Chapter 6 Ellis Women Don’t Hide
Eclipsera festers below, a lesion split wide across the velvet dusk, its glass-veined arteries hemorrhaging light like something too obstinate to surrender.
From sixty stories up, the city sprawls in warped grandeur, Founders’ Crest slicing through the clouds while everything beneath it spirals downward in concentric circles of privilege and decay.
From this height, the illusion still holds.
Crystalline towers lance toward the stars, magic pulses along arterial streets, and the entire metropolis pretends it isn’t rotting from the inside out.
The Aureum Quarter blazes below Crown Heights.
All polished innovation, curated chaos, and creative overindulgence masquerading as culture.
I remember the Valencian sisters’ studio next door, back when we lived in that district.
Their apartment was a volatile gallery. Spells streaked across half-stretched canvases, and experimental enchantments crackling in the air like storm-soaked ozone.
Their Puddle Paw—one of those liquid-shifting familiars that artists adore for their ability to absorb stray magic—would melt into quicksilver pools whenever I scratched behind its ears and curl around my ankles.
I loved that creature more than I should have.
Then one morning, it was gone. No warning, no explanation.
Just Father’s voice, glacial and final. “Sentiment is a weakness, Aria. Ellis women don’t weep over lost pets.
We create the future. We don’t get attached to things that hold us back.
” It was the first time I learned that in Eclipsera, love could be seen as a liability.
Now I watch my former sanctuary glow with someone else’s dreams, while Everreach tries desperately to mirror upper society’s shine, but their spellcraft flickers with no substance.
Below that, the Rift District festers with quiet resentment, where the “elevated” workforce pretend their relocation from the Lower Rings wasn’t a generous reprieve.
As if housing, stipend tiers, and access to minor rubies isn’t worth their gratitude.
And at the city’s lowest edge, where the old drainage basin once ran, those slums constrict like a garrote.
Unrefined currents bleed into the streets, turning every enchantment fissile, every casting an act of desperation.
Two months ago, I might’ve been there. Not in the gutters exactly, but in The Den, buried in the curated grit of Rift District nightlife, letting Dom’s intoxicating chaos erase every inherited expectation, every legacy carved into my bones.
His illusions were addictively precise, built for indulgence and designed to numb.
Now, I haunt this tower like a ghost with too much self-awareness, another fallen heiress dressed in gilded melancholy.
Not that I’ve ever had the temperament for true tragedy.
I brace myself against the obsidian railing, savoring the bite of aged whiskey as it cuts down my throat.
The blood ruby pendant resting at my collar thrums with a low, familiar warmth, a gift from my parents that saves me from the crude necessity of opening veins for spells.
My fingers find it automatically, a habit woven into muscle memory, triggered whenever my thoughts stray to them.
Seventy years ago, they altered the entire magical economy with these gems. Not that Eclipsera cares.
Not anymore. Silva Academy textbooks reduced their work to footnotes, glossing over the era when magic devoured bodies whole.
When bloodletting was a necessity, not a choice.
Mother used to tell me stories about those days, but even her accounts felt clinical and stripped of weight.
Sanitized folklore meant to pacify children.
Fairy tales about a time we’d collectively buried because it made the current system look too comfortable.
As my glass empties, I press my thumb to the rim, releasing a controlled pulse of power. The whiskey rises in a steady swirl, refilling to the precise line. A trivial spell, really, but one that underscores how easily we come to expect even our smallest luxuries.
The latest issue of The Whispersilk Press lies open across the table, its illusion-inked pages rippling with moving images of my parents’ funeral.
The headline shimmers in calligraphic gold.
‘The Legacy of Innovation: Can Aria Ellis Carry the Flame?’ Beneath it, my face stares back from graduation day at Silva Academy—top of my class, three published theories on blood magic augmentation before my thesis was even submitted.
The golden girl of Eclipsera’s academic circles, thanks to Alexander Darkmoor’s carefully spun stories about my “extraordinary potential.” Long before their deaths, he’d positioned me as heir apparent, parading me through society functions like a prize thoroughbred.
