Chapter 16 Lysa #2
The screaming mass of raw silver energy, the fracture in the ley-line, bulged outward.
It wanted to explode, to consume everything in a radius of miles.
But Kelda’s invisible grip caught a tendril of it.
She isolated a dense, writhing clot of that power and with a sharp, brutal jerk of her wrist, she threw it.
I watched as Kelda guided that parasitic sludge past the parents’ failing shields and drove it straight into the chest of the boy sprawled on the floor.
Fenrik arched off the stone, a soundless scream tearing his mouth open as the silver mass slammed into his sternum. I saw the moment the parasite latched onto his heart, the silver veins flashing up his throat, seizing his vocal cords, and drowning his magic in a foreign noise.
He collapsed, writhing. This wasn’t an accident, my mind screamed. It wasn’t a curse he inherited. It was an assassination.
Kelda watched him fall, then she simply let go.
She dropped her hand. The subtle weave of Veil magic guiding the energy snapped.
Without her containment, the rest of the ley-energy crashed down.
Lord and Lady Stormgarde vanished in the shockwave.
The stone floor melted. The books fused.
The windows shattered, and in that split second before the debris hit her, I saw Kelda’s face change.
The cold calculation vanished, replaced by a mask of horror and grief so perfect it made my skin crawl.
She threw up a personal shield, not to save the family, but to save herself for the performance she was about to give.
Why? The question hammered against my skull.
Why keep him alive only to torture him? If she wanted the power, why not let the explosion take the heir, too?
The vision shuddered, skipping forward. The molten floor had cooled to a dull slug-trail of black glass.
The air hung heavy with the smell of smoke and copper.
And there, amidst the ruins of what used to be his life, Fenrik crawled.
He was unrecognizable from the man I knew.
This boy was covered in ash, his clothes shredded, his hands scrabbling uselessly against the fused stone where his parents had stood moments ago.
He kept retching, his body rejecting the violent intrusion of the magic Kelda had shoved into his chest. She knelt beside him.
Unlike Fenrik, she was clean. Not a smear of soot marred her pale green robes.
She looked like a statue of compassion. She reached out and stroked the hair back from his sweat-slicked forehead.
It was a gesture of tenderness that made bile rise in my throat.
“I saw...” Fenrik choked out, his voice a jagged ruin. He tried to push himself up, his grey eyes wide and unseeing, flashing with that new silver light. “Kelda... I saw you. The energy... you pulled it. You threw it at me.”
“Hush, sweet boy,” Kelda murmured. Her voice was too low for the vision to catch yet, but the memory was crisp enough that I could see the tension in her jaw. “You’re in shock. The ley-line snapped. It was a tragedy, Fenrik. A terrible accident.”
“No,” Fenrik said. He clutched at his chest, where the silver veins were already darkening. “The vector... the trajectory was intentional. You were outside the circle. You anchored the thing. I calculated the—“
“You calculated nothing,” she cut in. The warmth evaporated. “You are delirious with grief. Look at you, you’re broken.”
She moved her hand from his hair to his temples. Her thumb pressed right over the pulse point. Fenrik flinched, trying to pull away, but he was too weak. The silver markings on his throat flared, and he gagged on the power choking him.
“It hurts,” he sobbed, the defiance crumbling into pure agony. “Make it stop.”
“I can,” she whispered.
The sound of the memory seemed to drop out, or perhaps she spoke below the threshold of sound, but I was close enough to the glass to see her lips move.
You won’t remember this. You’ll think it was grief. You’ll know I’m helping.
Her fingertips began to glow with a strange, oily shimmer that looked like the hazy distortion of Veil magic.
She pressed them hard into his skin. Fenrik’s eyes rolled back, the whites showing, as his body went rigid.
Then, something happened to the image in the glass.
The scene rippled like disturbed water. The edges of the memory blurred, the colors shifting.
I blinked, rubbing my eyes, but the distortion wasn’t in my vision, it was in the record itself.
In the rewritten image, Fenrik was no longer thrashing or accusing. The struggling boy smoothed out. He sat up straighter, his bloody face calm, almost resolute.
“I accept it,” the illusion-Fenrik said, his voice overlapping with the real Fenrik’s previous screams, creating a discordant harmony of lies. “I need the power, Kelda. Give it to me. I’ll bear the curse if it saves my legacy.”
“A noble sacrifice, Lord Stormgarde,” the Kelda in the reflection said. In reality, the Kelda kneeling in the rubble watched the boy convulse as she veiled him.
“You monster,” I shouted.
The vision flickered and died, plunging me back into the dark room. The vacuum had shattered somehow, because I could hear my gasp.
A wet, scaly nose prodded my hand. I jumped, tripping over my own boots. Kirion stood there, blinking his yellow eyes, his head tilted to the side. He let out a soft, questioning chirrup.
“You missed the dramatic reenactment of the worst day of your master’s life,” I said, rubbing the spot between his horns. The scales were hot, but steady, my earlier work holding firm. “Count yourself lucky.”
Kirion snorted, a puff of smoke shaping itself into a question mark before dissipating. He looked at the shattered window, then back at me, unimpressed.
“She did it,” I told him. “She didn’t just take advantage of the tragedy; she orchestrated the whole bloody thing.”
Kirion hissed, stamping a clawed foot.
“Exactly. My thoughts entirely.”
I turned from the window. The House wanted more than to give me another history lesson; it wanted me to find something. And considering the manor was currently operating on the architectural equivalent of a panic attack, I decided not to keep it waiting.
