Chapter Fifty-Three #2
Elandor huffs, too caught up in his own rapture to notice the shift. “Realm-changing, yes. But my dear woman, this is so much more: it’s progress. The Codex was never meant to sleep forever.”
But Mavyrn’s lips curl, the ghost of a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “No,” she murmurs. “It wasn’t.”
Kael’s hand tightens on my thigh, a subtle warning. I don’t take my eyes off her.
For the first time, I think I see it—the faintest tremor in her composure.
Excitement, yes… but not the clean kind. The kind that tastes of expectation. Of a plan years in the making finally falling into place.
Seren’s still smiling, oblivious to the undercurrent, her blood drying dark against the Codex’s edge.
Elandor beams like a man witnessing divinity.
And Mavyrn—
Mavyrn watches the book like it’s finally come home.
Elandor’s hands tremble as he reaches for the Codex, the reflected light of its sigils dancing across his face like fractured Stars. “Careful,” Seren warns under her breath, but the scholar ignores her, his fingers hovering just above the page as though touching divinity itself.
The Codex snaps shut like the jaws of a great beast—a response to Elandor’s closeness.
The Archivist yanks his hand back, cradling it to his chest as if he almost lost it.
“It doesn’t want you, Elandor. It wants the witch,” Kael asserts, his voice cutting and concise.
“Do you feel that?” Seren whispers, completely oblivious to the rest of the chamber. The book hums—quietly at first, like the murmur of an unseen choir. The air vibrates with it, stirring the candles until their flames gutter low and bend inward, drawn toward the open tome.
“It’s alive,” Rubi murmurs.
“No,” Mavyrn says softly, her voice sharp enough to still the air again. “It remembers.”
Seren’s hands smooth over its cover, and as if responding to her touch, the Codex groans open.
Its pages begin to move of their own accord, turning with a steady, deliberate rhythm, the parchment glinting with silver veins that pulse like Stars in the sky.
Dust lifts from the pages, dancing on candlelight.
Elandor’s voice shakes with wonder. “It’s guiding us. Choosing what to show. Stars save us…”
When the pages stop, the chamber fills with a faint sound—like wind rushing through hollow bones. The markings on the open page rearrange themselves, the ink bleeding and reforming until the words gleam in silver light:
The Convergence of Forces
To bind a god requires four converging forces, without which no chain may hold.
“Maldrak’s spell,” I breathe, the words leaving my lips before I can catch them.
Gasps of surprise, awe and horror fill the chamber, but I can’t stop, my eyes hungry for answers. Scribbled in a chaotic hand, is a list:
· One Channel—born of the old blood to weave the binding, to bridge mortal hand and immortal power.
· One Anchor—a god’s own essence, seized in resistance, turned upon itself to lash divine will into fetters.
· One Seal—royal blood spilled by the murder of kin.
· One Rune by a Runewright—a grid rune carved into altar-stone, lattice between realms, through which the tether may be held and power drawn.
Below the final line of ingredients, the script curls downward, the ink seeming to breathe—silver smoke spilling into words that were not meant to be read aloud:
Note:
What is bound in sequence may be loosed only in reverse.
To unmake the chain, invert the links.
But beware—when a bond is unmade, the debt of blood remembers its maker.
Silence crashes through the chamber.
Elandor’s mouth works soundlessly, eyes wide behind his lenses. “By the Stars,” he whispers. “It’s a reversal ritual.”
Kael’s fury flickers across his face, sharp, pained. “Royal blood spilled by the murder of kin…” he murmurs, reading it again, slower this time, like each word flays something open.
My gaze snaps to him. “Kael—?”
He doesn’t look up. His jaw locks tight, muscle ticking. “Maldrak didn’t just kill my father. He used him.” His voice is a blade. “He bled him to seal the binding on Morrathys.”
The air goes thin.
Teddy swears softly under his breath. Seren’s hand flies to her mouth. Even Ronyn’s bravado falters.
But Jax, her mouth pressed into silent rage, pushes back in her chair, the legs dragging loudly across the floor. She entwines her fingers behind her head, breathing ragged and chaotic. Panic or something more sinister seizes her, gripping her so entirely she forgets how to breathe, how to speak.
Kael shoots from his chair, crossing the chamber in a heartbeat.
He reaches for her wrists, pulling them down, cradling them to his chest in a soft embrace.
“Jaxxy, hey. Hey,” he soothes, trying to reach her.
