Chapter 10 #3
The Light came first. I coaxed the Shadow to meet it, to fuse it again.
It didn't come.
I pulled harder. The Shadow coiled deeper, stubborn, retreating from the Light's flare like a wounded animal refusing to be touched. Come on. Come on.
The left sensor drank in my Luminar pulse. Catalogued it. Known. Single-marked. Threat.
No—that's not—I need both—
Then the golem's runes blazed hotter. Amber bled toward red, spreading across its stone shoulders like infection. The massive head turned, archaic joints grinding, and its hand drifted toward the sword at its hip.
Intruder. Luminar. Threat.
It was waking up.
Fuck.
My eyes snapped open. I abandoned the fusion, abandoned the plan, and ran back to the opening in the stone.
Below, the enforcers had closed the gap. Less than twenty yards now—near enough to catch the gleam of their armor, the hungry set of their shoulders as they circled Maxx like wolves scenting a wounded deer. He was still fighting the lasso, the rune-lock flaring brighter with every struggle.
Behind me, stone ground against stone. The golem. Rising.
I looked at Maxx. Looked at my knife—the only blade that could save him, the only blade that could save me.
One knife. Two impossible problems.
"Probably the worst moment to be noble," I muttered.
I palmed the blade, let out a piercing whistle, and threw.
The knife spun end over handle, a flash of steel cutting through the air between us. Maxx's head snapped up. Our eyes met—then the blade arced toward him—and went wide.
Don't move, idiot.
He didn't. Went rigid as a corpse, breath held, every muscle locked. Even the enforcers faltered, tracking the blade's trajectory with the kind of morbid fascination reserved for things that were about to go very wrong or very right.
The knife struck home with a solid thunk—buried in the leather toe of his boot, an inch from flesh.
Maxx's eyes narrowed at me. I'd deal with that look later.
He dropped into a crouch, sawing the rune-locked rope against the blade's edge with desperate, jerking motions. The fibers split. Frayed. Held—then snapped with a sound like a bone breaking.
The enforcers lunged.
But Maxx was already moving—rolling, rising, his own sword singing free of its sheath, joining my blade . He met the first enforcer's strike with a grin that promised violence, and then he was a blur of steel and spite, holding the line so I could finish what I'd started.
I turned back to the golem.
It had drawn its own sword.
The golem's first step shook dust from the ceiling.
I spun toward the parapet's lip, voice tearing out of me before pride could stop it. "I need a—"
Brannick's hand crested the stone.
He hauled himself over the edge, breast heaving, a Mark-tempered blade clutched between his teeth like some ridiculous storybook pirate. He spat it into his palm and slid it on the stone floor toward me, still gasping from the climb.
"Already on it." He managed a weak grin through the sweat and strain. "Next time you need to borrow a blade, little flame—" Another ragged breath. "—just say so."
Behind me, the golem took its second step. Closer. The stone floor trembled under my boots.
I snatched the blade up. I spared him a glance but no time for gratitude. No time for the complicated knot growing in my chest—
"Stay down," I told him.
He didn't argue. He hung suspended on the edge, and waited.
I turned to face the golem.
It had made it to the center of the room. Stone joints grinding with every step, sword raised, runes blazing red across its torso. Ten paces away. Eight. Six.
Get it done, Amaria.
I planted my feet. Steadied my breath. And grasped for both Marks again.
The Light rose first—I didn't wait for it to settle. I tore open the door to the Shadow before fear could seal it shut, dragging the dark up to meet the bright.
For a heartbeat they warred, repelling each other, and I felt the fusion slipping before it even began.
No. Together. Feed one into the other.
I didn't push. I folded. Took the flare of Light and wrapped the Shadow around it, threading dark through bright until they weren't two forces anymore. Just one. A single pulse of void that was neither and both.
Null.
I opened my eyes.
The golem's runes flickered and it went completely still. Amber to gray. Gray to nothing. Both sensors registering, both canceling each other out—the ward's logic misfiring, confused, unable to categorize what it was seeing.
Light? Shadow? Both? Neither?
The eyes went dark.
The Stone-Wight slumped back against the pedestal, dormant once more. A sleeping beast that had decided, in its mechanical way, that nothing worth waking for had entered its domain.
I exhaled. My legs shook. My marks throbbed in tandem—the forced fusion had left them raw—and a static burn lingered on my tongue.
Brannick just stared at me. "How did you know that would work?"
I didn't. Not really.
"Lucky guess," I said, and moved toward the pedestal before either of us could see how badly my hands were trembling.
‘Golem whisperer.' Just what every girl dreams of becoming.
The pedestal sat at the room's heart. Black stone, worn smooth. Embedded in its surface—a tablet no bigger than my palm. Even from here it murmured. A heartbeat trapped in stone.
The Light Glyph-Key.
