Chapter 24
Alina
Jules’ Chamber, The Barrow
The Barrow feels too small.
Which is insane, because this place is enormous—endless halls and shifting staircases and roots that go down forever.
But here, in Jules and Alaric’s chamber, with the door sealed and the wards humming, it feels like the walls are pressing in.
We’re all huddled together in the sitting area.
Jules is propped up in bed with Marcel at her breast. Phoebe is perched on the edge of a chair like she’s ready to launch at any second. And Delia is pacing a groove in the rug.
Clarisse moves between us with a tray of tea and little honey cakes no one is really eating.
The air is heavy.
Taste of stone dust. Ozone.
That weird metallic tang that means magic is being pushed to the limit somewhere deeper in the castle.
Somewhere our men—our viyens—are fighting.
I feel Dagan’s power at the edges of my awareness, muffled by distance and wards and whatever Idris is throwing at them.
It comes in pulses.
Steady, steady, hit, recover, steady, hit again.
Each time the impact lands, something in my chest clenches.
Like my ribs are fault lines and someone’s taking a sledgehammer to them.
“God, sit down before I duct-tape you to a chair,” Jules mutters at Delia, wincing as another contraction of someone else’s pain goes through her.
“Can’t.” Delia scrubs her hands over her face, fingers trembling. “Every time Thorne gets hit, my stomach drops like I’m on a bad roller coaster. Not exactly conducive to chilling.”
Phoebe wraps her arms around herself and stares at the door. “Kael keeps slipping. I can feel him surge and then—” She shakes her head. “It’s like he hits a wall. Over and over.”
My bond with Dagan thrums.
He’s not slipping.
Yet.
But he is tired, and that scares me more than I want to admit.
Clarisse sets a cup of tea in front of Jules, then another in front of me. Her hands are steady, but her eyes are tight.
“They will endure, miladies,” she says, like she’s willing it to be true. “The Lords have held Nightfall for centuries. They won’t fall now. Not while the Barrow stands. Not while the crown sits hidden in its place.”
I glance away.
To the far side of the room.
And it’s like my vision sees past the bed, past the stone walls, and floors, all the way down to the secret chamber where, on a low stone pedestal grown straight out of the floor, sits the crown.
The Prime’s crown.
It’s smaller than I expected—more a circlet than a full-on king hat—twined metal and crystal that glows from within with a low, pulsing light.
Not bright. Not bold. Just there.
Like a heart that hasn’t decided if it’s still beating.
It hums in my bones.
None of us have history with it the way the Lords do.
We never saw it on Aurel’s head.
Never watched it refuse a new Prime.
Never feared it or wanted it.
But I feel it.
Power, layered and old and confused.
Searching.
Reaching for someone who doesn’t exist anymore.
The next shock that rolls through the castle is worse.
The floor lurches.
A hairline crack races across the far wall, only to be stitched shut by roots a second later.
Marcel startles and lets out a sharp, offended cry.
Jules shushes him, tears shining in her eyes.
“Okay, that was bigger,” Delia says tightly. “I didn’t like that one.”
Phoebe grimaces, pressing a hand to her chest. “Kael just swore through the bond. In several ancient languages.”
“Alaric’s mad,” Jules whispers, breath hitching. “Not just battle-mad. Scared-mad. He doesn’t get scared.”
Dagan hits something hard.
The impact reverberates all the way up my spine. I gasp, grabbing the edge of the table.
For a second, everything goes fuzzy—the room, the women, the tea—and all I can feel is weight slamming into him, magic clawing at him, the earth buckling beneath his feet.
Then it clears.
He’s still standing.
But he’s bleeding power.
“What is happening out there?” Phoebe demands.
“Idris,” Delia says. “What else?”
Jules shifts Marcel to her shoulder and pats his back.
“Alaric says he’s pulling from more than just SoulTakers. He’s siphoning the gaps.” Her eyes go distant for a second, unfocused. “From the places the crown used to anchor. From the parts of Nightfall that don’t know who to listen to anymore.”
“The vacuum,” I say slowly.
Three sets of eyes swing to me.
“The what now?” Delia asks.
“In structural engineering,” I say, brain kicking into gear through the fear, “when you remove a support without replacing it, everything around it has to pick up the load. Sometimes it can. Sometimes it can’t. Stress lines form. Cracks propagate along the weakest planes.”
Phoebe blinks. “You’re going to have to de-science that for me.”
“The Prime,” Jules murmurs, eyes locked on the crown. “He was the load-bearing beam.”
“Exactly.” I gesture vaguely toward the ceiling. “The crown anchored the idea of that beam. One central point all the power flowed through. One leader. One person Nightfall answered to.”
“And now, there isn’t one,” Delia says, voice sharpening.
“So the power is confused,” I finish. “It’s trying to do what it’s always done—feed into a single focal point. Idris is offering himself as that focal point. The system doesn’t know he’s wrong. It just knows there’s a hole and something’s filling it.”
Silence.
The good kind.
The thinking kind.
Jules shifts on the bed. “You’re telling me Nightfall’s magic is basically code with a bug.”
“Yeah,” I say. “A very, very big bug. And your guys are fighting the end-user, but the exploit is still there.”
“You have an idea,” Phoebe says softly. “I can see it.”
I swallow.
The crown’s hum grows louder in my head, like it heard her and decided to lean in.
“I might,” I admit. “But if I’m wrong, it could go very, very badly.”
“Define badly,” Delia says, crossing her arms.
“Worst case? We destabilize the main anchor so hard that the whole system collapses. Nightfall fractures for good. The forges die. No more dreams. Just… entropy.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding, face tight. “And best case?”
“We fix the bug,” I say. “Rewire the system so it stops searching for one Prime and starts distributing power across all four Lords. Four anchors instead of one. Four load-bearing beams instead of a single point of failure.”
“Redundancy,” Jules breathes. “Like rerouting grid power across multiple substations.”
“Exactly.” My heart is pounding. “Idris won’t be able to hijack the stream anymore because there won’t be a single stream. Just a network.”
Phoebe looks from me to the crown and back again. “And how do we reroute?”
“First, we get the crown.”