23. Asha
Asha
Hale’s hellfire hits the portrait like a verdict.
It combusts in a silent, consuming white-gold flash that drives us all back a step. The frame blackens. The paint blisters.
Yseld screams.
Not from the portrait. From the walls.
Her voice tears through the stone of the passage in a long, vicious shriek that rattles my back molars and sends silver sparks cascading from the ceiling. I don’t cover my ears. I want to hear every second of it.
“Keep going,” I tell Hale.
He doesn’t need me to issue the order. His fire pours from both hands, hellfire that belongs to no magical system SilverGate can interfere with, and it hits the portrait in relentless, focused blasts.
The painted face distorts. The crone’s expression twists from fury into something that looks uncomfortably close to fear.
The screaming intensifies, and then the passage walls crack.
Purple light bleeds through the fractures, sharp and immediate, and the stone floor shudders.
And then it stops.
The screaming, the hellfire, the burning stench. All of it.
All that’s left of the portrait is a wisp of smoke and some ashes that fall to the cold stone like pretty, dirty rain.
“Are you quite done, Mr Hale?” Blackridge asks.
“Is she dead?”
“Maybe.”
“Then, no.”
Blackridge’s expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes shifts like he’s getting a supernatural equivalent of a headache forming. He looks at the ash on the floor, then at the crack running through the wall where Yseld’s voice tore through the stone, then back at Hale.
“She is not dead,” he says.
“You just said maybe,” Hale fires back.
“I was being generous. She is dispersed. Temporarily.”
I step forward before Hale can burn something else in frustration. “How temporarily?”
Blackridge looks at me with an expression which screams that he finds the question deeply irritating and the answer worse. “Hard to say.”
“Longer than three days, or less?” I ask, my gaze boring into his.
His bores back into mine. “Hard. To. Say.”
“I hear you,” I say with a sage nod. “But if she comes back, we will simply ‘disperse’ her again. She will not disrupt my triumphant return home.”
“Meaning?” Blackridge places his hands behind his back.
“Meaning that the eclipse is in three days,” I say. “When it opens, I’m going home. Without Yseld’s rotting ghost trying to hijack my body on the way through the gate.”
Blackridge is quiet for long enough to be annoying. “You know about the eclipse.”
It’s not a question.
I don’t deny it. “Yes.”
Blackridge exhales through his nose. “Naturally.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“I rarely waste energy on the inevitable.”
Tobin gives him a sharp look. “You knew the timing.”
“I knew the cycle was approaching.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that every gate in existence is about to become permeable?”
“That is not for student knowledge.”
“Because you intend to keep it a secret?” Tobin asks, bulldozing his way past Hale to glare at Blackridge. “That is insidious at best.”
They glare at each other, and the passageway falls silent. I study Blackridge’s face, though, in the few seconds it takes to realise what he plans to do.
“You’re going to stop it,” I accuse him.
“This is a catastrophic occurrence, Miss Asha. Yes. Our plan is to attempt to stop it.” Blackridge drags his gaze away from Tobin.
“How?” I hiss.
“That is need to know.”
“Oh, I think I need to know, seeing as I plan to use this eclipse to get out of here.”
Blackridge’s eyes narrow. “Your plan is exactly why you do not need to know. If the eclipse completes, every sealed boundary weakens. Not just StormGate. DarkHallow. MistHallow. Hell. The old fae courts. Dead realms. Broken realms. Places with no names left because speaking them became illegal for excellent reasons.”
“Not my problem.”
“It will become your problem when things follow you through.”
I smile at him. “They can try.”
Tobin makes an exasperated sound. “How are you stopping it?”
The headmaster looks at him. “You are in no condition to involve yourself.”
“Wrong.”
Leith shifts beside me. “If you stop the eclipse, you trap her here.”
“I preserve every other realm attached to this academy.”
“Touching,” I say. “Really. Heroic headmaster saves existence by keeping one angry goddess in a fabricated body until SilverGate spits me out through a ward seam or Yseld crawls back together and steals what belongs to me. I thought you wanted me gone.”
“I do. But not at the cost of every other creature in the network of realms.”
Ouch. That hits me harder than I expected it to. Why do I care about them? I care about me. I care about… I look at the guys. Them.
“Would I survive it?”
“Most likely. You are a goddess.”
“But they wouldn’t,” I whisper. The three guys turn to look at me.
Blackridge’s eyes give away his regret at this situation for all of a microsecond. “No.”
The word lands between us and breaks something clean through the middle of me.
No.
I turn slowly, taking in Hale’s fire, Tobin’s pale fury, Leith’s awful stillness. Three idiots who knelt for me in a tower while the universe prepared to open its veins. Three creatures who have somehow become more necessary than my own throne.
I despise that.
I detest how easily Blackridge found the one blade sharp enough to make me hesitate.
