Chapter 60 Theo
Theo’s magic erupted the moment he pressed his hand against Seraphine’s dying heart; that sharp hiss inside him, the desperate yearning to take, to devour…
He didn’t want to devour Sera. To steal even a single flicker of her light. It was the cost that had become entwined with her soul that sang to him, the shadow of all that spent magic. All those saints.
Take it.
Not the soul, but the curse.
Not the magic, but the cost.
For there was no magic left now.
Fate, perhaps mockingly, had made him a devourer, but he would not bow to destiny’s idea of him.
He would decide what to take. He had staked his cause to Andreas to help Seraphine, and though he had strayed into other daydreams along the way – the lust for power, for fame and riches beyond compare – his waking soul, his truest self, could not sacrifice the loyalty on which he had built his entire life.
Andreas could not offer him what he already had.
A devotion to the light.
To his family.
To the goodness of the world beyond today.
Andreas’s mistake was thinking that because Theo Versini looked like his ancestor, Hugo – the man who had plunged Fantome into darkness – that he would act like him too. Think like him, covet like him, fold like him.
Andreas had been a fool.
It was divine purpose that propelled Theo into the rubble of Traveller’s Arch, where he held the body of his friend, his Maker, and decided, without hesitation, to save her life.
And so he devoured the shadow of her spent magic. That dark, lingering cost.
It went down easy, like a shot of honey.
But that’s because he was already dying.
The world faded in a blink and a new reality shifted into place.
Theo found himself hovering on the threshold between life and death, looking towards a wash of golden light. There, in the sun-bright haze, a silhouette appeared. He smelled her jasmine perfume, heard the melody of her laughter. And her warmth, that old familiar warmth… it streamed toward him.
Mama.
She was joined by another shadow. A tall and gangly shape, hunched a little at the shoulders, if only to better kiss her cheek.
Papa.
There was music. A folk song, wafting like a summer breeze, and beyond, a spill of verdant mountains. On a bench nearby, sat a golden-haired girl of about sixteen, journalling in the sunlit peace.
Theo felt himself splintering, the strands of his soul reaching towards the light, and all that lay beyond it.
Wait.
A voice from behind made him turn. Seraphine was here, hovering in that strange in-between place. She was not as she had been on rubble below – bruised and bloody and pale as death – here, she was soft and clean and smiling. Unmarked, unharmed.
They stood together on the threshold between worlds.
There’s a curse in me, Theo, she said.
I will bear it, Sera.
She shook her head. It’s my cost.
He only smiled. He knew by her frown that she could feel it now – the taking. It was done.
It doesn’t hurt any more, she said.
Freedom is not supposed to hurt, he told her.
She drifted from him. Or perhaps it was he who’d moved towards the light. He stood alone now, the sunlight casting a halo around his hair.
She stalled, watching him from afar.
Theo, she called out.
There was such a weightlessness to him now he could hardly bear to linger.
Turn around, Seraphine.
He felt her panic, heard the reel of her thoughts as though they were his own. She couldn’t bear to leave him, not without telling him she was sorry – saints, she was so sorry – about all of it. That it wasn’t fair to part like this, that she would miss him sorely. Always.
Fantome needs its dove, he told her. Go home, Sera.
She began to fade. I’ll see you again, Theo.
Not for a long while.
Make it count, he called after her.
I will, she cried.
Her words echoed in the sunbeams.
It was simple then, letting go.
Surrendering to the divine weightlessness of forever.