Chapter 47
Forty-Seven
The chanting stops abruptly as Xavier turns his back on us and faces the mirror with his bloody arms spread wide, ready to embrace the God they’ve so cruelly sacrificed my friend for.
Though I don’t miss the tension still lining his shoulders and the tremor in his hands as he turns from Stryx’s body, his mouth set in a grim line.
Around me, silence suddenly ensues, everything feeling like it’s happening in slow motion as a piercing ringing now fills my ears.
I can hear my blood pumping, the wetness of my tears tracking through the grime on my face, and chaos around me slows as my blackening vision narrows on the lifeless body of my friend.
Riven releases me from his hold, and time instantly renews its usual pace, the overwhelming din returning in full force as I sprint towards her body and slam to my knees beside her, the pain from my joints barely registering as I pull her into my arms.
Xavier’s body starts to convulse as he starts a chant of his own, his voice split into many, the Faceless God starting to take him piece by piece.
I should be watching him. I should be seeing the end of the world as I know it.
But all I see is Stryx’s eyes, wide and fading, trusting me when I don’t deserve it.
“No,” I choke, and it comes out more like an animal’s sound than a word.
My hands press against the wound, slippery, useless.
Always useless. Warmth pours over my palms, and with it, memory floods me—the last time, the victim who stared at me as the light left them.
That same helplessness digs its claws into my ribs. I can’t breathe. I can’t lose her.
Not her.
But I’m not the same woman I was then. I have Echofae magic in my blood…and The Veyne. That wicked magic that eats pieces of me with every use. I swore I’d never use it again, but what good are memories, what good is humanity, if Stryx isn’t in it?
“Please don’t go,” I whisper, my eyes blurring through my tears. “Don’t go where I can’t follow you.”
A hand closes over mine, steadying, grounding. Riven is kneeling beside me, his face pale. My voice cuts through the chaos, bordering on hysteria. “Riven, use your magic. Save her, please.”
“I can’t,” he whispers, his face ashen.
“No, no you healed me before, my shoulder–”
“I just put it back in the socket, that’s it.”
No, that’s not right, it can’t be. “But I felt so good after, it felt like magic–”
“You just assumed it was magic. You’ve asked me more than once why I won’t heal myself. It’s because I can’t.” His words are a frenzied rush, his hands joining mine as we try to stop the bleeding.
“But Stryx, you healed her before, when she was attacked in the Archives, you can do it again.”
“She wasn’t physically injured, she was attacked with magic, I just countered it. It’s not the same.”
Stryx makes a gargling noise as her throat continues to bleed, Riven’s words sinking into me like a leaden weight.
Everything starts to unfold around us with a kind of terrible, surreal slowness, every detail sharp in my senses, every heartbeat a countdown.
Xavier remains standing before the towering mirror, his silhouette swallowed by the ghostly vapour now siphoning from its surface into him.
The substance streams like pale, liquid light, coiling around his arms, sinking into his skin, making his veins beneath it glow an eerie, unnatural white.
With every pulse of that drifting essence, the mirror changes.
Its surface—once shifting like dark water—stiffens and solidifies, becoming something akin to blackened glass.
Fine cracks start to lace across it, spiderwebbing outward in slow, delicate lines that glitter with trapped light.
The sound is faint at first, soft pops and brittle ticks, like ice thawing under strain.
Riven and I work frantically over Stryx’s limp body, hands stained with blood, trying to stabilise her, trying to keep her tethered to life. But her pulse is terrifyingly weak, and the cavern itself is shaking now, responding to the force Xavier is drawing into himself.
“I can’t save her, but maybe you can,” Riven says, his voice strained.
I shake my head. “How? I don’t understand.”
“You just have to try,” he grits out, “it’s all about intent. Try to picture what you want your magic to do in your mind.”
I look at him incredulously. “If it’s that simple, then why can’t you do it?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been able to. But you—you have to try–”
He gasps, lunging forward onto his hands a second before I feel it too.
A sudden wave runs through my chest, like something’s being ripped violently from my body.
Then, like an elastic band snapping, it stops, and I’m left feeling this horrendous emptiness in my mind, like a part of my soul has been removed.
One glance at Riven’s pallid face tells me he experienced the same thing.
The world shudders as Xavier screams, and a single, deafening fissure rips through the mirror’s centre.
For one suspended heartbeat, everything stops.
Then, without warning, the mirror shatters.
A violent, concussive eruption explodes through the cavern as it bursts into a million pieces, a colossal boom slamming into the cavern walls, detonating the glass outward in a storm of razor-bright fragments.
Deadly debris sharp as knives cascade through the space at speed, and the air becomes dust and thunder.
Glass pieces scythe through the thick smoke, slicing into stone pillars, embedding into the earth. The explosion wipes out all sound save for a ringing, metallic shriek. The world becomes white haze, choking dust, and the sharp, burning rain of the broken mirror.
