t last. A warm, golden light begins to bloom at the edges of my perception.
It’s not the harsh, sterile light of the clearbloods.
This is different. It feels… familiar. Like the heat of a forge, the core of a sun.
It’s the… dragon blood? Dayn’s essence… a stubborn, living fire that refuses to be extinguished, and it’s wrapping around what’s left of me.
I am no longer in a body. I am… a perspective. A point of awareness floating above the carnage. I look down and see the gray, withered husk that was Esther’s body, surrounded by the equally desiccated remains of her killers. I have become a spirit.
This isn’t how the Grave Recall is supposed to work. You experience the death, you learn from it, and you return. You don’t become the ghost.
Or am I somehow still tethered to Esther, to the memory of her spirit?
The golden light pulses, and my senses expand in a way that is both terrifying and sublime.
I can see the battlefield in the world of the living—the trees, the bodies, the blood.
But I can also see the spirit realm layered over it, a shimmering, ethereal landscape.
From the fallen darkbloods, faint, pale-gray shapes of their souls are rising, confused and untethered, drifting like smoke in a still room.
Many are screaming, their mouths open in silent horror as they realize what's happened.
Then I see them. Far across the battlefield, circling high above the worst of the slaughter, are things that are not…
spirits. They are blacker than night, wisps of smoke that twist and writhe with a palpable hunger.
They keen and hiss, a sound that I feel in my new, non-physical form as a strange, soul-deep vibration.
They feed on the pain, on the agony of the dying, on the despair of the newly dead.
Ides.
They turn, their collective non-gaze seeming to fix on me, as if they sense me. As if they sense my power.
And as they turn, something inside me shifts.
A new sensation rips through me. It is not pain, but a profound, hollow ache.
A hunger that doesn’t feel like my own. A need so absolute it eclipses thought, eclipses memory.
The world of ghosts and pale light winks out, and I am falling into a blackness that promises to fill me.
I am ripped back into my body with a scream that tears my throat raw.
The black hunger vanishes, replaced by the hard, cold shock of the stone floor against my cheek.
My lungs burn, heaving for air that doesn't taste of death.
The chamber swims back into focus—the altar, the shadows, the terrified face of my sister.
“Esme!” Brynn’s voice is shrill with panic.
Hands are on me. One pair is cool, familiar, Brynn’s fingers digging into my shoulder.
The other is a furnace, Dayn’s hand scorching my back, a grounding weight of pure power that both steadies and suffocates me.
He hauls me to my knees with an effortless strength, his other arm circling my waist, holding me upright as my body trembles uncontrollably.
“She did it,” I hear Warden Blythe say, her voice devoid of relief, filled only with a grim, clinical satisfaction. She steps into my wavering field of vision, her face an unreadable mask. In her hand, a small silver knife glints in the violet light still pulsing from the ritual bowl.
“Wait,” Brynn chokes out. “She needs a moment. She needs—”
Blythe already has my left hand, her grip like a vise.
“Her blood is needed after every trial.” The silver blade flashes.
A sharp, biting pain slices across my palm, and my own blood, dark and hot, wells up.
The next thing I know, Blythe is pressing my palm flat against the ancient, rune-carved stone.
The moment my blood touches it, a low, grinding groan starts deep within the earth, a sound that I feel in my teeth, in my bones.
The entire chamber seems to lurch, a violent tremor that throws Brynn off balance.
Dust and small stones rain down from the vaulted ceiling.
The tombstone beneath my hand begins to glow with a strange, white light—completely different from the violet light of the ritual.
The world shrinks to a pinhole, darkness creeping in from all sides.
My hand's throbbing, the ground's violent shaking, even Dayn's feral rumble—everything recedes into distant echoes.
Only one sight remains: my blood seeping into ancient stone, transforming before my eyes from crimson to something otherworldly—veins of midnight shadow intertwining with threads of liquid sunlight.
Then I surrender to the void.