Chapter 16 #2
My attention fixed on the figure waiting on the sidelines.
Beautifully brooding Calder, standing with his arms crossed, dark eyes finding mine across the distance.
Relief flickered across his face, followed immediately by concern as he took in the crown in my hand.
For a moment, Pip hovered near his shoulder, her blue hair blowing in the breeze as she clutched her tiny sword to her chest.
As if someone had given them a signal, they moved onto the field, coming to join me, Wickett and Lucette.
The Oracle stood with unnatural stillness, her face turned toward us with jarring attention, despite the blindfold. Her dragon dropped from the sky with far less ceremony than on the night of Vitoria’s damnation. Shifting mid-air, he landed behind the Oracle almost silently.
The Magistrate stood beside her with his hands locked behind his back, staring up at the crowd, rather than his victors. “Citizens of Grimora. Behold your champions. Proven in blood. Tested by Mortalis.”
The crowd’s roar intensified, but something in their tone had changed. There was less bloodlust now. More reverence. More understanding of what was to come. This had been a show of power by the Magistrate, but the hunt wasn’t about him. It was about the Phoenix. She was the reason we were here.
There would be no more hunters combing the streets. Only the world’s truest hunt for the world’s greatest enemy.
Except they’d gotten the wrong girl.
And I was about to do every single thing I could to divert them away from her. If only I knew where she was.
I scanned the sea of faces above us. Thousands of eyes stared back, hungry for whatever came next. But my gaze drifted to the arena’s edge, where the real power stood.
The Magistrate’s inner circle. His advisors, his enforcers, his chosen few. They formed neat rows in their perfectly pressed black uniforms, with their gold Chancellery emblems gleaming on their chests, marking them as untouchable. Just more smug pricks who thought they owned all they saw.
But one figure stood apart from the rest.
Dressed entirely in black with no emblem, no ceremonial colors like the others wore.
He kept too much distance between himself and the council members, like proximity to them might contaminate something he valued.
His hands were buried in his pockets, shoulders set with tension.
Sharp jawline. High cheekbones. Dark hair styled with precision, every strand deliberately placed in a way that somehow made him look more dangerous rather than refined.
The kind of face that belonged on ancient coins or carved into marble, beautiful in a way that felt dangerous, deliberate, like something designed to lure you closer before it destroyed you.
But none of that was what made my skin crawl.
It was the way he looked at me.
His mouth was set in a scowl that enhanced those perfect features, but his eyes, burning with an intensity that felt physical, were fixed on me like I was the only person in the entire arena that mattered.
Not casual interest. Not even curiosity.
This was recognition. Knowing. Like he could see straight through every defense I’d ever built, every lie I’d ever told, every secret I’d buried so deep I sometimes forgot it myself.
He looked at me like he knew exactly what I was.
Like he’d sworn his own oath to hunt me the moment this ceremony ended.
Who the fuck was he?
“You are no longer contestants,” Tiberius’s voice cut through my focus like a blade. “You are the Venatori.”
I jerked my attention back to the Magistrate, but the moment he was quiet, I searched the sidelines again, drawn to the stranger.
The man in black was gone.
Not moved to a different position. Not behind someone else. Gone. Vanished, like he’d never been there at all. I snuck a glance at Calder to see if he’d noticed the stranger. Nothing.
“... victors of the Mortalis,” the Magistrate continued. “You will be our salvation. The end of the Burnings is near.”
Shaking my head to regain focus, I snapped my attention back to Tiberius as he walked toward us and gestured toward a tunnel entrance. A line of witches stumbled forward, iron chains binding their wrists, their ankles, their throats. All of them rigid and broken and terrified. All of them, his.
My blood turned to ice. The hedge maze hadn’t been constructed by witches in his employment. These weren’t volunteers. They were prisoners. And now spectacles to show his control and power. Again.
With a cacophony of whispered spells, a dome began forming over those of us in the center of the arena. The magic was so dense, I could taste it, feel it sealing us inside with whatever fresh hells Tiberius had planned. The magical ribbon connecting me to Wickett snapped.
Just gone. The constant pull, the awareness of his presence, all of it had vanished as if it never existed. My hand flew to my wrist where the binding mark had burned for days.
Nothing.
The crown in my grip crumbled to dust. The chalice in Wickett’s hands turned to ash. Lucette’s blade dissolved like mist.