The article drones on about “Eclipsera’s devastating loss” and “the uncertain future of magical advancement,” managing to write three pages about my parents’ death without once mentioning them as actual people.
Not a single mention of Father’s appallingly bad jokes, or Mom’s obsession with jasmine tea.
Nothing about Luna either. Just endless speculation about whether I’ll “rise to continue their legacy” or let “Ellis innovation die with their bloodline.”
Mom’s leather-bound journal lies beside it, its pages fluttering in the evening breeze.
I’ve read it so many times the corners have frayed beneath my fingers, worn down from obsession disguised as diligence.
I tell myself I’m still searching for answers, buried clues, and the moment it all unraveled, but I always circle back to the same entries.
The same brittle passages, hoping, stupidly, that this time I’ll find something more than observation. Something that feels like love.
Instead, I find confirmation of what I’ve always suspected. From the very beginning, I was a means to an end.
“It’s strange. I thought I’d feel more by now, but there’s only stillness. Anticipation, yes, but not joy or excitement. Just this unshakable belief that she will fix what I broke.”
Every entry reads like a lab log. Growth milestones documented in detached prose.
“She’s healthy. Bright. Already focused. She watches everything.”
Then, in a rare moment of self-awareness: “Cedric asks if I’ve taken any photos. I hadn’t even thought to.” Of course she hadn’t.
I was seven when I first proved their experiment successful, rewriting one of Father’s formulas and correcting his error. “He laughed and called it beginner’s luck,” she wrote. “But it wasn’t. She understood it.”
I remember that night better than I should. I’d left her a drawing—me and her, holding hands beneath a sun and scrawled at the top: Us. Her response is still etched into my chest like a brand.
“She was never supposed to be mine, but I think I would burn the world before I let it take her.”
The worst part? A piece of me is relieved they’re gone.
No more walking that impossible line between being their daughter and being their legacy.
No more decoding if Mom’s rare, clinical touches were rooted in affection, pride, or obligation.
But that same traitorous sliver coils with guilt, because another corner of my heart still aches for them with a violence that refuses to dull.
For the way Father’s eyes used to spark when we dissected theories late into the night.
For those rare, unguarded seconds when Mom watched me as if I were something delicate and dangerous, unsure whether to preserve me or document the anomaly.
They loved me, I know they did. Just never quite the way I needed them to.
But I can’t think about that. Won’t. Not when their deaths still don’t make sense and every accident report reads like carefully crafted fiction.
Let the Founding Families keep their practiced sympathies and shallow condolences, I’ve seen what hides beneath their smiles.
Magical pioneers don’t just die quietly on the verge of rewriting the world.
And Luna . . . sweet, naive Luna. Still trying to preserve our status among them with her flawless manners and dimpled charm. She’s too pure for their games, too trusting to recognize the performance beneath their gilded concern. I should protect her from them, but she won’t let me.
It’s easier to chase answers than confront the festering knot of grief and fury in my chest. Easier to dissect every detail of their deaths than face the uglier truth that, even now, after everything, part of me still wishes I’d been enough.
Enough to make them choose me over their work and ambition.
The sharp rhythm of heels on marble breaks my brooding, and I don’t need to turn to know it’s Luna.
My little sister has always moved like she’s floating.
A trait that used to drive our etiquette tutors wild with envy.
Even grief hasn’t stolen her grace, though sometimes I catch the way her smile trembles at the edges when she thinks no one’s watching.
“Aria?”
I glance over my shoulder. Luna stands haloed by the penthouse lights, all sunshine and summer breeze against my winter storm.
Two dresses dangle from her manicured fingers.
One a blush chiffon that belongs at a debutante luncheon, the other a sleek emerald silk.
She’s been doing this more lately, these little attempts to draw me out of my self-imposed exile.
Part of me wishes she’d stop trying so hard. A bigger part is terrified she might.