Chapter 42
Hope
The night had flown by amidst preparations and agreed alliances.
Now, as the pale sun was peaking over the horizon, the world was waking up while the red moon still shone bright.
They moured in pairs to the outer skirt of the Organ House, close enough to see and far enough to be unnoticed, to be safe.
Hope and Ciaran landed first, and Ciaran immediately covered the area in shadows, inside which everyone else landed. Jake and Lenna came next; Ayla and Stevian followed.
The Organ House was completely surrounded.
In the sky, countless sangins fought for space mid-flight, observing the living beings patrolling the ground and each gate, but not attacking them.
There were humans armed with sharp, long spears suspended just above the ground. Their uniforms were no longer red, but black.
Fifty roixers protected each gate, and in front of the West gate—the gate Jake said connected to the throne room—the Roix Reigner stood stoic and immobile, three metallic stripes across her chest differentiating her from the rest. Indianna’s mother.
The Queen had not one army, but two. One made from her own blood, patrolling the skies.
One converted from the military organization that had ensured civilian obedience for centuries.
The question was to what extent the roixers were loyal to her.
Hope was not willing to spend much time figuring that out, though.
“Are my numbers correct in guessing around two hundred mentally-fucked-up-and-way-too-still-roixers and approximately five hundred sangins are our welcome party?” Lenna asked, tilting her head. “Cute.”
“Cute to kill our welcome party, indeed,” Jake agreed.
Hope smiled, hands caressing the crystal hilts of the Lawful Stabs on her waistbelt. Her blood was racing with excitement and impatience. Ciaran’s eyes glittered as he smiled at her, too, a trail of shadows fidgeting amongst his metallic fingers.
“They seem way too bored, though,” Hope said. “Lucky them, we are about to change that. Everyone clear on the plan?”
They nodded decisively.
“Then, bloodrose, may you unfold the beginning of the end,” Ciaran said, nodding towards Hope as a shadow caressed her arm, before she moured away by herself.
As she already knew, the Organ House allowed her straight inside it. She landed in a side room close to the South gate, and a wide-eyed roixer gasped, about to shout.
Hope’s dagger met his throat before his voice left it, and while the man slipped to the floor, she took all but five seconds to assess the room.
All she needed was a focus, a target, something to aim for.
She Gave a crystal orb filled to the rim with her own Cardinal-red sparks.
She smiled. Everyone would know exactly who had come—including the Cardinal Queen.
She released the Fifth Power and moured away before her own magic would explode in front of her and kill her.
She moured straight to the dead-end corridor Jake had shown on the map, close to the West gate, and repeated the process. Give a Cardinal-sparks-full orb, make it mercilessly explode with the Fifth, moure away before the impact hits her.
The East gate came next, and then the North one, before she moured back to the shadow-covered clearing where Jake, Lenna, Ayla, Stevian, and Ciaran admired the performance. The Organ House was still blowing apart, four almost-simultaneous explosions destroying the harmony of the Core.
“That was fun.” Hope grinned.
Lenna snorted. “They are not bored anymore, don’t worry.”
The moment the four gates blew up, chaos began. Since the explosions were inside, the roixers ran, spears at the ready. From their backs, every panom who had answered Hope’s call for help, closed in to attack.
Not even five minutes after she sent the ink, to Hope’s surprise, Gabrielle Heliba had answered, not mentioning how destroyed Ciaran and she had left the desert in the South Petal. Now she, Arabella, and many other panoms she had never met from the South, were dealing with the South gate.
Cobrian Castel and nine panoms from the West had come, and their sparks were already flying in the West gate as they chased the roixers inside.
Courtrades led by Elara and Marcus covered the East gate, since no one had volunteered from the East Petal. Jake had held his hands up for killing half of the panoms there because they were useless, and acknowledged perhaps the others were too scared to even breathe.
The North gate’s attack, to Lenna and Ayla’s utmost shock and disbelief, was led by their own mother, Veronica Brachyan, and many other panoms the twins had grown up with.
The battle was on, and death followed. There was not a single second to waste.
It was their turn.
Hope moured Lenna and Jake in first, opposite the ruined corridor by the North gate she’d already detonated.
The moment they landed, she disappeared again, this time bringing with her Ayla and Stevian, and with the final mouring she brought Ciaran into the Organ House, his protective, covering shadows with him.
Their embrace was firm and uniting, his arms surrounding hers as her palm touched the back of his neck. This was all the fuel she needed.
Where she had attacked before, crystal ash still smoked, and the Fifth had blackened stone. Shouts came across the walls, the battle between panoms and roixers in full force.
“This is not right,” Jake said, stepping in front of Lenna to be a physical barrier between the wall and her body.
“What isn’t?” Lenna asked, narrowing her golden eyes at the uneven wall in front of them.
The corridor walls breathed.
Wet. Wrong. Too alive.
With a sick pop, hidden pods split open. Membranes tore. Black fluid slicked down the stone as bodies spilled out, screeching.
Hatchlings. Dozens of them, peeking. Sangins still slick with their mother’s ink, claws skittering, teeth already red.
“Fuck,” Lenna hissed, golden sparks igniting in her palm.
Hope’s dagger cut the throat of the first one before its scream finished. Jake’s Harming cut another clean in half. The floor crawled with them, the air heavy with the iron stink of blood.
Ayla’s silver sparks flashed like the sharpest knives. Stevian was calm—always calm—his shadows already coiling from his hands. He exchanged stares with Hope for the briefest moment, a kind smile on his lips as he nodded.
