Chapter 49
and then…light
The sanctuary was a cathedral of ruin now, its roof pierced, the shrouded moon shining down on the wreckage inside. The scent of scorched magic and old blood was heavy in the air. Silence hung like a mist, broken only by the grotesque sound of Max groaning—his voice a cracked whimper of agony, pinned to the front of the altar stone like a failed offering.
The heavy percussion and light flashes from outside were becoming infrequent. One side was winning, but Jess didn’t have time to worry.
She had a task to finish.
Jess walked forward, each step deliberate, her boots crunching over glass and grit. Her face was sober and dirty from the fight, but the rage she was feeling boiled from her skin like heat off summer asphalt.
She stopped at the foot of the altar and turned her gaze to the other half of the translucent container, and a rare smile formed at the irony.
Next to Max, the ancient sorcerer’s face was moving, gasping, silently screaming against the glass. It was Virelich, and the warped version of a human form was throwing himself against the wall of his prison.
Max was weeping now, tears mixing with blood. The stone rails held him like celestial iron, still burning where they had pierced his arms and been driven through his flank. A small but strategic rod was sticking in his hand, preventing him from triggering a spell.
Jess stepped closer. Her voice was ragged, exhausted.
“You never planned to share power, did you?” Jess said, her dark eyes locked on Virelich. “Not with them. Not with anyone. You were going to take it all. Ride the chaos. Become some ridiculous god while the rest of the world burned.”
Max made a hoarse sound, but Jess didn’t flinch.
She turned, finally, to face him. “You fed off all of us. Your father, Emelia, and me. You consumed us to build your throne.” She pursed her lips. “So, here we are, your majesty. Except now you’re strapped to it.”
Jess raised her hand and drew a small, precise, ancient sigil in the air, her fingers tracing a shape older than language, more accurate than science would discover for a few more centuries.
A fine crack of silver appeared in the face of the box. It spread with a hiss, a hairline opening forming like a crack in time.
Inside, Virelich shrieked.
He did not hesitate. He stuck a crooked finger through the aperture, the jagged and festering nail on the end scratching and digging at Max’s arm, only a couple inches from the hole. Virelich struggled to widen it to no avail, and his fury exploded with his frustration.
So Jess made the hole a little wider.
Through the enlarged slit, the Harbinger clawed, and a jointless hand stretched out. His fingers made contact—touching what he could, willing Max’s pilloried body to his grasp. Pulling closer what would move and ripping away what was pinned by Solrien’s glass shards.
An arm, then part of Max’s shoulder.
Flesh tore, and Max screamed a high, desperate wail as he was flayed, then pulled—cracking, and compressing—into the box.
Virelich was no longer offering an alliance. He was content with devouring the fool who thought he could control him.
Jess didn’t look away, but this was not vengeance.
It was education.
Only when Max fell silent—his body still somehow alive but ruined—did Jess lift her hand again. With a twist of her fingers, the aperture snapped shut.
Virelich glared, barely having time to take his hand from the slit before it did. He yanked it back, then glared at Jess before opening his mouth to scream at her.
Silent.
Defeated.
For now.
Then collapse.
The ornate prison box began to implode. Not with a bang, but with a silence so complete, it swallowed sound—crushed like a star folding in on itself. The air in the sanctuary bent, thickened, and then returned through the hole in the floor where the Veil reclaimed it.
Blood stains and one of Max’s legs had been left behind as a gruesome corporeal reminder.
The pressure lifted, and the building shook once with a final gasp of power.
Jess swayed slightly, disoriented. The rage had nowhere to go now, and she turned.
Callie wasn’t moving.
She was splayed out on the stone floor, tipped up on a broken arch from one of the windows. Blood was still trickling along the stone joints, and the runes of her staff were still glowing faintly like the embers of a dying fire.
She was too still.
Jess’s heart fluttered like a candle in the stillness of the church, and she stumbled to her knees.
“…Callie…?”
“Callie…wake up…please.”
The silence following the vanishing of the Harbinger did not offer peace.
It was more of a hole in the middle of the sanctuary—a gap in sound transmission waiting to be refilled as some new version of normalcy returned. But all around Jess was devastation, the kind of rupture that leaves a soul exposed.
Jess was on her knees, her hands soaked in red and trembling. The tourmaline shards embedded along Callie’s collarbone glinted dully in the flickering remnants of magic.
Sobbing, Jess stared down, watching Callie’s chest rise in the shallowest of rhythms—truly a rasp of life. The pressure in Jess’s chest was enormous, and she couldn’t breathe as her sobs filled the destroyed chapel. Primal and jagged, Jess wasn’t even aware of the sound she was making as a deep, thumping pressure filled her lungs.
“Please…please, no…not like this.”
She struggled to hold onto Callie, her fingers trying to grip, to keep her close, but there was so much blood—too much—her grip slipped, and as Callie slid to the floor, Jess unleashed a terrible, haunting wail.
She couldn’t hear it; her ears were filled with new pressure, a loud, thunderous pulsing.
And then…light.