And mercifully, my power came flooding back.
The connection to Silas was immediately restored. He was above the dome, screaming fury that echoed in my bones. “The binding happens now, Rune Weaver.” Tiberius snapped his fingers. “Make the circle.”
Every instinct I had screamed to escape the trap I’d chosen for myself. But I was as stubborn as I was foolish, it seemed.
“Aperio,” I whispered, drawing on the magic that lived in my bones.
Silver light erupted from beneath my feet, racing outward across the arena grass in thin, blazing lines.
The earth split as the magic seeped deep into the ground, connecting symbols etched between the outer and inner boundaries, script that spiraled in the language the Furies had brought to this world.
When the light faded, we stood inside a masterwork of magical architecture carved directly into the arena floor, the kind of spell circle that took witches hours to plan out by hand with candles and chalk or salt and painstaking measurement.
The kind that required ritual preparation and steady hands.
The kind a Rune Weaver was known to do in seconds.
The Oracle stepped forward. Her blonde hair hadn’t moved an inch, and her long white robes were perfectly unwrinkled as she crossed the broken ground. In her hands, she carried a small wooden box. And when she opened it, my breath caught.
Runes. But not carved from ordinary stone or metal. These were cut from something else. Something I’d never seen. Black as midnight and shot through with veins of silver that pulsed like heartbeats.
“Starfall stone,” the Oracle said. “Fallen from the space between worlds. The strongest material for binding magic ever discovered.”
This was the kind of thing that existed in legends—in stories told to frighten children about the old magic and its price. Not here, in front of us.
“Each of you will take a rune,” she continued, extending the box. “Place it in the circle. Speak your true name. Give your blood.”
Again with the fucking blood magic. Didn’t these people know anything? I held my tongue watching as Wickett went first, selecting a rune that seemed to hum with approval when he touched it. He placed it in the circle’s northern point. “Wickett Demetrius Veyne.”
Blood from the cut on his palm fell onto the starfall stone. It absorbed the offering greedily, the silver veins brightening.
Lucette took hers to the eastern point, dripping blood as the song grew louder. “Lucette Fira Varrow.”
Pip fluttered to the northeastern point, her tiny hands struggling with the weight of the rune. She pricked her finger on her miniature blade, and even that small drop made the stone pulse with hungry light. “Pip Lunaria Willowbend.”
Calder was next. No hesitation as he drew his blade across his palm, stepping to his place. No emotion in his voice. “Calder Thaddeus Grimm.”
My turn. The final rune was warm, almost alive. I carried it to the southern point, my hands shaking despite every effort to control them. “Syneca Morrigan Black.”
My blood hit the stone, and the world shifted. Not physically. Magically. Like reality had just stepped sideways and left us all somewhere else entirely.
The five runes glowed brightly enough to hurt.
Silas yanked on our connection.
Stay back. I pushed the thought toward Silas through our bond. Whatever happens, stay back. And though he hated it, he was beholden to my command.
His fury crashed into my mind like a hammer.
I know. But not yet. Please.
Tiberius stepped forward, something gleaming in his hands. My heart stopped.
Vitoria’s dagger. Silver and deadly familiar, with the three interlocking circles carved into the hilt.
“The blade will serve as your focus,” he announced, placing it in the circle’s center. “Your blood, her weapon, fury-born witness.”
The Oracle began her incantation, words in the old tongue falling upon the final starfall stone in her palm. But just as the magic began to build, Tiberius’s voice cut through hers.
“Thirty days hence, let judgment fall. Life for life, may the debt be paid.”
The magic slammed into us.
Not gentle binding. Not careful ritual work. Pure violence that drove me to my knees. The starfall runes exploded with light. Such valuable stones wasted as the circle burned brighter than the sun. Power tore through my body like there was molten metal in my veins.
Silas roared.
Something had just gone very, very wrong.
But I couldn’t help him, nor could I breathe. The magic was rewriting me from the inside out, carving new purpose into my soul whether I wanted it or not.
We’d made a monumental mistake, Calder and me. We hadn’t just bound ourselves to finding Vitoria. With Tiberius’s interjection, we’d just sworn an unbreakable oath to hunt her. And we only had thirty days to do it, or the starfall rune would take our lives instead.