Chapter 10 #2
I couldn't see them. But I could feel them—a grid of energy stretched across the ground ahead, threads so fine they'd be invisible even in full daylight. Trip-runes. One wrong step and the whole tower would light up.
"Wards," I breathed. "Fifty paces out. Maybe less."
Brannick squinted at the empty air ahead of us. He couldn't feel what I was feeling, but he'd been doing this long enough to trust someone who could. He nodded once. Your call.
I mapped the gaps in my mind. The grid wasn't uniform—some threads sat close together, others left pockets wide enough to place a boot. I picked my line, exhaled, and stepped.
Left foot between two threads. Right foot wide, angled, landing on the ball.
A half-step forward, then a full stride left where the weave thinned out.
Every placement deliberate. Every breath shallow.
The runes buzzed on either side of my ankles, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off them.
Behind me, Brannick matched my path exactly—boot to boot, stepping where I'd stepped. Then Maxx. Then Ryla and Torin. A single-file chain of bodies threading through invisible tripwire, each one trusting that the person ahead hadn't just killed them all.
Forty paces. Thirty. Twenty.
My calf brushed a thread I'd misjudged. The rune flared—a brief, hot pulse—and I froze. Everyone froze. The jolt rose, wavered, and sank back to its baseline.
I didn't breathe for five full seconds. Then I adjusted my line and kept moving.
We slipped into the shadow of the wall without a sound.
For a few seconds, nobody moved. Just five bodies pressed against the basalt, breathing hard and pretending they weren't. The grid hummed behind us — patient, indifferent, already forgetting we'd passed through.
Brannick recovered first. Hand signals, quick and practiced.
Ryla and Torin peeled off toward the south wall — high ground, sightlines, crossbow range.
Ryla didn't look back. Torin didn't need to.
Maxx drifted north, fingers already working the air, feeding his phantom patrol fresh light to keep the sentries chasing ghosts.
That left Brannick and me at the base of the tower.
He dropped to a knee and laced his fingers together. "Up you go, little flame."
I stepped into the boost and latched onto the first handhold.
The mortar had rotted decades ago. Every grip was a gamble—fingers in a crack, test the hold, pull, pray it doesn't crumble.
My boots scraped stone as I climbed. Left hand.
Right hand. The wall was old enough to be generous with its cracks and stingy with its promises.
Partway up, my foot slipped.
I caught myself—barely—but my heel knocked a brick loose. It tumbled away from me, spinning end over end toward the ground, and my stomach dropped with it.
No. One sound and the patrol would be on us before we cleared the wall.
I twisted, arm shooting out, fingers grasping for the brick—
Missed.
But the brick stopped anyway.
Suspended. Hanging in the air like gravity had lost interest. A shudder ran through reality itself—I felt it in my bones, in the way the air went thick and wrong around the hovering stone.
The same hiccup I'd felt in the square. The same wrongness.
The Veil flinching, reality stuttering around the spike of my panic like it couldn't decide which laws still applied.
Then it dropped.
Brannick snatched it. Both hands, no sound, a grunt trapped behind clenched teeth. He lowered it to the ground and looked up at me.
His expression gave nothing away. But his eyes flicked to the space where the brick had frozen, and the question was loud enough without words.
I kept climbing. Faster now.
I hauled myself over the parapet's edge. Below, Brannick held position at the base. Waiting for my signal. Waiting for the wards to come down.
That part was on me.
I turned toward the watch-room and let my eyes adjust to the dark.
First things first. I yanked the dampening amulet over my head and shoved it into my pocket. Muffled senses would get me killed up here.
The world sharpened the instant the amulet left my skin. Every edge, every shadow, every draft of air through the stone—all of it dialed up to a frequency I'd been suppressing for hours. My Unravel stretched awake, ravenous after its forced sleep.
Blue-white light stretched across the walkway ahead. Filaments thin as spider silk, crisscrossing the stone in a lattice that hissed with barely contained energy. One touch and they'd scream. One brush of fabric and every sentry within a mile would know where I was.
The Unravel could read them. I let my vision soften and the pattern came through—not random. Rhythmic. The filaments shimmered in sequence, brightening and dimming on a cycle that repeated every few seconds.
But seeing the trap wasn't the same as surviving it.
The gaps between swells were too narrow. Too fast. I could read the rhythm, but my body couldn't move quickly enough to slip through before the next flare.
Unless I made the gaps wider.