Ciaran’s shadows poured out the moment the membranes broke. His darkness flooded the chamber in a tide of black, wall to wall. For a heartbeat, Hope thought it would hold, that they were safe.
Then the pods ruptured wider. Black ink bled from the walls, seeping into the shadows themselves. It pulsed, alive, hungry, like a sentient, living entity. More screaming sangins were birthed from the walls, pouring into the corridor like endless killing curses.
What had the Queen done to the Organ House—to Hope’s House?
Stevian moved first. He spread his arms, and his shadows became a blanket, slamming over the hatchlings. They shrieked, muffled against the smothering dark.
“Hold them down,” he barked, braiding his shade tighter, pressing them into stone.
The ink fought back. It wormed into his shadow, thick as oil, staining it, eating it. Hope felt her skin prickle with the Fifth—she could burn it all to ash, but there were too many lives that mattered between these walls. The risk was too high.
Stevian didn’t hesitate. He pushed harder, shadows strangling, suffocating, breaking. He took every writhing sangin body into himself, until his arms trembled with the weight, until the black ink rose from the floor to his ankles, knees, chest—
“Go!” he shouted. His smile was back, determined and reckless. His eyes flicked to Hope, then to Ciaran. “Don’t waste this.”
“Stevian—” Hope lunged, went to catch his wrist as her blades flew to the sangins while she Harmed them with her free hand, trying to get them off him. But she couldn’t touch him. His arms were covered in ink, now trailing up his neck. He was going to drown in the Queen’s ink.
His breath was ragged. “We were forged for war.” His shadows surged one last time, drowning every sangin hatchling in the room. The ink crawled up his neck like fire, eating what he was. His body shook, but his voice stayed steady. “Be the ones who live for peace.”
Then the shadow snapped.
There wasn’t a scream. Just a body falling, and a smear of darkness burned into stone that light refused to touch.
Ciaran dropped to his knees beside him, shadows trembling in his hands. Ayla’s jaw clenched so hard it could break. Hope’s face went hard as iron. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—Stevian’s smile was still there, even as the last of him bled into silence.
But there was no time to grieve. Not in this war.
She grabbed Ciaran’s hand, helping him stand, allowing for a quick caress on his grandfather’s cheek before he covered Stevian’s body with shadows.
And they ran.
The Organ House roared around them. Sparks collided with steel, panom magic against roixer spears.
The black-eyed soldiers moved like machines, the Queen’s ink driving every weapon with intent.
Outside, chaos thundered—their allies fighting at the gates, panoms and courtrades spilling blood for Thyria.
They fought their way through the battle, following Jake’s lead to the throne room.
It wasn’t an easy feat. Roixers and sangins and panoms battled for their lives, and it felt so wrong not to help, to continue running.
Hope had to keep reminding herself that the end of the battle was ahead of them, not here.
Once the Queen was dealt with, this would end. This carnage and massacre would end.
Lenna halted behind Jake, her eyes locked on a fire-haired woman fighting three roixers at once. The woman’s bronze sparks didn’t falter, moving smoothly around them, dodging, Harming them, but one of the roixers spears opened the skin on her leg.
“You rotten sons of a fucking feather,” Lenna roared, running towards them.
She lifted her hands, simultaneously Giving a golden necklace to one that stopped him dead between screams, Taking the breath out of another’s lungs.
Before she could deal with the third roixer, Ayla had stepped in, Giving silver metal chains that locked his arms and legs.
The woman clenched her jaw, lifting her chin as her nostrils flared.
“Mother,” Ayla called, and Veronica looked at her daughter’s metal eyes. “Don’t spill another drop of blood for them.”
“Go do whatever you need to do,” Veronica Brachyan demanded, standing straight, heading towards a panom who was fighting two sangins at once and being debilitated.
The five of them ran with Jake in the lead, using shortcuts and diverse routes, ensuring safety until they forced their way to—
“The throne room,” Lenna gasped, when the doors groaned open in front of them, revealing nothingness. The doors slammed behind them when they closed, leaving all noise from the fights outside.
Hope inhaled sharply, her firm steps echoing in a completely empty room, as she approached the throne.
Made of black feathers and bones, the last time she had seen this throne, her father had sat on it. The last time she had been in this room, her father had killed her mother, and she didn’t stop it. The Black and Red Lawful Stabs throbbed at her waist, begging, demanding, to be claimed.
There was no Queen here.
Hope stood in front of her throne. Her biological hand caressed it, analyzing, assessing, as she reconfirmed there was no one sitting in it, not even in invisible form.
The Queen knew Hope was here. Her Cardinal-red spark-filled orbs were all she needed to know it was truly her and not a false bait.
Hope turned around, locking her eyes with Ciaran, Jake, Lenna, and then her heart skipped a beat.
“Where is Ayla?” she gasped, clenching her fist around the hilt of a Stab, fearing she already knew the answer.
Lenna’s hand went to her mouth, eyebrows shot to the roof as she opened the doors and ran back to the corridor, calling her sister, as her golden sparks left her hands, sending Ayla an ink desperate message.
Panic rose like fire. Jake dragged a hand through his hair, Ciaran’s shadows clenched tight. Hope’s pulse hammered, dread sinking into her ribs. Hope already knew Ayla wouldn’t answer the ink.
Like a sudden hit, her forearm hurt.
Fresh ink crawled across her skin, black, sharp, and velvet, words that carried a voice she already hated in her bones.