The room was a disaster of molten stone and fused books, but in a corner, a small side table had survived the apocalypse. It sat there, coated in dust holding a leather-bound sketchbook.
“Subtle,” I murmured to the ceiling.
I blew the dust off the cover and cracked it open.
Fenrik’s artistic talent, it turned out, was frantic.
The first page was a charcoal smear that looked like a storm cloud having a breakdown.
The second was better, a profile of a woman.
It was rough, unfinished. A generic assemblage of features: nose, chin, sweep of hair.
“Who is this?” I asked. “His mother? A lover?”
As if hearing the question, the charcoal lines began to writhe.
I dropped the book on the table. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
Kirion hopped up on his hind legs to peer at the page, trilling curiously.
“Don’t look,” I warned him. “It’s cursed.”
But I looked, since I couldn’t help it. The graphite crawled across the paper sharpening the angles, refining the shading.
The generic chin grew pointed. The soft eyes narrowed into almonds.
The hair smoothed itself into an intricate braided updo.
Within seconds, Kelda Morvain was staring up at me from the page.
Even in charcoal, she managed to look condescending.
“She haunts his sketchbook,” I said, a shudder rattling my spine.
“That takes a special level of narcissism. Or perhaps it’s his mind trying to draw the monster.
” I flipped back through the earlier pages, searching for dates or annotations.
Several had been scratched out and rewritten in the same hand, recent ink overlaying older impressions.
I couldn’t tell which was the original anymore.
Kirion growled and tried to set the page on fire with a sneeze. I caught his snout just in time.
“No arson. Not yet.” I flipped the page with the tip of my finger, wanting to get away from that face.
The last page didn’t move and didn’t crawl, it broke my heart though.
Taped to the center of the paper was a dried, flattened moonflower. Beneath it, the handwriting was jagged and hurried, the desperate scrawl of a man writing in the dark before his mind wiped the slate clean.
“For when I forget. The smell of Lilies. The green dress. She was there.”
The writing trailed off into a heavy blot of ink, as if the pen had been pinned there. I stared at the date scrawled in the corner. Two weeks ago.
“He knows,” I said, tapping the paper. “He knows, Kirion. He’s been fighting her inside his own head.”
Two weeks ago was right before he sent for me. He hadn’t just gotten desperate; he’d gotten suspicious. He was leaving breadcrumbs for himself in the one place she couldn’t reach, the memories of his hands, his art, the physical evidence of his own sanity.
“The green dress,” I repeated, looking at the dragon. “Our villain has a consistent wardrobe. And your master isn’t the madman everyone thinks he is.”
I grinned. “He’s a terrible archivist.”
Kirion head-butted my hip, nearly knocking me into the molten floor.
I tucked the sketchbook under my arm. Where the sketchbook had been, a lone paper had remained.
It was folded once, anchored by a small chunk of unpolished amethyst. The adrenaline from the ley-window vision was still thrumming through my veins, making my heart kick against my ribs.
I knew what I’d seen. I knew Kelda was a monster.
And that paper had to be more proof that Fenrik was fighting her.
Another desperate note to himself. Another crumb of sanity in the dark.
The handwriting was his. There was no mistaking that elegant, spidery scrawl, the same hand that had written the invitation that brought me here, the same hand that had labeled the moonflower sketch. But this wasn’t a note to himself.
K, it began.
You were right. I cannot do this alone. The creature—the dragon—is better, but the cost is higher than we anticipated. But I cannot let her know the truth. She would leave.
The floor seemed to tilt. My stomach dropped, leaving me weightless.
Her magic is useful. Potent. It stabilizes the hunger in a way yours never could, though I miss the way you quell the silence afterward. I still wake reaching for you. The sheets are cold without you, and looking at her is a chore I endure for the sake of the result.
I dropped the letter as if it were red-hot iron.
...a chore I endure...
“No,” the word sounded pathetic.
My mind tried to stitch the contradictory scraps of reality together, but the needle kept breaking. The window, I had seen her murder his parents. I had seen her infect him with the dragon parasite. That was real. The House had shown me because it wanted me to know.
But this letter...
Had she broken him so thoroughly over thirteen years that he had learned to love the hand that held the leash?
I squeezed my eyes shut, and immediately the memory of Fenrik in the study assaulted me, the heat of his body, the desperate hunger in his eyes, the way he’d whispered I’ve wanted you since you arrived.
Lies. All of it. If the letter was real, then the man who had kissed me wasn’t a victim fighting to survive.
He was a conspirator. He was sleeping with the woman who had destroyed his family, perhaps out of a twisted need for the power she controlled, or perhaps the parasite she’d shoved into his heart had rewritten his desires along with his memories. I still wake reaching for you.
Was I the savior of a cursed lord? Or was I a battery? A useful, “plain” tool brought in to stabilize the messy overflow of their dark magic so they could continue whatever twisted game they were playing?
“He saved the wyrmling,” I stared at the dragon who was sniffing the paper on the floor with suspicion. “He fought the shadow inside him.”
But did he fight it? Or was he just managing it?
The House groaned around me. It felt sorrowful.
Confused. Maybe the House didn’t know either.
Maybe Fenrik Stormgarde was so lost in the labyrinth of his own mind that he played the victim by day and the lover by night, leaving me trapped in the middle, staring at a letter that turned my heart to ash.
I didn’t know which was which anymore. The only good thing was that if I were indeed in a cage, I had just walked into the lock.