Tobias
My walls were crumbling as the virus ravaging my system disintegrated them bit by bit. One last time, I made myself picture the dungeon I built in my mind—not to cage my emotions within, but to keep that fog from slipping through the bars.
While the others had worked, I had painstakingly rebuilt the cells I knew by memory. But this time, the bars were made of light, not iron. They burned a pale, perfect yellow, bright against the onslaught of the cloudy white haze.
I shoved Silvius forward toward the doorway. Dolion looked remarkably steady as his blade leveled at Silvius’s back, its tip slicing through his ruined robes.
“If he doesn’t cooperate, feel free to stab him,” I drawled scornfully. “After all, we only need his hand.”
Black dots multiplied in the corners of my vision as I tried to limp back to Quinn, nearly falling before she rushed over to help me. Bile lurched up my throat, but I forced it down along with everything else. Her hand shook as she draped my arm around her shoulders.
When she was safe, I would let myself feel this. For now, it was all I could do to remain standing—silently praying this would succeed, even as something inside me whispered it was too easy.
Quinn shot Silvius a look sharp enough to cut. The flicker of red in her eyes told me she was ready to take control the second he tried anything.
The door reappeared as they neared. Another poke of the sword, and Silvius raised his hand to the access pad. His blood seeped into the stone.
For one agonizing moment, I thought Silvius tricked us yet again…
A familiar current zipped through my veins.
The crackle of light momentarily blinded me, surprising me in its intensity.
I hadn’t expected to still be able to access my magic, not when Eva had lost hers almost immediately after the virus’s first symptoms. And yet, mine traveled between each fingertip in celebration, its power immediately bolstering me.
“Now into your cell,” I said coldly to Silvius. “I’ll keep you alive as long as you’re useful.”
Two lines he had so often said to me. Silvius’s eyes narrowed, his face calculating, but he stayed silent as he staggered to his cage.
Dolion unlocked it, then shoved Silvius inside.
He slammed the door behind him with a clang that made my heart plummet before locking him inside.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
The bluish glow of Dolion’s power immediately flared at his fingertips as he rushed back to his fallen queen.
Quinn knelt beside me, her fingers pressing against my rebroken leg as I leaned heavily against a cold, steel counter.
“Save your strength,” I muttered raggedly. “You’ll need it to find the way out of here.”
Quinn lips pursed. “I am. You’re too heavy to carry and you can barely walk as is.”
And yet, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, I was still standing. Still…functioning, despite the virus attacking my brain. I closed my eyes as her magic faded into my thigh, its blue glow bright behind my eyelids. The relief barely registered.
“Kill him,” Silvius demanded.
I opened my eyes a split second too late. A horrible crack echoed through the room. One of the guards had wrapped his arms around another, his neck already snapped. There was nothing I could do as his lifeless body slumped against the stone.
A moment later, everyone in the cell but Silvius went completely still. I didn’t have to see the rise and fall of their chests to know Quinn had incapacitated them.
Quinn’s blood red eyes glared at Silvius. “It’s over, don’t you get that? Why did you…how could you…”
Silvius let out a bitter laugh. “You may get out of this room, but now you won’t get out of here alive.”
The sinking feeling in my stomach solidified.
“If you want to survive this, you’ll explain that,” I growled. “The two healers you captured may feel some moral obligation not to let you bleed out in the same cell you used to torture us, but it’s no less than you deserve.”
“It is over,” Silvius agreed. “That”—he gestured at the mirror—“was your only way out. We are deep beneath the Enclave, far beneath the earth. There’s no way out now.
The tunnels leading here are completely blocked thanks to my stone wielder, and he”—a dismissive glance at the body—“was the only one with the magic to reopen them.” His gray eyes bore into me.
“If I die here, then so will everyone who killed the True King, including your bitch of a sister.”
I stared back at him as the world around me blurred. Silvius only smirked.
“He’s lying,” Dolion gasped. “There’s no way he would entomb us down here…”
My voice sounded foreign to my ears as I whispered, “He’s not.”
For four years, my survival had depended on knowing every tick of the fae in front of me, every tell, every mannerism and mood that might signal what torture I had in store. He might be a psychopath and a murderer…but he wasn’t a liar.
Quinn turned to the desk behind her, hastily scrawling a message. “We just need another Elemental who can reopen the tunnel, and Rivan—”
Silvius laughed as the slip of paper disappeared only to reappear in his outstretched palm. A line formed between Quinn’s brows, before she whispered, “A spyfinder.”
Aviel had used the same magical barrier to stop messages from escaping when his forces decimated the Mayimite army during the war. The price for that magic was in lives willingly given. Though something told me the lives he had taken to maintain it had likely lost their minds first.
Silvius only watched me, the smug look on his face begging for me to plant my fist into it.
“I should also mention that I put a failsafe in place that triggered the moment you used my blood to unblock your magics. Should I not return to disarm it within the hour, you’ll all be reacquainted with a familiar airborne serum, except this time there will be no one to shut it off.
” Blood streaked his teeth as he smiled at me.
