Chapter 21 #4
Morgen's sword dropped from his fingers.
Kaden kept his but his knees buckled, hitting the floor.
Loclyn's magic still clamped Nyx. She couldn't move, but he hadn't actively drawn from her again, his focus on draining Kaden and Morgen. Nyx took her tenuous reprieve, fought against the growing lassitude enveloping her, and clawed her way back into Kaliaris’s senses.
Seizing control of the Station again, she dropped Kaden, Morgen, and Tristen through the floor, but instead of putting them in the basement with Loclyn's people—who were nearly up the long staircase and to the door that led back to the cafe—she shunted them sideways and down, into Morgen's laboratory.
It didn't break Loclyn's hold on them. They were one floor and multiple rooms away and she could still feel his magic stretching through Kaliaris, killing them.
Desperate, she grasped her Hidden magic and flung it out, trying to Hide the points where Loclyn's magic latched onto them, as she'd once done in the Shadow Market when Maruca's had latched onto her.
It had worked, then. But Maruca Moor had not been an energy mage for nine centuries.
And Maruca, while irritated, had not been trying to kill Nyx.
Her connection had been a mere thread of magic.
Loclyn's was all-encompassing, tentacles clamped around her and the others.
She would have to Hide them entirely. She strained, her magic flexing, weaving layer after layer between Loclyn's magic and her friends.
Every stitch was a fire in her mind, every reserve of her magic pushing against Loclyn's knowledge of their presence.
Pushing against his magic's knowledge that it grasped them. She shoved with everything she had and felt Kaden and Morgen flicker out of Loclyn’s sight.
The tentacles of his magic flexed, seeking.
Nyx hurt, arcs of pain screeching through her as she refused to let go of her magic.
She couldn't hold it much longer. A second. Maybe two. She had to move Kaden, Morgen, and Tristen before she gave out and Loclyn found them again.
When she reached for the Station, it felt like her mind splintered.
Her vision grayed as she shoved her people through the wall, out onto the Station grounds.
Her magic—and Kaliaris—slipped from her grip once more.
She heard a door slam open behind Loclyn, knew his Devoted had returned when he snapped, “Take care of the other three. This one is mine.”
They didn’t argue. She only hoped Kaden and Morgen could handle the others. Or that they had been smart enough to run. But she knew them. They wouldn’t run.
Loclyn’s magic drank from her again. A slow sip, this time, as if tasting her rather than seeking to drain her immediately. Footsteps drew nearer and his shadow fell over her.
“What are you?” Loclyn's voice held the kind of curiosity that came when a person hadn’t found anything truly interesting in years, and had finally discovered something new and wondrous. “What have you become?”
Loclyn brushed the hair from her face, his fingertips tracing the spiral pattern of the chaos thorns in her cheek. She tried to brush him off, her hand jerking a few inches off the ground before a fresh draw from his magic stole her strength and her muscles gave out.
“No, no,” Loclyn murmured, stroking her cheek. His voice was almost tender, now. “Don't rise.” His fingers trailed down her neck, stopping when they hit the chain of her necklace. The chain that was no longer Hidden. The chain that held the Harvester.
Use me, it called to her. She could feel its promise to devour him.
But she couldn't use it. Not now. She didn't know if she was dying, but she knew she was holding onto consciousness by a thread. She had barely restrained the Harvester in Mary’s shop, when she had been at full strength.
If she let it loose now, she could not contain it.
It would take Loclyn, yes. But then it would take everything she loved.
More of her energy siphoned away as Loclyn tugged the necklace from beneath her shirt. In her mind, someone was screaming at her. An ancient voice and a furious one, demanding that she find A-Queltr. What a ridiculous notion. A-Queltr was peace. She could not find peace in all this pain.
Loclyn inhaled sharply as the Harvester fell into his palm. “Here, all this time.”
Finding peace in pain is what A-Morridahns do, Alihana bellowed in her mind. Or are you not one after all?
