Chapter 36
AMARIA
Through the wreckage, I saw him.
Brannick.
He fought like a thing possessed—weapon swinging wild, face streaked with grime and sweat. Still loyal. Still stupid. Still choosing the wrong side like it was a religion.
Our eyes met.
His face split open with recognition, then horror.
He saw me standing. Unbound. Daggers in hand. His rhythm faltered.
The guard he'd been fighting didn't hesitate. Shield rammed into Brannick's ribs. He lurched, gasped, lost his grip on his weapon. It clattered against the stone.
Eryndor cut the guard down before he could finish the job.
Thank you.
I moved.
Brutal focus on my prey.
He saw me coming and scrambled for his fallen blade, too slow. I stalked closer while he fumbled.
My dagger was at his throat before his fingers touched the hilt.
The edge bit into skin. A thin line of red welled up beneath the steel.
"Amaria—" His voice broke. "Little flame, please—"
"You told me something once."
My voice came out quiet.
"Kill false hope before it kills the ones you love."
His breath hitched. His eyes went still. He knew.
“I’m taking that advice.”
I drove the blade in.
It was easier than I thought it would be. Muscle parted like an apology.
His pupils dilated. His hands flew up, gripped my forearms—not to stop me, but to pull me closer. His mouth worked frantically, blood bubbled over his lips, staining his teeth crimson.
“Amaria—wait—Kaelen’s spell—”
I twisted the blade. Silencing the lie.
“Needs a—”
I ripped the steel free in a brutal, sideways arc.
"—sacrifice."
The word ended in a wet gurgle. His eyes went wide—then empty. His body sagged against me, suddenly heavy. Just meat and bone.
I let him fall.
He hit the stone with a dense thud. The sound was too small for what it meant. And as I stood over him, the adrenaline receding enough for reality to bleed back in, I looked down.
We weren't on the ground.
We were on the dais. Standing directly over the central conduction glyphs Kaelen had carved into the basalt.
Brannick’s blood didn't pool. It hissed against the stone. The intricate runes drank it greedily, the dark liquid racing along the channels, connecting the dormant circuit. The basalt beneath my boots began to hum.
Oh gods.
The Codex didn't just activate. It erupted.
A soundless, psychic shriek that tore through the basin, bringing every swing of a sword to a halt. The book flew open on the altar, hovering, pages riffling violently. The ink didn't glow—it became a void, a profound absence of light that pulsed with a sick, bruised rhythm.
It grabbed the frayed ends of my power—and yanked.
It wasn't a flow this time. It was an extraction.
A brutal, violating tear that ripped the remaining magic from my core.
I collapsed to my knees. My hands hit the basalt, fingers splayed, shaking.
Something behind my sternum unspooled and kept unspooling—a thread being pulled from a reel that was already empty.
My teeth chattered. My nails scraped stone.
The world went silent.
The Rupture in the sky above us stilled. The veil didn’t pulse. The Nullatheon stopped reaching.
And then, the draining began, straight into the void that was the rupture.
It started at the horizon and rushed toward us—a wave of desaturation. The vibrant, deep green of the distant ancestral pines turned the flat, dead grey of ash. The blood on the ground lost its crimson shine, the sky, which had been a bruised, violent purple, bleached out into the color of static.
It was like looking at a painting left too long in the sun. The vibrancy of the world simply... evaporated.
And with the color went the hum.
That constant, low-level vibration of the Veil—the song I had heard in my blood since the day my marks appeared—cut out.
My Marks went silent—like two hands letting go of mine. I reached for the Light. I reached for the Shadow. I grabbed nothing but dead, empty air.
"My glamours," Maxx whispered. His voice sounded thin in emptiness. He flicked his wrist, nothing. Again, frantic. No glamour, no illusions.
Nothing happened, just a hand waving in the grey light.
"Gone," Serenya breathed. She was clutching her mirrored token, her knuckles white. She looked up at me, eyes wide and terrified. "Amaria... the leylines. They aren't just quiet. They’re dead."
Movement at the edge of the ridge.
The King.
He sat atop his destrier, his armor stripped of its golden luster by the grey light. His eyes snagged on Eryndor for just a moment before he wheeled his horse around, spurring the beast into a panic. His remaining guards followed, a grim, silent retreat into the colorless treeline.
"At least they're running," Maxx muttered, though he didn't sound relieved. He sounded shaken.
"Not all of them," Serenya whispered. She nodded towards Eryndor.
Everyone turned.
Eryndor was on his knees, one hand braced against the stone, the other clutching his wound. In the monochrome world, the blood soaking his armor looked like black oil.
But it was the veins that stopped my breath.
Shards from the stone stuck out of his skin like broken glass. The poison from it was now pumping through his open wound with every beat of his heart.
The black lines crawled up his throat, thick and ropy, invading the ashen skin of his face.
He looked at me. His eyes, usually so brutal, were glassy. Unfocused. "Amaria," he rasped.
The sword slipped from his hand. It hit the basalt with a dull clatter that echoed too loudly in the silence.
"Eryndor!"
I lunged for him, catching him just as his knees gave out. He was heavy. Dead weight. I went down with him. His armor dug into my thighs. His head settled in my lap and the weight of him pinned me there. Black ichor smeared across my palms where I held him, slick and fever-hot.
"The magic," he whispered, his breath hitching. A line of black ichor leaked from the corner of his mouth. "The air... it’s empty."
He gasped, a wet, rattling sound. "I can't... draw from it. I can't fight it back."
The realization broke over me.
Fae bodies were conduits. We drew power from the world to heal, to mend, to survive the impossible.
But I had emptied the world.
I had fed the magic to the Void. Every drop of it. The fuel his body needed to fight the corruption, to keep his heart beating against the black crawling up his throat—I had drained it dry.
I had taken his ability to heal himself.
He gripped my wrist. His strength was fading, his fingers trembling against my skin.
"We won, little fox," he breathed, a ghost of a smile touching his lips, oblivious to the horror breaking my heart.
His eyes rolled back. His hand went slack, falling from my wrist to the grey stone.
"Eryndor?" I shook him. "Eryndor!"
Nothing. Just the hollow stillness of a world I had bled dry.