58. Chapter 58 #5
Eryndor twisted toward the door. "What—"
A broom beside us flickered. Vanished. Reappeared three feet to the left.
We both froze. I climbed down. He grasped my hand, steadying me.
My legs were boneless. I gripped the shelf next to me while my heartbeat hammered in my ears and the room swam back into focus—brooms, buckets, the smell of soap and dust and him.
He was already straightening, pulling my gown back into place with hands that were still shaking, still warm from my skin. His eyes still dark with our fever.
Then the bucket in the corner started rusting, crumbling, collapsing into dust. Then it snapped back, whole and gleaming, like nothing had happened.
"The Veil," I whispered.
The screaming outside grew louder.
"We need to—"
The door exploded inward.
Guards. Six of them. Swords drawn, faces pale, barely looking at us—too focused on the nightmare behind them.
"Your Highness—"
The guard didn’t get to finish. He dissipated into dust particles and blew away.
Beyond them, through the shattered doorway, the ballroom was unraveling.
The Nullatheon bled through cracks in reality, thickening the air where it spread.
It moved wrong—too slow, too deliberate, reaching for the nobles with tendrils that left corruption in their wake.
Where it touched, things changed. A dancer's hair went white in seconds, then black, then white again.
A male aged fifty years between one step and the next, then snapped back to youth with a scream that cut off mid-breath.
The flowers—the roses we'd made bloom. They were dying. Blooming and rotting in the same breath, petals falling and reforming and falling again.
Time was looping. Stuttering. Breaking.
A chandelier crashed to the floor. Then rewound—rising back to the ceiling, crystals reassembling. Then crashed again. Then rewound. Trapped in its own private apocalypse while the court fled in chaos beneath it.
The mirrors lining the walls had gone mad.
Every reflection was wrong. Nobles stared at versions of themselves that didn't match—older, younger, dead, never-born. A fae screamed at a mirror showing her own skeleton. A man wept at the image of a child he didn't recognize but somehow knew.
And then the ballroom vanished.
All of it.
One moment—chaos, screaming, the Nullatheon spreading. The next—nothing. Empty void where the floor had been, where the walls had been, where everything had been. Guests tumbled into darkness, their screams dopplering away into silence.
Then reality reasserted itself.
The ballroom returned—but different. Different flowers in the vases. Different paintings on the walls. Other people standing where the fallen had been, blinking in confusion, wearing fashions from decades past.
"It's pulling from other timelines," Eryndor breathed. "Other possibilities. The Veil isn't just torn—it's hemorrhaging."
A fae walked past the doorway with her face on backwards.
She didn't seem to notice.
"ERYNDOR."
The King's voice cut through the chaos like a blade.
He stood at the top of the grand staircase, untouched by the madness swirling below. His expression wasn't panicked. Wasn't horrified.
It was satisfied.
"My study. Now." His eyes found mine through the ruined doorway. Cold. Knowing. "Both of you."
He knows.
My thighs were still trembling. My lips were still swollen. And now the whole world knew what that cost.
Eryndor caught my hand and squeezed.
"Father—"
"Now, Eryndor."
The mirrors around the ballroom flickered. For one terrible, endless moment, every reflection showed the same thing.
Me and Eryndor. Tangled together in the dark. His mouth on my throat. My hands in his hair. The moment before the world broke.
Then they shattered.
All of them. Every mirror in the ballroom, exploding outward in a cascade of glass that hung suspended in the air—frozen, glittering, accusatory.
The King smiled.
"We have much to discuss."
I scanned the wreckage. Couldn't help it—couldn't make my feet follow the King until I'd found them in the chaos.
There. Near the far wall, where a column had cracked and reformed three times in the last minute.
Maxx had Serenya tucked against him, one arm around her shoulders, the other shielding the dog tucked inside her dress.
Glass hung suspended around them like a constellation.
He wasn't looking at the mirrors or the King or the madness eating the room alive.
He was looking at her eyes. Making sure they were still hers.
She was looking back. She knew him.
That's enough. That's enough for now.
I turned and followed the King up the stairs.
The corridor behind us was still twitching—a sconce flickering between lit and unlit, a painting of a hunt scene resetting the hounds mid-leap every few seconds.
We'd walked through it in silence, stepping over a tile that kept vanishing and reappearing.
My dress was rumpled. My hair was wrecked.
The glamour Maxx had laid over my face had cracked at the edges, my real features bleeding through like ink through wet paper.