She would have laughed, if she'd had the strength. All this time, Alihana kept telling her she was only half Salyrian, and now that it mattered to them, they expected her to be whole. She swallowed and felt the rock resting against the hollow of her throat bob with the movement.
Seth. Seth was peace.
A doorway to a tower opened in her mind. She walked through it. Down the tower stairs, out the door onto frozen slopes, across to where the ledge of A-Queltr waited. Outside A-Queltr, in the physical world, Loclyn ripped the Harvester from her neck, the chain biting into her skin as it tore free.
“Can I—” Her voice, hoarse from all the screaming, gave out. She tried again. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked Loclyn, her words the softest of whispers.
"Of course." Loclyn was jubilant, as if mesmerized by her. His right hand clutched the Harvester in his fist, his left rising to cup her face. “Tell me all of your secrets, child.”
She smiled up at him. “Jevryn didn't kill Kiev.” She leapt onto death's ledge, barely sticking the landing. The balm of A-Queltr poured over her, severing the hold of Loclyn's magic, and her body returned fully to her own control. “I did.”
She couldn't pull Alihana, the blade trapped beneath her. She didn’t have to. She punched her fist upward as Constance flowed over her hand and snapped into a gauntlet, blades sprouting between her knuckles. They cut through skin and bone like butter, punching into Loclyn's heart.
His eyes flew wide in surprise. The tentacles of his magic flared outward.
They couldn’t reach her through A-Queltr, but they were reaching for anyone else.
Her Hidden magic, tortured and bruised from recent misuse, yet answered her call, finding Griff and Kaden and Morgen and Tristen.
But Loclyn wasn’t reaching for them. She remembered Alihana saying that he was tied to his Devoted.
It was their energy he took, pulling it in by the bucketload, so potent it crackled in the air, but it didn’t matter.
She’d pierced his heart, and he was no healer.
What he took could have countered a magical attack.
It could give him the energy to stave off sleep for days.
It could give his body the reserves to heal more quickly on its own.
And it kept him alive now past when he should have expired.
But his magic could not repair a ruptured heart.
His hands clawed at her fist against his chest, but it was no use.
Constance protected her. Loclyn’s attempts grew weaker and weaker, until at last he slumped on top of her.
She didn't have the strength to pull Constance free.
She certainly didn't have the strength to push Loclyn’s body off.
Her vision wavered, going in and out, in and out.
She clung stubbornly to consciousness when she wanted only to give into it.
She forced herself to stay awake, because though the Harvester still hung from her neck, it was no longer Hidden, and she didn’t want to find out who it might manage to call in the absence of that Hiding.
She couldn’t physically move to grasp it, but she reached for it with her Hidden magic, her abuse of that power arcing fresh pain through her.
But her magic knew the target, had been Hiding it for years.
And though reworking the Hiding hurt, it was a simpler task for its familiarity.
She tied the last thread on it, and once it was safely Hidden, she let her eyes close and she let herself go.
Or tried to. Someone was shouting in her mind. Someone old and irate, screaming something about a ledge and a path. She couldn’t quite grasp what they were talking about. All she wanted was to sleep. But every time she tried, they raged all the more furiously in her mind.
Beneath her, the floor thrummed, a bone-deep call.
That feeling meant something, didn’t it?
Her vision flickered in and out. The third time it came back, it was to see someone limping into the room.
They had long, tangled black hair, a face covered in cuts, their left eye swollen shut, their robes torn and covered in blood.
Their one open eye bore a flaming red iris.
Their identity finally clicked into Nyx’s disjointed brain, as she thought that this was the messiest she had ever seen her father look.
She smiled tiredly at him. “Hi, Vasi,” she said weakly, the Salyrian word for “dad” spilling off her tongue.
Then her eyes fluttered shut and the physical world faded.
Inside, in A-Queltr, she lost her footing and tumbled off death's ledge.