“Unless you all want to die down here, I’m afraid your only option is to let me free. ”
Letting Silvius go wasn’t an option. I was once again caged beneath a castle, with no way to claw my way from it—and Quinn was trapped here with me. The muted feeling of her fear tore into my racing heart, each beat demanding that I figure out how to save her before I lost the ability to do so.
There had to be a way. Someone who could…
My brain felt unbearably sluggish as I looked at the shattered mirror, the broken pieces sparkling like sunlight on sand. I blinked, as though that might clear the fog away, limping closer.
Light glowed at my fingertips—some intrinsic part of me knowing the answer before my brain fully put it together.
My eyes dropped to the jagged shards of the mirror left in its frame, trying to remember the exact process—one I had only read about. The silver backing of the mirror was still in place, my dull reflection staring back at me. Two balls of light consumed the space where my eyes should have been.
I knew what I needed to do.
“Tobias?”
Quinn’s voice seemed far away as I burrowed deep into my power. But I didn’t have time to explain, not when I could feel myself weakening with every breath. The tether to my magic felt impermanent—like if I were to let go of it again, it would fade from my grip forever.
I drew a deep breath in, letting it steady me even as the world blurred at the edges.
When I let it out, light arched from my hands, turning into the burning bands I had once learned to fear.
They painstakingly wrapped around every piece of glass, reflections scattering in every direction as I lifted them from the floor.
Zaps of lightning darted between them as I reached for each tiny shard, the smallest already binding back together from the heat.
Closing my eyes, I let the charge build up within me. Tunneling down and down and down into my magic, I welcomed that same heat that seared my skin so many times—the scent that lingered in my nose after every nightmare.
Aviel had never understood the intricacies of light and heat, let alone the true depth of my power.
This wasn’t fire, despite the inferno growing inside me, nor could light alone create this warmth.
The brilliance that burned within me was born of loss, its untamed chaos too bright to be contained.
This was the magic that had blazed inside me for months, building in power until I thought it might consume me.
The air thickened, a sharp metallic taste coating my throat. My hands extended forward, my fingers splaying wide as I felt for that invisible channel through the air.
A low, electric hum curled around me, not quite sound, not quite silence. The hair on my arms rose, my skin prickling as the tension built in a feverish crescendo.
I couldn’t contain it anymore, but I no longer had to.
My eyes flew open.
Pure power flew from my hands like a long-silenced scream, a blinding, jagged bolt of lightning streaking across the room with a sharp crack.
The sudden heat slammed into me like I had inhaled pure flame.
It branched apart like the limbs of a tree, striking every single piece of glass I had forced together.
The sharp, clean scent of ozone filled my nose as the glass glowed like it contained the sun itself. I took one step forward, then another until I stood before it. Not daring to look down, I sliced a deep cut across both palms.
If this didn’t fucking work…
I thought I was done being burned, that I had suffered that pain for the last time.
Maybe that was why I finally gave in to the roar of agony and long repressed rage as I pressed my hands against the white-hot glass.
As magic and my blood—the blood of Soleara’s king—melded into the molten, glowing mass.
The mirror shuddered as its light-covered surface undulated beneath my fingers so violently I feared it would break.
My teeth ground together as I forced the glass to bind against the silver, bonding it at a molecular level.
The edge of my endurance began to fray, my magic pouring into it until I thought it was me who might shatter.
“Tobias.”
Quinn. I couldn’t feel her anymore. Couldn’t sense her like I should. She stood far too close to me, too close to the lightning that seemed to stretch from my very soul.
My blistered hands clenched into fists. The last of my light seared my palms as I cut it off at the source.
The room went dark. Only the ghostly shape of those branches remained, suspended where my magic tore across the space an endless heartbeat ago. I forced myself to breathe through the pain.
It was nothing compared to the ruins of the fallen walls in my head.
A familiar blue light cut through the dark as the blind spots in my vision receded. My vision was tinted a milky white as Quinn wrapped her hands around mine, the chill of hers shocking against the heat of my skin.
“Holy gods,” Dolion whispered from behind me. “How did you know that would work?”
Only then did I realize that the mirror wasn’t just whole.
It was rippling.
“I didn’t,” I croaked, my throat raw. My eyes found Quinn’s. “When lightning hits sand in the desert it creates glass. Someone I love mentioned it once.”
Her lower lip trembled. My arms wrapped around her, far too weak for how tightly I wanted to hold her. Yet the bond between us still felt muted—silent despite the emotion all over her face.
Quinn seemed to realize something was wrong in the same heartbeat. “Tobias?”
Dolion swore as the mirror began to ripple more urgently, lifting up his sword. But the figure who came through the mirror was familiar, one of the same Solearan soldiers who once welcomed me to this realm. Quinn’s gasp of surprise turned into a shout.
“Akeno.”
Quinn was safe. Pari and Eva would be too, now that we had their cures. They had to be.
I stared into those amber eyes, committing them to memory as my vision went cloudy. There was nothing left to stop the endless white as it bore down on me, intent on erasing the broken pieces that finally felt whole.
My gaze dropped to the sunflower glinting around Quinn’s neck—the familiar yellow shining like a beacon through the fog.
That last wall crumbled, and so did I.