Chapter 36
LYKOR
Aesar materialized beside Lykor in the corridor, fully formed, silver hair catching the crystalline light, arms crossed as he studied the walls with a scholar’s focus.
As if he’d simply decided to show up. As if silence were a door he could walk back through whenever he chose.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Lykor said out loud.
But he already knew the answer. Kal’s death had given Aesar every right to vanish into grief.
But while Aesar sank beyond reach, their people remained.
Their war. Every decision paid for in bodies, every sleepless night spent waiting for the next catastrophe to find them.
Aesar had left him to bear the weight of all of it.
Jassyn had stood beside Lykor, but Jassyn didn’t live inside his skull. He couldn’t sense the place Aesar had occupied, or how loud silence became after a lifetime of never being alone.
“Walking into this place by yourself was stupid,” Aesar said instead of acknowledging him. “Even for you.”
“You could have said anything before now.”
Aesar’s nostrils flared. “Jassyn is going to be furious.”
A muscle jumped in Lykor’s jaw. Predictable. The low blow. Aesar didn’t get to disappear for days and return with reprimands wrapped in Jassyn’s name.
“Jassyn doesn’t know I’m here,” Lykor shot back. “Which you’d be aware of if you’d bothered showing your face.”
Aesar stared at him, the silence holding judgment. His gaze dropped to the blood drying over Lykor’s skin, then lifted to the light pulsing down the corridor ahead.
“You have blood on your knuckles, and the walls are watching you.”
“Glad you finally came back to help.”
“And since we’re here, let’s see how far the miners got.”
Lykor rolled his eyes. “What do you think I was doing before you showed up?”
Aesar turned away, denying him even the satisfaction of an argument. He followed the corridor’s impossible geometry as he drifted ahead, curiosity pulling him deeper.
Light struck under Lykor’s boots when he followed, racing forward in pulses. Aesar slowed to watch the wave break ahead of him.
At the end of the passage, crystal rose unbroken from floor to ceiling. Lykor lifted his claw to the wall, searching for a weakness, a mechanism, anything his talons could pry. The surface warmed beneath his palm, the resonance in his skull sharpening until his ears rang.
Then the wall moved.
With a hiss of released air, seams opened across the flawless surface. Angular sections withdrew into the surrounding crystal with a precision that made Lykor’s skin crawl.
The passage opened into darkness, bands of light racing across the walls.
Aesar’s attention caught on boot scuffs scored into the otherwise flawless floor.
“Someone came through here. They may still be ahead.”
Lykor stepped forward without waiting, the crystal sealing behind him with a whisper. Aesar materialized farther down the corridor.
The floor shuddered. Somewhere beyond the mine, earth ground against earth, the movement deep enough to climb his legs.
The passage emptied into a chamber. Crystalline ribs curved overhead, vanishing into darkness. Along the far wall, the weight of the earth had split the structure open, stones spilling through the jagged wound.
Five humans hauled rubble from the breach, stacking it in piles. Beyond them, half-hidden behind a ridge of broken stone, an armored figure sat slumped against the crystal.
The miners stooped and lifted in perfect unison. One dragged a leg bent sideways below the knee. Another’s hands had worn open, tendons shifting with every grip.
None of them slowed.
At first, Lykor took them for another crew.
Then one turned.
Her eyes passed through him, fixed and glassy. Her head kept rotating past the point where her neck should’ve broken. A heartbeat later, her torso snapped around to follow, joints cracking into alignment, and she bent for another stone.
Lykor’s shadows cinched around his fists, ready to strike.
Aesar appeared beside the nearest human. “She’s not breathing.”
Her chest remained still while her arms lifted another slab, her feet crossing the ground without faltering. Whatever kept these bodies upright, Lykor couldn’t trace it, the Essence in the walls too dense to isolate a single source.
Aesar drifted to the elf slumped at the chamber’s edge, one arm fused into the crystal behind him. The soldier’s armor hung loose on a frame thinned past starvation, breath scraping out of him. Alive. Barely.
He clutched a Starshard in his fist. From it, crystal had climbed over his wrist and spread into the wall, sealing both flesh and gem into a single glinting mass.
His eyes stared at nothing, pupils blown wide, his lips moving around words too faint to hear.
Light pulsed through the Starshard. Across the chamber, the corpses jerked in response. Five bodies continued to haul rubble into piles, each movement keeping time with the elf’s whisper.
A chill settled under Lykor’s ribs, deeper than Rimeclaw’s frost.
The miners above had already been dead.
He’d walked past them without a second glance while they chipped at stone, flinched from empty air, and whispered to no one.
Neither he nor Aesar spoke as the corpses kept working and the crystal hummed around them.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” Aesar said at last when the wall claimed another sliver of skin.
“Wasn’t planning on it.” Lykor left the elf to the crystal and the dead behind.
The corridor divided into passages no miner could’ve carved.
