Nine #2
Bread catches painfully in my throat and Marissa bursts out laughing, spitting her soup back into her bowl.
“Did you hear the crack?” she asks, delighted. “Kael looked like he was going to kill him for a second, but he let him go.”
“I’ve never seen a Shadowborn back down from a fight,” Sorin says quietly.
Alaris cuts in, his eyes narrowed. “The Shadow Dominion hasn’t won the Blood Rites in generations, but they always survive until the end. Good for them, bad for us.”
“The Shadow Offerings are dangerous,” Fen says, glancing at Alaris before looking back to his plate, cheeks colouring ever so slightly. “They’re not like the others. The Shadow Crown wouldn’t risk a Prince unless they expected him to survive.”
“What makes you so sure he was sent?” I ask.
“That might be worse.” Sorin says.
Alaris rolls his eyes but doesn’t disagree. “My family said that the Shadowborn would take you out in the dark before fighting you head on. The Fireborn are the real problem—they enjoy it.”
The thought makes my stomach tighten.
“At least the Shadowborn will make it quick.”
Lyssandra's mouth twists. “It’s all barbarism in the end,” she says, her voice even and calm. “They’re here to kill, no matter how you phrase it. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
A lull settles over us, but I feel compelled to speak. “Will you not, then? Kill, I mean?”
Lyssandra sighs, deep and resigned. “Our faith forbids it.”
I want to ask her more, but a familiar, distant voice interrupts from my right. Theon’s eyes are glazed and cloudy, like before. His fingers splay across the table, pressing down with such force that his fingertips have gone a pale white.
“The watcher under the waves stirs,” he says, the words spilling out quickly, as though in a trance. “It waits. Watching. The bridge will break before it bends.”
His eyes flick to me.
“The darkness hungers for the light, but only the water of the deep can drown the divine.”
Silence spreads outwards from him, slow and unnatural.
Theon blinks rapidly, shaking out his hands as the blood returns to the tips.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, “I was gone for a second there, wasn’t I?”
I nod slowly while everyone else pretends not to have noticed, but the silence feels heavier than before.
It is Marissa who breaks it, nudging me with her foot under the table as her eyes dart across the room.
“Look,” she whispers, nodding towards a far table.
I glance quickly over my shoulder. Kael sits there with the other Shadowborn—Nyxen and Vaelis. All three sit statue-still, only moving to place food in their mouths. Kael is watching me, his face cold and expressionless.
“He keeps looking over here,” Marissa whispers.
I want to tell her she’s being ridiculous, but the memory of his body pressed to mine, his voice in my ear, is too vivid. My face betrays me immediately and I focus hard on my soup instead.
Lyssandra picks at her bread without looking up, and for the first time I notice rings of tiny silver scars around her fingers. Beautiful, but haunting, somehow.
“He does act differently towards you,” she says quietly, just for me. “As though he’s orbiting around you. His darkness seems to wrap around you but never quite touches. I cannot quite understand why, though.”
Morwen finally glances up, pinning me with her deep blue stare. She signs something—five short, sharp gestures with her hands—and Lyssandra translates: “She says your fate is bound with his.”
Marissa giggles in a way that reveals her true age, placing a hand over her heart as she mimics a swoon.
I suddenly become very interested in my bread.
Our conversation is not as quiet as we think, because Fen leans forward, voice severe. “It hardly matters. Only one person survives this. Sounds to me like fate intends to kill you both.”
Alaris lets out a harsh sigh. “Mother help us, sorry about him, Luceris. He can be a bit depressing sometimes. It’s not like anything the Waterborn say is true anyway; no offence.”
He lifts his hand in a half-hearted wave of apology.
“The currents speak a language you couldn’t dream of understanding,” Theon says.
“Right...” Alaris responds, rolling his eyes.
The conversation meanders along, but all I can think about are Theon’s words.
The darkness hungers for the light.
It takes all my willpower not to look behind me, to see if he’s looking at me still.
The Waterborn excuse themselves to pray, and Marissa, Callen, and I stand to leave.
“We should rest,” I say. “We only have one more day to prepare.”
Marissa gives me a hug before we go.
“Try and get some sleep tonight,” she whispers. “Don’t let the monsters in.”
I squeeze her back, hard. “Only if you promise to do the same.”
Her grin grows into a smirk.