I shut my eyes. Found that place where The Unravel and The Griefweaver coiled around each other, bristling like cats forced to share a pen.
Three heartbeats. That was all Dreadscale had given me. Three heartbeats of fusion before the whole thing collapsed.
It would have to be enough.
On the inhale, I reached for the Shadow.
It came reluctantly—cold, sulking, resentful of being called. I didn't fight it. Didn't yank. Just opened the door the way Dreadscale had shown me and let it unspool from my core in a thin, dark thread.
The Shadow touched the nearest filament.
The light flickered and dimmed. It dulled enough that the gap in the pattern widened from a heartbeat to two. Maybe three.
I moved.
One step. The filament beside my ankle flared back to brightness, but I was already past it. Another step. My Shadow strained, trying to dampen two threads at once. The fusion started to slip—Shadow and Light pulling apart like wet hands losing grip.
Hold. Hold.
Two more steps. The lattice blazed around me, a web of frozen lightning, and I was threading through it on instinct now—reading with the Light, dimming with the Shadow, my body a needle weaving through impossible gaps.
My vision tunneled. My lungs burned.
One more step.
I cleared the lattice and stumbled, catching myself on the inner chamber’s archway.
My marks snapped apart, the fusion dissolving like smoke in wind.
I pressed my forehead to the brisk stone, heaving and sweat dripping down my temples despite the chill.
I’d made it to the golem’s warden chamber, where the key was kept.
Three heartbeats. I'd held it for maybe five.
Dreadscale would be insufferably pleased.
I opened my eyes and scanned the chamber.
Circular, low-ceilinged, the walls lined with empty weapon racks and the remains of a wooden table that had rotted down to its iron nails.
Dust coated everything—thick enough to muffle my boots, the air stale and sealed.
And with it, a hum—faint, persistent, growing louder with every step I took past the threshold.
Then I saw why.
The golem crouched beside the glyph pedestal. A hulking mass of fused brick and prehistoric mortar, easily twice my height, light runes crawling across its shoulders in a faint, sleepy pulse. A Stone-Wight Guardian. They were supposed to be extinct.
This one hadn't gotten the message.
The Wight's eyes were dark. Dormant. But a shimmer lingered behind them—two sensors, one bright, one dark, waiting to register intrusion.
My Luminar mark prickled with recognition.
I'd seen wards like this in the old texts Serenya hoarded. Dual-natured. They couldn’t be tamed or unlocked by Light or Shadow alone.
Only by both. Meant as a safeguard to never be disabled, since it should be impossible to use both at once.
Any normal intruder would trip one sensor or the other—their soulmark announcing them like a dinner bell. But both at once, in the same body, from the same source? The ward wouldn't know what to make of it.
In theory.
One step. Two. The Wight's eyes flickered—a pale light stirring in the left socket. It had sensed my Luminar Mark. The runes on its shoulders began to warm, shifting from dormant gray to a dull, threatening amber.
Shit.
Two more steps. Then—shouts. Outside. Below.
I spun toward the arrow slit and peered out, heart pounding.
Maxx.
The enforcers had seen through his glamour. Half a dozen of them closing in, and Maxx—gods-damned Maxx— bound in a rune-locked lasso that roiled with that same sickly amber glow. It cinched tighter around Maxx with every thrash—an amber snare only Mark-tempered steel could sever.
My hand flew to my belt. To the knife. The one knife I'd taken because I was too proud, too paranoid, too stupidly stubborn to accept a full kit from people I didn't trust.
One blade. And Maxx needed it to survive.
But I needed that key, and without Mark-tempered steel, touching it would wake every ward in the tower.
I ran to the parapet's edge, scanning desperately. Brannick and Ryla held position on the south wall—stone and sixty feet of empty air between them and Maxx on the north side. They couldn’t reach him in time. Not without a blade that could pass through walls.
If I throw him mine, I lose the key. If I don't—
Maxx's shoulders wrenched as he fought the lasso. The runes blazed brighter. He had minutes. Maybe less.
Maybe I can grab the key first. Quick. Before—
I turned back toward the pedestal, took two hurried steps—
Its attention fixed on me. Ancient magic that stirred like a beast catching a scent. The right eye flickered—my Shadow, leaking through despite every effort to cage it.
Both sensors. Both registering.
The golem's fingers twitched. Stone ground against stone.
Now or never.
I stopped in the center of the room. Closed my eyes. And searched for both Marks at once.