Trying to claw her back from whatever she’s lost to.
“I need you to come back, Jaxxy. You didn’t know.
None of us knew. He fooled us all,” Kael pleads, his arms wrapped around her, but she’s unmoving, save for the fragmented breaths that rasp down her throat.
“Jaxxy, we all loved him,” Kael promises, his tone pleading.
But it’s then that her eyes rise from Kael’s chest, chin tilted back all the way.
The deep-brown hue of her gaze boring into him, her raven-black hair falling in a sleek cascade over his forearms, but her breaths still.
“But it was me who let him in, Kael,” she breathes, meek and broken.
“Your father stopped including him in the war council for a reason, but it was me who told him our plans, anyway. I let him into my heart, my body…” she trails off, gouging at her skin as if she wants to shed herself of it.
“No one has ever blamed you—he would’ve found a way, regardless,” Kael counters, voice stoic and unrelenting.
“But he would never have known that your father was summoning Morrathys. He would never have been able to create the Marked with such ease. And I would never have been the one who helped him,” she admits, hanging her head in anguish and shame.
“I dream of them, you know,” she murmurs, her eyes lifting, looking to Teddy and Rubi.
“Taali, your little girl, your parents, mine. Every night. There is no end to the nightmare. Asleep or awake, they are all I see.”
Her voice cracks, and it’s like listening to my own ghosts speak.
Grief. Shame. The kind that festers when you realize the monster wore a face you trusted.
She doesn’t ache for him—she hates herself for not seeing it, for mistaking manipulation for love. I know that kind of hate. I’ve lived inside it.
Maybe that’s why it hurts to look at her. Because her ruin looks too much like my own.
Kael straightens, the fury gone quiet and lethal in his voice.
“Then we set it right,” he says, each word measured like a vow. “We break his chains, we erase his reign, and then I’ll flay the skin from his fucking bones.”
There’s my king.
The chamber holds its breath.
But something inside me answers him—the part that remembers fire, violence, and the promise of ruin.
“And keep him alive long enough to feel it. Let the crows pick him clean,” Teddy growls savagely, as if a lifetime of fury is buried in his bones. He’s a General of War, yes. But by what Jax said, he was also a husband, a father, and my throat thickens at the realization.
Ronyn’s jaw goes slack, but his eyes tell a story of primal rage as he fixes them on Jax. “Then let’s reverse this fucking spell!” he snaps, and Seren flinches in the face of his anger.
“So,” Rubi murmurs curiously, piecing something together and snapping our attention back to the spell, “to reverse it—someone of royal blood must die again.” She traces her finger over the parchment of the Codex.
“Yes, and I know we all want it to be Maldrak, but we need him to reverse the rune first,” Seren says, her voice tentative, as if she doesn’t want to admit we can’t simply slay him on sight.
Elandor slides his spectacles to the bridge of his nose.
“That’s right, I believe. Reverse the rune,” he begins counting on his fingers, “slay royal kin, you’ll need some of Morrathys’ magic—given freely if we are truly reversing the spell—and have the original Arcanist bind it all together with a simple binding spell. ”
He nods curtly, huffing the frayed gray hair out of his face, as if he’s talking about the weather.
“Holy fucking Stars,” Teddy exhales, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Well, I guess that is pretty realm-altering,” Ronyn drawls. “Lady Sylvaine wasn’t lying.”
Jax huffs a soft laugh, and the room exhales for the first time since she stood up.
But Elandor rises from his chair, jittery and nervous. “Ah, yes. Yes, realm-altering is right,” he stammers, moving to his desk stacked high with scrolls and parchment. He shuffles them around, moving strange objects, lifting heavy tomes, searching for something.
“Ah! There it is!” he exclaims, holding a small object in his palm.
The gleaming onyx of his robes glints in the candlelight as he hastens back to the table, setting a small, circular object on the table—silver and glass, no larger than his palm. Inside, threads of light drift like captured starlight.
Seren’s eyes shine with intrigue. “What is it?” she breathes in awe.
“This,” Elandor declares, “is a Nymerian Prism.”
Ronyn’s hand edges in towards it, but Elandor bats his hand away like a child reaching for a cookie.
“A masterful Nymerian invention that allows us to see what lives within Memory Orbs without breaking them,” he explains.
But something about the way he says it—the edge to his voice, the sharp inhale at the end, the way his body moves with frenetic energy—unsettles me.
“Because, Elyssara, there’s one you must see.”