Twenty Seven
For one breath—one impossible, stuttering instant—everything holds still.
The beach, the sea, the sky, the Overseers, us: suspended as though the hand of a goddess has pinned the world in place.
Above us, the counter bleeds red, the number sixteen carved into the sky like a wound that will not clot.
Rain beads in the air, the droplets frozen mid-fall.
It all unfreezes at once, and the world doubles its pace to take back the lost second.
The counter shifts and turns, anchored in the heart of the crystal crown.
Then the crown erupts. Crystal rips from it, growing impossibly fast down towards the island’s centre.
It becomes a tower so high it eats the sky, shoving aside the clouds and warping the air. The red sixteen glows on its face.
The Mother Shard does not speak.
The silence feels deliberate.
The Overseers form a loose, uneven ring around us, then another, and another, as far as my vision goes.
Their faces are distorted—no, not faces.
Masks. Glassy and fractured, but alive and constantly shifting.
One turns and its features flicker, cycling through a dozen iterations—Marissa’s soft freckles, then Atheron’s hateful sneer, then Callen’s pale eyes, then my own face, all overlaid in a blur.
Some seem stuck between faces, wearing the expressions of strangers dead for generations.
Their bodies are worse: every movement is a glitch, a jump, a correction. Fingers bend and snap back. Limbs twitch and lag, out of sync. Their robes drag on the sand and leave no mark. They are malfunctioning ghosts, and there are far too many of them.
The chanting begins, and I want to bite through my own tongue just to stop the sound.
Until the count is true.
The cycle must resolve.
Completion.
Each Overseer says a different line, with a different cadence, and the effect is a stuttering spiral of noise. A ritual prayer on an infinite loop.
Kael’s hand is still in mine. I squeeze it harder than I should, and he flinches, but he doesn’t let go. He looks at me, face lit red by the death counter.
“What now?” I ask.
His jaw is set, his eyes pure black, but his voice is steady and cool. “We fight.”
My mouth goes dry, tongue stuck to the roof. I try to swallow but all I taste is salt and the memory of blood.
I nod.
Kael doesn’t wait any longer. He pulls his hand from mine and steps forward, letting his shadows eat him alive.
It’s different from before. There’s no beauty, no finesse.
It’s the same rage as the fire trial, but born from a different need.
The darkness comes in brutal sheets, pouring out from his shoulders, blurring the outline of his body into an animal shape.
He lunges at the first Overseer that comes within reach.
His shadows extend into a scythe, and he slashes clean through its midsection, expecting to cut it in half.
Instead, the scythe passes through like smoke, the Overseer’s torso distorting, bulging, then correcting itself.
The Overseer doesn’t even react, and Kael stumbles back, his mouth a line of white.
“They’re immune,” he says, not to me but to the world. “It’s useless.”
Another Overseer steps forward, and Kael attacks again, this time going for the head.
He throws the shadow like a spear, straight and perfect.
It impales the Overseer’s glass mask, the darkness distorting around the point of impact, crackling like trapped lightning.
For a flashing instant, the mask flickers with the faces it has worn, then resets.
The glass is undamaged, and the Overseer resumes its chant as if nothing happened.
Kael’s shadows ripple in confusion, then begin to recede, retreating up his arms and back into his chest.
He falls back to my side. “I can’t touch them,” he says, voice tight.
I look at him, then at the ring of Overseers, then up at the crystal tower. The death counter burns, unwavering.
Something snaps inside my head, like a cord finally breaking, and I scream at the sky, the words tearing my throat raw. “You can’t have us!”
My voice echoes into the world.
“I won’t kill him!” I shout. “I won’t!”
Thunder answers me. Real thunder, so close it’s not a sound but a knife to the eardrums. The beach shakes, the sea behind us frothing and surging, sending waves crashing wildly on the shore.
Rain comes, thin at first, then in stabbing needles. Water streams down our arms, pooling at our feet. Lightning forks overhead, and with each strike, the Overseers seem to multiply.
The air is alive with static, with hunger. A voice, so close it could be inside my own head, answers:
“It will all be over soon.”
It’s not a threat. It is a promise.
The ring tightens. One Overseer moves in front of the others, feet not quite touching the ground. Kael launches blasts of shadow at it, but they scatter like ash in the wind.
It lifts its hand and Kael drops to the sand.
