Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
MORGANA
The portal tears open reality with the sound of a thousand screams.
I’m still tasting Azrael’s kiss when we step through. He locks his hand around mine, tight enough to bruise. The three mirror pieces we recovered—two from New York, one from London—are secured in the shadow-lined satchel across my body, heavy against my hip with every step.
Kieran and Chella flank us with weapons drawn while six elite shadow warriors form a moving barrier around us, blades ready, bodies tense. For one breathless instant, the between-space swallows everything.
Cold.
Silent.
Weightless.
Then it spits us out.
Prague is on fire.
I stumble as my boots hit broken pavement.
The impact of it hits harder than the landing.
This is not the city I remember. Not the one with its quiet bridges and old stone beauty.
This is ruin. This is collapse. The sky itself is torn open, the rift I created now a widening wound stretching across the horizon.
Purple energy crackles along its edges like something alive and infected.
And through it, they come.
The creatures pour into the world in waves.
Some are small, skittering things of shadow and broken anatomy.
Others are vast, wrong shapes that blot out entire streets when they pass.
I watch one the size of a bus tear through a barricade three blocks away.
Human soldiers fire into it. Their bullets mean nothing.
Their screams mean everything. One soldier turns to drag another behind cover. They do not make it two steps.
Because of me.
Because I did this.
“Morgana.”
Azrael’s voice cuts through the spiral, trying to take hold of me. I force myself to breathe.
“Stay focused.”
Right. Focus. I can fall apart later, if there is a later.
“The museum is two kilometers northeast,” Kieran says. His voice is steady, almost calm, but his eyes are sharp as he scans the burning streets. Shadows pool at his feet, already responding to his intent. “Multiple hostiles between here and there. Malik’s forces have fortified the building.”
“Of course they have,” I say.
I draw my shadow-forged blades. The weight of them grounds me. Familiar now. Dangerous. Mine.
“He knows we’re coming,” I add.
“Let him know,” Azrael says.
His voice is colder now. Sharpened into something lethal.
“We are ending this tonight.”
We move.
The city becomes a war corridor. Our formation holds tight as we cut through streets filled with smoke and collapsing light.
Every block tells the same story. Burned-out cars.
Cracked stone. Bodies I try not to look at for too long.
Buildings torn open as if something massive dragged its claws through them.
A child’s teddy bear lies half-burned in the gutter, one button eye missing.
I look away before it can break me completely.
“Don’t,” Azrael says quietly beside me.
His hand finds mine for just a second. A brief pressure. A reminder.
“Guilt later. Survival now.”
He is right. I hate that he is right.
The first attack comes at the river.
They rise from the water itself, tearing up through the surface as if it were never solid to begin with. Shadow-things with too many limbs and mouths that open in places where mouths should not exist.
Power rises through me, answering as if it has been waiting. My shadows spill outward, sharp and controlled. My blades move before thought catches up.
One drops. Then another.
A creature lunges at Chella from her blind side. I twist, and my magic catches it mid-air, snapping it back like a broken thread before it reaches her.
We move together. Not like strangers thrown into war. Like something trained. Something forged.
For a moment, I almost forget to be afraid.
Because I am not the girl who broke the mirror anymore.
I am something else.
Something dangerous.
The fight ends fast, but not cleanly. Nothing here is clean.
Azrael barely looks winded when the last creature falls apart into ash and shadow.
“Ten more blocks,” Kieran says, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He’s grinning as if this is not the end of the world. “That was just the warm-up.”
He’s not wrong.
The next fights come in waves.
Ambush after ambush. Streets that collapse into violence before we even fully enter them. Malik’s corrupted warriors join the creatures now—Shadow Court soldiers twisted by void magic until they’re barely recognizable.
Azrael kills them without hesitation.
I try not to think about how many he’s known for decades. Centuries.
We keep moving.
By the time the museum comes into view, the city behind us feels like another life entirely.
It stands still in the chaos. Beautiful architecture wrapped in destruction. Windows shattered. Doors hanging open like broken jaws. The rift above it pulses faintly, as if the building itself is breathing with it.
And I can feel it.
The mirror pieces. Calling to me.
“They’re waiting,” Chella says quietly. Her ice-blue eyes scan the upper windows. “Ambush for certain.”
“Good.” Azrael’s smile is all teeth. “I’d be disappointed otherwise.”