Some opened to what might’ve once been living quarters—low platforms recessed into the walls, waist-high ledges projecting from the crystal, shallow impressions where objects had rested and been removed.
Roots needled through fractures in the floor, alive where stone and silence should’ve starved them.
Aesar paused at every threshold until Lykor’s stare pulled him onward. By the next turn, he’d stopped looking into the side chambers, his focus ahead.
“Essence is converging toward a single source,” he murmured, studying the pulsing illumination. “Whatever lies at the heart of this place, we’re walking toward it.”
“Glad a century sharing a skull hasn’t dulled your powers of observation,” Lykor muttered.
“Still waiting for evidence you possess any.”
The corridor funneled inward, its walls drawing close as the ceiling lowered. The light under Lykor’s feet narrowed with it, a thin band cutting through the crystal.
A root brushed his neck. He struck it aside without looking at the growth piercing the ceiling.
The passage released him into a chamber vast enough to swallow every space behind them. Its ceiling climbed toward an apex lost in shadow. At the center, a dais throbbed with power, slow rings of Essence spreading through the crystal like shockwaves across still water.
A figure hovered above it, wrought from turquoise light, its edges breaking like flame. It faced a raised pedestal with one arm extended, Essence gathering around its fingers.
The figure’s hand stilled, the chamber’s hum narrowing to a piercing tone.
“We need to leave,” Aesar hissed.
The apparition turned, light rearranging itself around a body that never settled. Its features shifted from angular to soft, masculine to feminine, neither and both, face after face surfacing and dissolving before any could hold.
Its gaze found Lykor, turquoise light holding the form of an elf without the weight of flesh. Essence surged through the chamber. Every surface flared, and pressure gathered behind Lykor’s eyes until his molars ached.
It reached for him.
The gesture struck inside his skull. An ancient presence drove through the channels Galaeryn had carved into his mind, following paths worn deep by years of coercion.
Lykor’s hands shook. His body locked.
The king’s magic had been iron forced through thought, crushing Lykor’s will until it bent or broke. He’d survived by burying Aesar in their awareness, partitioning himself behind obsidian doors, sacrificing whatever pieces he could afford to lose.
None of it had kept Galaeryn out.
But this touch offered warmth.
The hum thinned into something intimate, pressing against the inside of his skull with the tenderness of a hand cradling his face. It whispered without language, yet Lykor understood.
“Come home. The stars have kept your seat.”
A part of him writhed, trying to fight it. But his body—Aesar’s blood, the Aelfyn lineage Lykor had never claimed—leaned toward the warmth before he could wrench it back.
“Lykor.” Aesar’s voice cracked. “This is why Galaeryn experimented on you in the prisons. He was making you a—”
Vessel.
The king’s words returned.
Forged for divinity. Shaped to bear what others would break beneath.
The king had followed a design whispered into his mind. And the presence before Lykor recognized what years of torture had prepared him to become.
Lykor’s vision blurred, the crystalline walls bleeding into light. Aesar clawed through their shared awareness, dragging Lykor back, forcing himself between his mind and the presence claiming it.
Aesar lunged for control.
The switch struck like a blow. Their body staggered as Lykor’s awareness was driven aside. His hand lifted without his command, his jaw locking with Aesar’s concentration. Aesar seized their muscles and reached for their Well, hauling up enough Essence to tear open a portal.
Somewhere. Anywhere. It didn’t matter. Only out.
Essence scattered before it could gather, the crystal devouring every thread Aesar wove.
Aesar’s hold on their body tore loose.
“Lykor. Move.”
The presence seized Aesar within their shared awareness and yanked him beyond Lykor’s reach, like a body swept beneath ice.
Lykor slammed back into himself.
Too late.
His body lay beyond command, his mind screaming inside motionless flesh as it had in the prisons. There, stillness had been agony. Here, it offered peace.
A terrible, borrowed peace like belonging.
Lykor had never belonged anywhere. He’d carved a life from survival and spite, and none of his defenses knew how to withstand a place claiming him as its own.
The figure glided closer. Its shifting features settled into a face that might’ve shared blood with the king.
It raised one hand toward him.
Far away, the earth shuddered again.
A deep rumble rolled through the chamber walls. Stone ground against stone, shaking crystal dust from the vaulted ceiling overhead. The figure paused, its head turning toward the sound.
The wall opposite Lykor buckled.
A fracture knifed through the crystal, fissuring until roots wrenched it wide. Slick with sap and violent with new growth, they rammed through the breach.
Crystal burst. Whole sections tore from their joints and crashed inward, spilling soil and shattered stone into the chamber. More roots hammered after them until the structure peeled open around their passage.
A finer tendril found Lykor’s ankle. It circled once and tightened, gentle as fingers testing for a pulse.
The figure snarled and lunged.
It seized Lykor’s face. Essence poured through his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Filling. Drowning.
Magic flooded through every channel the king had carved. When the presence reached for control, Lykor went under.