Chapter 25 Lysa #2
I craned my neck back. High above, peering over the edge of the jagged hole in the floor, which used to be the hallway, were two heads. Thorven looked like he’d wrestled a bear and lost, his beard singed and face smeared with soot. Mrs. Crane looked... immensely disappointed.
“The structural integrity is compromising!” Thorven bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth. “The Sentinel Beasts have stopped trying to kill us, which is good, but now they’re cowering under the hydrangeas, which is bad!”
“Also,” Mrs. Crane shouted, her voice cutting through the magical roar, “The West Wing has developed a severe list to the left! If you act now, we might save the tapestries! And for the love of the stars, Master Fenrik, button your shirt!”
Fenrik actually glanced down at his chest, looking affronted.
“Also, the House says ‘good luck’!”
“Right, down the hatch.”I yanked the cork with my teeth, spat it onto the floor—Kirion immediately pounced on it—and swallowed the ruby liquid in one gulp. It tasted like spiced honey blood tea.
For a second, nothing happened. Then the world snapped into high detail.
I gasped, my back arching as pain vanished.
The ache in my hip? Gone. The exhaustion in my bones?
Evicted. The swirling confusion of the last hour?
Replaced by the absolute, unshakeable conviction that I could punch a mountain in the face and the mountain would apologize.
“Lysa?” Fenrik reached for me, his expression alarmed.
“I’m fantastic!” I shouted, though I hadn’t meant to shout. My voice vibrated in my own ears. “I feel shiny! It feels like it should be majestic!”
“Your eyes are glowing,” Fenrik said, stepping back warily. “Very... brightly.”
“Detailed!” I pointed a finger at the ley-line. “I can see the threads! Look at them! It’s not a mess, it’s a really terrible magical knitting project!”
The surge of power was agonizing, yes—a golden fire burning through my veins—but it was the good kind of agony.
The kind that made you want to run a hundred miles or reorganize a library by colour in five minutes flat.
It was golden, sparkling mania. My mind was so clear and I could see that Quieting had never been about stopping the flow, only about changing its shape.
If a current could be shaped, it could be redirected.
If it could be redirected, it could be transformed.
“Okay,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet. The floor felt bouncy. Was stone this bouncy? “I’m going to fix the plumbing.”
“Plumbing?” Fenrik asked.
“The big glowy plumbing!” I grabbed his shoulders. He felt very solid. “Stand back, Lord Broody. I’m about to do science!”
I spun toward the column of fire, threw my arms wide, and laughed. It was probably a manic sound, but frankly, with enough Dragonheart in my system to jump-start a comet, I didn’t care.
I shoved my hands into the column of silver fire.
It should have vaporized me. It should have stripped the flesh from my bones and scattered me across the valley.
But the Dragonheart extract apparently altered my density.
My blood felt like molten lead, singing a violent harmony with the ley-line’s roar.
“Fenrik!” I shouted, the sound lost to the gale but felt through the bond I could see so clearly between us. “Don’t hold it back! Give it to me! All your anger, you are one angry lord, I see, and scared, all the fear, pour it in!”
I felt him step up behind me, his chest pressing against my back.
His hands clamped over mine, his fingers tangling with my own right in the center of the geyser.
The contact sparked a detonation of light.
His magic flooded into me, blinding silver.
It was the storm over the mountains; it was the crash of the ocean against the cliffs.
And my magic rose to meet it. My gold. His silver.
The Law of Arcane Entropy states that magic cannot be destroyed, only transformed.
Kelda had tried to stop the flow, to bottle the ocean.
I was not going stop it. I was going to braid it.
My magic had never been incomplete, it had been alone.
Weird, but this warmth didn’t erase the cold I accumulated all these years, it merely gave it somewhere to belong.
His silver steadied me. My gold answered.
Quiet, I commanded. Listen. I grabbed the chaotic strands of waste magic, the volatile byproducts of Lumenvale’s comfort, and I twisted them.
I wove Fenrik’s raw emotional power into the structure, using his storm to turn the waste into fuel.
It was like knitting with lightning. The screaming frequency of the ley-line began to smooth, shifting from a shriek to a deep hum.
I knew what it would cost. There would be no taking it back.
“No!”
The shriek tore through our concentration.
Kelda had peeled herself off the wall. I knew she eventually would, I just hoped it would be too late.
The magnitude of the power we were wielding had probably burned through the fog of her stupor.
She staggered toward us, her eyes wide and bloodshot, her face twisted.
“You’re ruining it!” she screamed. “It’s mine! I earned it! I waited thirteen years!”
She lunged, not at us, but at the fissure itself.
She thrust her hands into the periphery of the flow, chanting guttural words of binding, attempting to siphon the power, to steal the weave I was creating.
She tried to force the river to stop flowing, but the ley-line wasn’t a dumb beast. It had been tortured for a decade, choked by her “valve,” poisoned by her suppression.
And now, for the first time, it was breathing.
It tasted the harmony between Fenrik and me, the perfect balance of chaos and order, and it recognized us.
It recognized her, too as its parasite so a shockwave of rejection slammed into Kelda.