An invisible force crushes him straight down, the wet sand giving beneath him before firming and holding him there. He tries to push up, but his arms can’t move. Blood leaks from his nose, then his ears, and the bones in his shoulders make a crunching noise I know too well.
I lunge forward and shield him, a dome of light expanding from my hands.
The force pushing Kael down shatters against the shield like waves on the shore.
The light is white-gold, shot through with lines of angry red, vibrating so hard the rain inside the dome starts to steam.
The Overseer stops, hand outstretched, palm flattening itself against the outer surface, and cocks its head at me.
I taste metal on my tongue. My heart has become noise, no longer an organ.
I drop the shield for one breath, just long enough to drag Kael to his knees.
He is breathing, but the veins at his temples stand out like black ropes.
I press my hand to his chest, feeling the ridiculous speed of his heartbeat.
“Don’t move,” I tell him, voice shaking.
The Overseer attacks again, this time with a wave of pressure that cracks the air. I throw up another shield, but the force hits so hard I nearly bite through my own lip, and my arms go numb. But Kael is safe. For now.
He tries to get up, but I hold him down. “Don’t,” I hiss. “She wants you dead.”
He looks at me, shadow leaking from his eyes, and for a second, I see him clearly—not a prince, not a monster, not a weapon. Just a boy. Broken, bleeding, and out of options.
“Why?” he whispers.
“Because you’re the easier one to kill.”
He smiles, small and edged with something dark. “I knew you’d be the end of me.”
It almost makes me laugh.
The Overseer is still there, hand pressed to the shield. It’s not giving up, but it isn’t rushing either. It’s watching. Learning.
I step forward, putting myself between Kael and the Overseer. The light flickers around my body, unstable. My Mana isn’t limitless, and I can feel this eating through me faster than anything ever has.
The Overseer tilts its head further this time, almost comically. Childlike.
It speaks, but the voice is layered, fractured—its own monotone but with the Mother Shard’s voice bleeding through.
“You must stop this now, my Light.”
I drop my shield and stare into its glass face. I see my own reflection, twisted and overlaid with a thousand strangers. My mouth opens, but the words come from somewhere deeper than my own body.
“You cannot have him.”
Thunder cracks again, the sand at my feet vibrating with the force.
Every Overseer in the ring turns towards me all at once.
The storm in the sky is nothing compared to what is waking inside me.
And we are well past the point of turning back.
I don’t see the Overseer move.
One second it’s in front of me, head tilted in confusion. The next, its skeletal fingers are locked around my neck, cold and wet and hard as marble. My shield tries to react, but the hand slides through, and the pressure on my throat becomes unbearable.
My toes leave the ground as the Overseer hoists me into the air, squeezing just shy of crushing my windpipe. Its face hovers inches from mine, cycling between my face and Kael’s at a rate that makes me want to retch.
The Mother Shard’s power explodes in my skull, turning to a scream so loud I feel blood run from my ears and draw a warm line down my jaw. My vision hazes red, then white.
Kael is still behind me, on his knees, clawing at the sand to rise, but every time he moves, more blood seeps from his nostrils, soaking the black sand. His shadows try to reach for me, but they recoil from the Overseer’s hand, unable to make contact.
I try to shield myself again, but my light sputters and flickers, rain and cold and panic tearing my focus apart.
The Overseer brings me close to its mask. “You must stop fighting me,” it says, fractured.
The voice is a dozen, a hundred, so overlaid they barely make sense. It starts to squeeze and black spots swim at the edge of my vision.
I flail, grabbing its arm, trying to find purchase where there is none. My palm slides over something sharp, and it slices my hand open, blood pouring hot and slick over my skin.
I stop trying to breathe and instead clamp both my hands onto the Overseer’s face, fingers scrabbling for any hold.
The cracked edge bites into my palm again, igniting a wave of pain that opens something inside me—a power not like Mana, not even like the light I have learned to wield, but something older.
Something that belongs to me the way a wound belongs to the flesh that carries it.
The light comes, not as a shield, not as a sword, but as a pulse—a detonation from my hands directly into the Overseer’s face.
A spiderweb of fractures spreads from the point of contact, and the Overseer screams.
Not a chorus, not a ghost, not even the echo of a god. But a single, human voice, full of agony. The sound is so loud I think my eardrums are rupturing.
The Overseer drops me instantly, its fingers clutching at its face as it falls backwards onto the sand.