Riven’s reflexes snap into place with a burst of magic that flares around us like a curved, shimmering barrier.
Vesper and Amari also manage to throw up a shield around themselves and Xavier just in time, but the others are not so lucky.
The impact of the blast slams into Riven’s shield hard enough to rattle my bones, the force shuddering through it as glass and stone shriek across its surface.
The explosion hits the unshielded cultists full-force.
The shrapnel viciously cuts its way through the cloaked crowd in a storm of glittering death.
Shards punch through bodies, slicing cleanly, brutally; the explosive wave hurling them backward like rag dolls.
Cloaks tear, limbs buckle, silhouettes collapse in sprays of dark, misting blood that vanish quickly into the settling dust.
All of them fall instantly.
When the dust clears, the cult members lie scattered around the dais in broken shapes. Not one of them survived the mirror’s death. Xavier still stands unmoving, shielded by his sister, drinking in the last of the power as the mirror collapses in front of him.
Another gurgling sound snaps my attention back to Stryx, her face ghostly pale, her blood loss too significant.
Bile claws up my throat, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode like the mirror.
My world narrows to her trembling pulse beneath my fingers, getting weaker every second.
I press harder and close my eyes, trying to summon my magic like Riven said, whispering nonsense half-spells, half-prayers under my breath as I focus on Stryx’s skin stitching back together.
Blue light flashes behind my eyelids and Riven’s sharp intake of breath has me snapping my eyes open again.
Holy Gods, it’s working.
Stryx’s eyes focus slightly, using the small remaining energy she has left to lift her shaking hand to cup my face. Blood streaks in its wake, but I don’t care. I grip her hand with mine, sobbing uncontrollably as I continue to stitch her skin together with the other.
“Come on, come on, please–”
“It’s—going—to be—okay,” she chokes out. “I—I love—you.”
Her eyes close and her hand goes limp in mine.
My vision blurs. My heart fractures.
Please, no.
If she goes, I will tear this world apart with my bare hands.
If she dies, I will feed every last shred of myself to magic until nothing is left.
Her blood stains me, sears me, anchors me.
My breath breaks as I feel her slipping into death, and in that moment I want to give up everything that I am, everything I have been, to keep her here.
Stryx, stay. Please. Stay.
I can’t lose her. I won’t.
Her wound finally closes under my magic, but I can feel it’s only surface level. The cut was too deep, too much blood lost. It might already be too late to make a difference.
I hear a dark chuckle and look up to find Xavier standing over us. One look in his harrowing eyes instantly tells me that the man I thought was my friend is no longer here.
He’s gone. They’ve actually done it. The ritual is finally complete.
And that’s when I realise, I can’t feel my Shadow’s presence anymore in the back of my mind, no dark morass looming in my periphery. The emptiness I’m feeling—it’s him. If Xavier completed the ritual, then he must have siphoned the fragments of the Faceless God from us too. I’m free.
But the cost is too much.
Xavier stands amid the ruin of the cavern, dust curling around him like smoke from a battlefield pyre. The Faceless God rises in Xavier’s stolen skin, and I swallow hard. This is what true grief tastes like, what love tastes like, when you’re too late.
My best friend is about to die and there’s nothing I can do to save her.
And now, the man I knew, the friend who once swore he’d take a blade for me, is gone.
His eyes drag down to meet mine and there’s no warmth, no spark of recognition, only an abyssal flatness that chills my blood.
What’s left of him is a shell. A vessel.
A puppet with its strings pulled by something ancient and hungry.
And now it’s staring at me like I’m its next meal.
My breath catches in my throat.
“He’s gone…” I whisper, my voice breaking from the horror. “Gods, Xavier’s gone.”
Riven inches closer to me, but even he seems hesitant, shaken. When I glance at him, I freeze. His face is white. Like someone sucked the colour out of him.
He looks at me, and then I feel it. The same thing that’s made him catatonic.
The world itself feels like it’s shifted, an invisible shiver rolling through the cavern, through the earth, through me.
The air presses in, thick and wrong, like gravity has splintered and reformed at a crooked angle.
Something vast and cold brushes against my skin, insurmountable danger rising to suffocate me.
My lungs seize.
The hairs on my arms lift.
It’s as though the entire city just inhaled, and forgot how to exhale again.
Riven whispers, voice hoarse and barely audible. “Octavia…”
Xavier slowly takes Vesper and Amari’s hands in his. “I’ve changed my mind, brother.” His voice sounds so different, so wrong. “Prison is too good for you.”
Then, as one, they disappear like smoke on the wind. The last thing I see is his cruel, twisted smile before we are plunged into absolute darkness. Then Xavier’s ominous voice echoes through the dark.
“Feed.”
A deep, menacing growl reverberates through the cavern, the noise chilling me to the bone.