The massive energy she tried to inhale snapped back, creating a feedback loop that turned her own body into a conduit for the decades of accumulated rot.
At last, I understood what my mother had done here.
She hadn’t been trying to win anything like this woman was, but to stop the madness.
The air around her shimmered and ripped apart. Her Veil magic, the layers of illusion she’d painted over herself for years, evaporated in the furnace of raw truth.
I watched transfixed, as her skin greyed and slackened.
Her golden hair thinned into brittle straw, then white wisps.
Her posture crumpled, the spine curling in on itself.
She withered, revealing the creature that had existed beneath the glamour, a woman hollowed out by envy, eaten alive by the dark ambition she’d nurtured.
“I was beautiful,” she croaked, her voice a dry rattle, staring at her skeletal hands. “I was perfect.”
The stone floor beneath her groaned. The earth itself, sick of holding her poison, opened up. The fissure widened to claim its debt.
Kelda looked up at us one last time, her eyes milky and blind with terror.
The raw energy surged, wrapping around her ankles.
She screamed once, the sound cut off as the floor dissolved.
The ley-line swallowed her whole, dragging her down into the crushing depths of the earth, sealing her into the foundation she had tried to enslave.
The crack snapped shut with a sound like a thunderclap.
Silence rushed back into the room, so sudden it made my ears ring. The geyser was gone. In its place, a steady, rhythmic pulse of silver-gold light glowed softly from the sealed floor, beating in time with my own heart.
One moment I was a conduit for the earth’s fury, vibrating with borrowed godhood, and the next, the Dragonheart elixir abandoned my veins, leaving me a hollowed-out husk sliding against Fenrik’s chest. The silence of the cavern pressed against my ears, but within that void, a door unlocked in my mind.
Maybe it was the proximity to death, or the raw, unfiltered magic still vibrating in my marrow, but the memory Kelda had poisoned clawed its way to the surface.
Blended with the illusion she’d spun, I could hardly feel the truth beneath it.
I closed my eyes and reached for it, grasping through the dark.
I was twelve again. The infirmary smelled of antiseptic snake-root.
The maddened wolf-familiar was lunging, its jaws snapping at my throat.
I remembered the terror, the instinct to Quiet it, to shove the silence down its throat before it tore me apart.
But then... I felt the hands. Warm, calloused hands on my small shoulders.
My mother. In Kelda’s lie, my magic had struck backwards, freezing my mother’s heart as it froze the beast. But now, with the ley-line’s song still humming in my blood, I felt the current as it had truly flowed.
My mother hadn’t pulled away in fear, she had leaned in.
I felt the surge of her own essence, warmed by love, pouring into me.
She had been the fuel for my power. She saw her daughter faltering against a monster and she had made the ultimate calculation.
Take it, her grip had said. Take it all, Lysa.
Hold the line. Tears leaked from my closed eyes, tracing hot paths through the stone dust on my cheeks.
She hadn’t looked at me with accusation as she fell.
The face fading in my memory was fierce and proud.
You are strong enough, she had whispered.
“I didn’t stop her heart,” I said. The crushing weight that had sat on my chest for a decade, the conviction that I was a monster, a weapon that misfired, evaporated into the dark. “She gave it to me. She passed the torch.”
Fenrik’s arms tightened around me, holding me up when my legs refused, but I didn’t need the support. Not for this.
“And I am not going to let it go out.”
Above us, the mountain exhaled. The Manor was settling its weight into the earth, shaking off the itch of the curse like a dog curling into its basket after a long hunt.
I blinked, waiting for the aftershock, but the world held steady.
I looked at Fenrik. The shadows that had haunted the hollow of his throat for weeks were gone.
No silver veins pulsed at his temple; no fever-bright glaze coated his iris.
His skin was pale under the grime, but it was the pallor of exhaustion, not of sickness.
He was just a man. A terrified, beautiful, gloriously human man breathing air that didn’t hurt him.
He stepped closer, his hands coming up to cup my face. His thumbs brushed my cheeks, anchoring me when I suddenly felt untethered.
“You did it,” he said, his voice rough. He searched my eyes, looking for the cracks, his forehead resting against mine. “Lysa, you—“
I tried to smile. I wanted to tell him that we made a decent plumbing team, or crack a joke about the mess Kelda had left, but my tongue felt like a block of lead in my mouth.
The golden fire that had been roaring through my veins was extinguished.
A few moments ago I was infinite; then I was a girl who had borrowed starlight and now had to pay the debt.
The glow in my vision faded, greying out the edges of the room until even Fenrik’s face grew dim. I knew, with distant detachment, that the gold in my eyes was gone, leaving behind only dull hazel. My reserves were scraped raw.
“Lysa?”
The sound of my name seemed to come from underwater.
My knees unhinged. There was no pain, only a sudden, overwhelming gravity.
I crumpled. Fenrik caught me before I hit the stone, his arms a solid band of heat against the encroaching cold.
I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. I couldn’t feel the floor.
There was only the scent of him, rain and ink and life, and then a silence deeper than the ley-line, pulling me down.