Chapter 19 Kelda #3
To my left formed the spectral figure of my brother, Callum. He was laughing in this appearance, his hands glowing with unrefined magic. He looked exactly as he had at twenty-four, before the rot took him.
“I know they killed him, I don’t need a reminder” I told the phantom, though it had no ears.
The hallway twisted, showing me the memory I kept sharpest. The Stormgarde family, Fenrik’s parents, standing tall and arrogant at the valley’s convergence point. They called themselves protectors. Sin-Eaters. They claimed they filtered the town’s magic to keep us safe. Lies.
I watched the illusion of the old Lord Stormgarde wave a hand, dismissing my father’s pleas for access to the ley-line.
They didn’t filter the magic, they hoarded it.
They sat atop the greatest wellspring of power in Lumenvale like dragons on gold, letting the excess, the waste, poison the groundwater rather than letting a Morvain engineer a better solution.
“ Waste,” I hissed, walking through the ghost of Fenrik’s father. He wisped away into smoke. “Gallons of raw potential, poured into the earth to rot.”
To my right, the illusion shifted again.
It showed Callum’s final day. The arcane entropy had gotten into his marrow, the poison the Stormgardes claimed to contain.
It hadn’t been an accident; it had been runoff.
Their “heroic sacrifice” was a leaky pipe, and my brother had drowned in the spill.
The illusion showed him coughing up silver bile, his skin grey and cracking, begging for a relief that the “Great High Lords” of Stormgarde Manor refused to provide because it would “compromise the wards.”
“They call me the monster,” I said to the dying image of my brother, stepping through his convulsing form. “But I am the only one willing to fix the plumbing.”
The shadows coalesced ahead of me, forming a ritual circle again, the forgotten rituals I had unearthed from the forbidden archives of the Academy.
The Stormgardes believed the Sump had to be endured.
The ancients knew better. The Sump wasn’t a drain, it was a battery if one simply had the stomach for it.
If one was willing to calcify a living soul into the stone to act as a permanent regulator.
I saw the diagram glowing in the air before me: the Final Binding. It required a vessel, Fenrik of course. It required a controller, me. And it required the removal of all chaotic variables.
“I do not hate them for their power,” I said, my voice echoing in the shifting corridor. “I hate them for their wastefulness. They treat a god-tier resource like sewage. Now please stop showing me things I did not require!”
I swept my hand through the air, banishing the ghosts of the past. The hallway snapped back to reality.
I was an architect surrounded by children playing with matches.
If I had to break a few fingers to take the matches away before they burned the house down, then history would thank me.
Assuming I left anyone alive to write it.
If not, I could write it very well myself.
The house fought me with every step, until I reached the underbelly of Stormgarde Manor.
“Oh, stop whining,” I snapped at the ceiling. “You’re crumbling because your master is weak, not because I’m here. I am the cure, you ungrateful pile of stones.”
I pushed open the heavy oak door to the ley chamber. It was three floors under the ritual chamber where the little Emberlin girl had found my breadcrumbs: the letter, the mirror. How predictable. Heroes always went looking for truth in the dark, never realizing that darkness was simply a canvas.
“Come, Vesper.” From the shadows of the doorframe, my favorite creation peeled itself away from the darkness.
Vesper wasn’t real, of course. She was a woven construct of smoke and Veil magic, shaped into the silhouette of a lady-in-waiting.
I had given her the face of a girl who had been mean to me at the Academy.
The rude cow was not even of nobiliar descent.
I put her in her rightful place, now she existed only to hold my ingredients and nod when I spoke.
Vesper glided forward, holding out the heavy mortar and pestle. I trailed a finger down her smoky cheek. “You look tired, darling. Have I been working you too hard?”
She didn’t answer since I hadn’t given her a tongue. Voices were so tedious.
I took the mortar. Inside, the bleached finger-bones of a traitorous Hearthcrafter I’d dealt with years ago were already brittle. I began to grind them, the crunch-snap-grind echoing in the silent cellar.
“The girl will return,” I told Vesper, sprinkling iron filings into the bone dust. “She has a martyr’s heart. It’s a fatal condition. She thinks she left to save him, but guilt is a powerful tether. She’ll come back to try one last desperate act of healing.”
I knelt by the old ritual circle etched into the stone floor. It was a standard containment array: boring, defensive, Stormgarde work. It was designed to push forces out. I dipped my finger into the mixture of bone and iron. “We need to invite the power in.”
With sharp strokes, I began to alter the runes. I drew a line through the symbol for Barrier and redrew it as Conduit. I twisted the sigil for Earth until it warped into Hunger.
“Lysa Emberlin is a Transmuter,” I explained to Vesper, who stood still, watching me with blank, adoring eyes. “She doesn’t just stop magic; she reorganizes chaos into order. When she comes back, she will try to pull the entropy out of Fenrik. She’ll try to heal the breach.”
I pressed my hand to the cold stone, imagining the surge.
“And when she does... when she pours all that golden light of hers into the dragon to break the curse...” I dragged a jagged line of grey dust to the center of the circle, directly to where I would stand. “...this array will catch it. I won’t just contain the collapse, Vesper. I will drink it.”
I stood up, wiping the dust from my hands onto Vesper’s spectral dress. She didn’t flinch. I liked that about her. People flinched and people judged. Vesper understood that greatness required messy work.
“They will be the fuel,” I said, looking at the altered circle. “Fenrik the vessel, Lysa the spark, and I will be the engine.”
“Am I beautiful, Vesper?” I asked, turning to my shadow-maid.
Vesper nodded slowly, her smoky form undulating.
“Liar,” I said affectionately, and with a wave of my hand, I unraveled her. She dissolved into grey mist, screaming silently as she faded back into nothingness.