We breach through the front entrance.
The museum is ruined inside.
Where I once dangled from the skylight, there’s now open air—the roof torn away by the rift above. Rubble and broken glass cover the marble floors. Everything I once knew about this place feels like a memory from another lifetime.
Three mirror fragments are arranged in a perfect circle in the center of what was once the main gallery.
The missing pieces.
The ones Malik’s people reached before we did, stolen from wherever the Bellamy guardians had hidden them, dragged here to complete a ritual he thinks he controls.
Purple black light pulses through them, synchronized with something deeper. Something inside me.
Ritual markings are carved into the floor, ancient and alive, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.
I can feel them recognizing me. Calling to blood that’s been preparing for this moment for generations.
They recognize me.
They have been waiting for me.
“Morgana Bellamy.” Malik’s voice echoes from the shadows. “The prophesied daughter. Come to fulfill her destiny.”
He steps out from the far end of the gallery.
He looks worse than the last time I saw him.
Corruption spreads visibly under his skin now, like ink bleeding beneath flesh.
Shadows move wrong inside him. His eyes flicker between grey and something endless.
His hands tremble around his blade, not with fear, but with the effort of holding himself together.
Whatever bargain he made, it is already collecting payment.
“Malik.” Azrael’s power floods the space, pressing against the walls. “Last chance. Stand down.”
“Stand down?” Malik laughs. “While you let that human whore corrupt everything our court stands for? Never.”
I should be offended. I’m mostly just tired.
“I’m trying to save both worlds, you delusional asshole,” I say. “But sure. Let’s make this about your wounded pride instead.”
For half a second, something almost human flickers across his face. Grief, maybe. Or the last ruined piece of the man Azrael once trusted.
Then he lets it die, his expression now twisting with rage.
“The old world had its chance,” Malik says. “I choose what comes after, even if it means becoming something you would have killed me for.”
Then the air behind him tears open.
The Voidbringer’s avatar steps through.
Every instinct I have screams before I even understand what I’m seeing.
It appears to be humanoid, but only in the way a nightmare remembers a body should look.
Too tall. Too wrong. Limbs bending where they shouldn’t.
Its skin isn’t skin at all, but a living void, darkness so deep it seems to consume the surrounding light.
Where its face should be, there’s just more darkness.
Empty. Hungry…
When it speaks, reality seems to crack.
“You cannot seal what I have opened,” it says. “Your sacrifice will be meaningless.”
It does not sound like a threat.
It sounds like certainty.
The temperature drops. My breath turns visible in the air.
The words are meant to frighten me.
Instead, they confirm the truth: if my sacrifice were meaningless, it would not be here trying to stop me.
Azrael moves in front of me instantly.
“Morgana. The ritual. Now.”
“But,” I start.
“NOW.” He doesn’t look back. His shadows are already rising to meet the Voidbringer. “I’ll hold them. You seal the rifts.”
I want to argue. Want to fight beside him.
But he’s right. This is what I’m here for.
I run to the ritual circle, Chella and Kieran covering my approach.
The moment my boots cross the rune circle, power slams into me.
Hard. Violent.
It drops me to my knees instantly.
The mirror pieces within the circle pulse brighter, responding to my presence.
My hands shake as I tear open the shadow-lined satchel and pull out our three pieces.
The Met fragment. Caruso’s auction piece. London.
Each one feels different in my palm, but the moment I set them at the edge of the circle, the other three waiting shards flare in answer. Like they remember where they’ve been. Who they’ve been stolen from. What it costs to bring them back together.
Behind me, Azrael and the Voidbringer clash in a sound that feels like the world is being unmade in real time. Magic against void. Reality bending under the pressure of it. I can’t look back. Can’t let myself be distracted.
I press my hands to the nearest shard.
The ancient text was clear about what is required. Blood. Power. Life force. Union. The pieces must recognize the bloodline of their creator, accept the sacrifice, and agree to be made whole.
I draw my blade across my palm.
Pain blooms sharp and immediate. Blood wells, warm and alive, spilling onto the black glass.
The mirror pieces drink it.
Eager. Hungry.
Something shifts.
Power floods into me in a rush that steals my breath. It isn’t only mine. It is older than me. Layered. Countless lives folded into one inherited current. Every Bellamy before me, every name I was taught to revere or resent, all of them press through my veins at once.