I walk the halls alone as Theon’s prophecy plays on my mind. In the quiet, I let myself think about Kael. I wonder what lives beneath all that cold restraint.
I wonder if everyone here feels this untethered, like something vast has already decided how this ends.
And despite every sensible instinct screaming otherwise, I find myself wondering what he sees when he looks at me.
That night, sleep does not come gently. It drags me under.
The sensation reminds me of standing on the Mana Bridge and looking down into the sea below: the certainty that if I fell, the water would not simply swallow me whole, but pull me deeper and deeper until even the light disappeared.
Kael is waiting for me.
Not with the sharp hunger from the Dome or the quiet threat of our first meeting in the corridor, but with something far more unsettling: stillness.
He stands in a place that cannot possibly be real. Crystal stretches endlessly in every direction, smooth and reflective beneath our feet like frozen water. Above us, the sky churns with white and black, the colours folding together slowly, like oil stirred through cream.
The world is empty except for the two of us.
And somehow that feels worse.
Kael moves first.
I try to step back, but the mirrored floor turns slick beneath my feet and I fail to gain any distance at all.
He stops only a breath away from me, close enough that I can see the silver threaded through his dark eyes.
They are not fully black here. Gold glimmers faintly beneath the surface, softening something in him that reality never does.
For one impossible moment, he almost looks hopeful.
Kael says something, but no sound follows.
The silence that replaces it is unbearable. It presses down hard enough to buckle the world around us, and suddenly the mirrored floor fractures beneath my feet.
The Mother Shard speaks.
Her voice tears through the dream with enough force to split the crystal apart in burning lines of pink and gold. Cracks race outwards beneath us, shattering our reflections into jagged fragments.
But beneath her voice, there is another: quieter, distant, pushing upwards like something drowning beneath deep water.
I strain to hear it.
The dream shifts violently around me as I focus. Kael’s hand remains against my face and, without thinking, I lean into the touch.
His expression changes instantly, fear flashing across his face.
His fingers drag suddenly downwards, nails no longer human but sharpened into dark talons that rake across my skin. He is staring past me now, somewhere over my shoulder, and the second voice rises at last, warped and broken beneath the waterlogged pull of the dream.
lost. lost. lost.
the children are lost.
the bridge is broken.
the blood. wrong. wrong.
communion shattered.
where are you.
where is your other. the other.
I try to speak, but water fills my mouth instead. My lungs seize. I am drowning.
Beneath me, the mirrored floor begins to collapse into a vast black depth, but Kael catches my wrist before I can fall.
The Mother Shard’s voice crashes through the dream again.
“Show me,” she demands.
The entire world shakes.
“SHOW ME.”
But the second voice refuses to be silenced. It fights back, ragged and desperate:
not one.
not one.
fractures must mend.
light to dark.
dark to light.
broken cycle.
tainted power.
hunger. hunger.
not enough. never enough.
Kael’s grip tightens, panic breaking cleanly across his face now. He tries to pull me towards him, but every movement shatters the world further. White becomes black. Black becomes white. The dream folds inwards on itself, collapsing beneath the strain of both voices tearing at it.
And beneath all of it, I feel the second presence searching for me.
Not the Mother Shard, but something else entirely. Something wounded. Something furious.
Then the dream tears apart completely.
I wake gasping.
The ceiling is a riot of fresh cracks, branching out like veins. They pulse faintly with golden light.
My hands are shaking.
Copper coats the back of my tongue, though when I touch my mouth there is no blood left behind. The wound has already healed, if there ever was one at all.
For a long time, I lie there staring upwards, trying to piece the dream back together.
The second voice lingers most clearly in my mind. Not the Mother Shard, but the other one—the broken thing beneath the water.
Fragments of its words still drift through my thoughts, tangled and incomplete. A warning. A plea. Maybe both.
Fractures must mend.
The words settle deep beneath my ribs, heavy with the certainty that this will not be the last time I hear that voice.
Worse still, I think it was searching for me.
The Dome is strangely empty for our final day.
There are no overseers in sight. Even the constant hum of the Embrace seems muted.
Marissa and I have the vast floor to ourselves. Our footsteps echo through the space like we’re already haunting it.
She stands in the centre of the room, the overhead light sharpening her features into something older. She has her hands raised, face taut. I circle around her, trying my best to look the part, despite spending the morning piecing myself back together.
“Shield,” I say. “You need to be fast. It’s no use if the knife is already in your chest.”