I crossed the distance on unsteady legs. My fingers hovered over the surface. Warm. The vibration traveled up through my bones.
I used the Mark-tempered blade to pry it free.
The room plunged into darkness.
Every ward, every rune, every faintly glowing symbol—gone. Snuffed out like candle flames in a sudden wind. The shadows rushed in to fill the void, thick and hungry, and for a split-second I couldn't see anything at all.
"Amaria." Brannick's voice, clipped. Urgent.
I looked up.
The dust motes had stopped falling. They hung in the air like frozen stars, suspended between one heartbeat and the next. One shuddered, dropped an inch, then froze again. Time itself was stuttering.
The Veil was destabilizing. And we were standing in the wound.
"Go." The word scraped out of my throat. "Now."
The descent was controlled chaos. Rope tearing through my grip, stone streaking by, the Veil still shuddering at our backs like an aftershock that wouldn't quit. Controlled being generous. Falling with style was more accurate.
My boots hit the ground and I was already running. No plan. No grace. Just legs and the sincere desire to not die in a place that smelled like wet limestone.
Maxx was ahead of us—two blades, no hesitation, cutting through Enforcers like he'd been born doing it.
Ryla's crossbow bolts punched through throats to his left while Torin blocked the swords aimed at her back. They moved in a wordless, locked rhythm, anticipating every shift in the other’s weight without a single glance.
I whistled to Maxx again and his eyes found mine instantly.
He nodded and then the air shimmered.
Behind the enforcers, a fresh wave of rebels poured from behind the abandoned buildings—dozens of them, war cries tearing from them as they charged the remaining enforcers.
When the enforcers turned to face their new threat, Maxx, Ryla and Torin took their easy exit and sprinted to join us.
Behind them when the enforcers’ blades met the new threat, their blades passed through air.
Maxx's glamour. One last trick up his sleeve.
Behind us, stone ground against stone. The tower.
The Wight was waking again.
I could hear it—the slow, terrible groan of weathered joints remembering how to move. The fusion had bought us time, not a pardon. Without my Shadow and Light holding it dormant, the wards had reset. And now they knew exactly what I was.
We didn't stop until the tower was a smudge on the horizon.
We collapsed in the scrubland a mile out—tall grass gone brown and brittle, a caved-in farmstead with one wall still standing and a stone trough full of rainwater. Lungs spent, bodies folded into whatever shadow we could find. Glamorous. The ballads would leave this part out.
I leaned against the frigid stone and willed my hands to stop shaking.
Maxx and the others caught up seconds later, he gulped for air, one hand braced against a buckling wall. He looked up at me between breaths—and for once, the smirk wasn't there.
"Okay," he managed between breaths. "That was moderately impressive."
Coming from him, it almost sounded like respect.
"But, don't let it go to your head."
And there it was. I glared at him. "You're welcome."
Brannick crouched beside me, pulling the glyph-key from his vest. He held it out, and I took it without thinking—then wished I hadn't.
The tablet was still warm. Still palpitating with that strange, trapped-heartbeat hum. But something had changed.
A crack.
Faint at first, spreading across the surface in hairline fractures I hadn't noticed before. I turned it over in my palm, watching the way the dawn light bounced off each tiny fissure.
"That wasn't there before," Maxx said, peering over my shoulder.
No. It wasn't.
The realization settled in my gut like swallowed stone. Removing the key hadn't just deactivated the wards. It had torn something loose. Something that was supposed to stay sealed. We hadn't just stolen a key. We'd picked at a wound that was already bleeding.
Ryla set her hand on my shoulder. “You should still be proud, no one has been able to do that in centuries.” She squeezed before she went back to Torin’s side.
The others murmured what might have been approval, or maybe just relief. Torin inclined his head—the closest thing to praise I suspected he ever offered.
But I saw their eyes flick to my hands. The tremor I couldn't hide.
The adrenaline was fading. And in its absence, unease crept in.
They'd seen me.
Not just the Luminar flare—they'd seen the Shadow. Watched it unspool from my torso like a parasite, a secret I'd spent my life denying. Witnesses. People who could talk, could whisper, could decide I was exactly what the King's posters claimed.
I waited for the disgust. The fear. The careful distance that always came when people saw what I really was.
Ryla was checking her crossbow. Torin was watching the horizon. Maxx was still catching his breath, and Brannick—
Brannick was looking at me like I’d performed a miracle instead of an atrocity.
I didn't know what to do with that.
Brannick stepped closer.
"You good?" he asked. Quiet. Just for me.
I shoved the key into my pack and pushed myself to standing. My legs protested. I ignored them.
"I'm fine," I lied.
We still had one more key to find. And if the first one had cost me this much—if the Veil was already cracking from a single stolen piece—
I didn't let myself finish the thought.
Some math was better left undone.