Hale moves closer, an expression on his face I’ve never seen before. “Don’t.”
I look up at him. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t start making noble fucking choices. It won’t suit you.”
A laugh scrapes out of me, harsh and wrong. “You don’t know what suits me.”
“I know you,” he growls. “And I know that look.”
Tobin’s attention flicks between Blackridge and me. “Define wouldn’t.”
Blackridge looks unimpressed. “I’m not indulging pedantry.”
“Indulge it,” Tobin says, his tone low and bordering on frightening.
The headmaster’s eyes sharpen. “Fine. If the realm gates fall and the veils between worlds bleed, the only things left standing will be those creatures whose very presence defies the natural order.”
“For example?” Leith asks quietly.
“Me,” I say.
“Creatures far worse than you,” Blackridge says.
“You never met me,” I say with a shaky smile.
“Do not make light of this, Miss Asha. It will be your downfall. And theirs.” He vanishes like he does, which pisses me off on an industrial scale.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Leith says, turning to me.
“Well, it kind of does,” I say lightly. “He’s going to find a way to stop it and save the worlds and all of you, and in the meantime, I will be stuck here as a low-level witch with no power.”
Hale growls, a low rumble from his chest. “That sounds like defeat.”
“It is.” The words feel foul on my tongue.
Hale recoils like I’ve struck him. “Take that back.”
I lift one shoulder. “Why? It’s accurate.”
“No, it fucking isn’t.”
“Blackridge is going to stop the eclipse. If he succeeds, I stay here. If he fails, you all die. Those are the options on the table.”
Tobin steps closer. “Those are the options he wants you to see.”
I turn on him because he is convenient and because if I look at Hale for another second, I’m going to cry again. “Oh, good. The witch has found secret options in the emotional wreckage. Please share with the class.”
His silver eyes narrow. “Blackridge doesn’t bluff about catastrophic events, but he withholds relevant information as a reflex.
You aren’t telling me that Yseld crawled through the gate during an eclipse that miraculously either didn’t drop all gates or everyone and their records somehow survived.
It’s too long ago for a fucking start. The timeline doesn’t track.
There is another way. We’ve been chasing this option down because the ghost of your body told us to. It’s a stupid plan.”
“It was my body’s plan,” I grit out.
“It was half of a plan from half of you,” Tobin fires back. “Given from inside a void designed to test claims and exploit fractures. I’m not saying it lied. I’m saying it answered the question we asked, not the one we should’ve asked.”
I stare at him.
Rain lashes the narrow windows at the end of the passage. The ashes of Yseld’s portrait sit between us, useless and too quiet. Purple light still pulses faintly in the cracks Hale made when he burned her painted prison.
“What question should we have asked?” I say.
Tobin looks at the ashes. “How did Yseld get out the first time?”
Silence.
It settles over us with unpleasant weight.
Leith’s attention shifts to the empty frame marks on the wall. “She didn’t do it nine hundred and sixty-two years ago.”
“No,” Tobin says. “She couldn’t have. If she used a full convergence to reach StormGate, the academy would have records of a realm-wide event. Blackridge would be less cagey and more murderous. The world would have scars.”
Hale’s fire dims slightly. “So she used a smaller door.”
“A fracture,” Tobin says. “A forced breach. A weak point between StormGate and SilverGate that doesn’t open everything else.”
“The opening in the stars,” I murmur.
“Precisely. The Astrology Tower wasn’t showing us the eclipse, it was simply showing us where the gate is.”
“Why?” I ask suspiciously.
“Because SilverGate wants you gone, and it wants you out of here before the eclipse.”
“So we go back outside?” I ask, weary of this entire fucking thing. If I ever get back to my throne, I’m glueing my arse to it so no one can evict me from my own realm ever again.
“We go back to the courtyard,” Tobin says. “But not blind.”
Hale looks at the ash smear on the wall. “We should burn more things first.”
“As comforting as that is,” Leith says, “we need the ground anchor.”
I stare at the empty space where Yseld’s portrait used to be, then at the purple cracks Hale carved into the wall. The light pulses once, before SilverGate starts sealing the damage.
“We have to do this before Yseld rematerialises,” I say, exhaustion in every syllable.
“We do. Which means we don’t have much time,” Tobin says.
“Library?” I ask, shoulders slumped.
“That’s the spirit,” he says, gripping my chin gently and tilting my head up to meet his gaze. “We will not be defeated.”
“Not yet anyway,” Leith says.
“Gee, doom and gloom much,” Hale mutters, but it lacks his usual insulting tone. He has an expression on him that is worrying.
“What are you thinking, princey?” I ask as we turn and head farther down the passageway, following Leith, who leads us into the library.
“Nothing,” he says, absently, giving me a quick smile. “Just pissed off.”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I say and lean into him as he wraps his arm around my shoulder. “I hear you loud and clear.”