The shadows snap. They break, dissolving into nothingness.
Kasian stumbles back, his face pale with shock. He had underestimated my monstrous power. He had underestimated my rage. He had underestimated my love.
I charge again. He tries another trick, conjuring a wall of shadow to block my path. I do not slow. I hit it with my shoulder, a thunderous impact that sends ripples through the magical barrier. It holds for a moment, then shatters like glass, throwing splinters of dark magic through the air.
I am on him. He raises his hands, a desperate incantation on his lips, but there is no time. My massive clawed hand slams into his chest. Not to kill. Not yet. I want him to feel it. To know what it is to be helpless.
He is thrown backward with a sickening crack, his body sailing through the air like a broken doll. He crashes into the largest of the crystal waterfalls that feed the Wildspont, his thin form disappearing in a blinding explosion of silver-blue light and spray. The entire cavern shudders, the humming power of the Wildspont reacting violently to the intrusion.
The ritual is utterly, irrevocably broken.
The brilliant white light of the Wildspont flickers wildly, then pulses, growing impossibly bright. The magic unleashed, unbound by Kasian’s control, surges through the cavern, a wild, chaotic storm of raw power.
Above the altar, the ghostly image of Lyra, Kasian’s beloved, solidifies completely. She is no longer translucent. She is real. Her eyes, filled with an ancient, profound sadness that mirrors Kasian’s own, open slowly. She looks down, not at Dina, still bound to the altar, but across the cavern, straight into the eyes of Kasian himself.
20
DINA
The cavern is a storm of uncontrolled magic. Xylon stands panting on the obsidian island, his monstrous form trembling with exertion, his blood dripping onto the black stone. Kasian lies in a broken heap in the frothing, luminous water of the waterfall. And above me, the spirit of his lost love, Lyra, is no longer a ghost. She is a solid, shimmering presence, real and terrible in her sorrow.
The magical bindings hold me fast to the altar, a helpless spectator to the climax of a tragedy centuries in the making.
Lyra’s eyes, filled with a sadness so profound it feels like the weight of the ocean, are fixed on the Vrakken. Kasian stirs, pushing himself up, his unnaturally graceful movements now broken and clumsy. He stumbles out of the water, his gaze locked on her, the obsessive hunger from before now curdled into a look of stunned, desperate hope.
“Lyra,” he breathes, his voice a broken thing. “I have you. I have you back.”
The spirit speaks, and her voice is not a whisper, not a ghostly echo. It is real, a clear, melodic sound filled with the crushing weight of unshed tears. “No, my love. You do not.”
She turns her heartbreaking gaze to me, still pinned to the altar. Her eyes are full of a gentle, profound pity. “You cannot build our future on the foundation of another’s stolen love, Kasian. I will not have my peace at the price of her life.”
Kasian takes a stumbling step forward, his pale hand outstretched. “But I did it for you! I have waited for you. I have preserved you!”
“Preserved me?” Lyra’s voice cracks, and a flash of anguish crosses her beautiful face. “Oh, my love. My foolish, grieving love. You have not been preserving me. You have beenimprisoningme.”
The air in my lungs freezes. The words land in the supercharged atmosphere of the cavern with the violent force of a physical blow.
“This place, this magic, your unrelenting grief… it has been a cage for my soul,” she says, her voice trembling. “I have not been waiting for release. I have been trapped, unable to move on, tethered to this world by the sheer force of your refusal to let me go. I have watched the centuries turn to dust, Kasian. I have watched you build this beautiful, terrible tomb around my memory, and all I have ever wanted was for you to let me go. To finally, truly, be at rest. With you.”
Her words, spoken with such gentle, devastating clarity, finally break through the walls of his obsessive grief. The madness, the frantic hunger that had twisted his features, drains away. He looks at me, truly looks at me for the first time, and I see not a tool or a key, but a terrified young woman on the verge of death. He looks at Xylon, the wounded, furious protector who would tear the world apart for that young woman. And then he looks back at his love, at the beautiful soul he has been tormenting with his selfish sorrow.
His face, a mask of stoic, ancient pain for five hundred years, crumples. A sound of pure, final heartbreak is torn from histhroat, a sound more terrible than any of Xylon’s roars. The sound of a soul shattering.
“Forgive me,” he whispers to the spirit of his love. To me. To the world.
With a cry of anguish that echoes through the magical heart of the world, he raises his hands. He speaks a single, sharp word of ancient power, a word of unmaking.
The invisible bindings that hold me to the altar shatter like glass. The pressure vanishes, and the air rushes back into my lungs in a ragged gasp. I am free.
I push myself up, my muscles screaming in protest, just in time to see Kasian turn his back on us. He walks toward the heart of the Wildspont, toward the brightest part of the pool where the light is a solid, living thing. Lyra’s spirit floats toward him, her hand outstretched, a sad, loving smile finally gracing her lips.
“Come home,” she whispers.
Kasian reaches out and takes her hand. As his fingers touch hers, he steps into the luminous water. He does not sink. His body begins to dissolve. Not in a gruesome, violent way, but with a terrible, sublime beauty. His midnight robes, his pale skin, his ancient, sorrowful face—they unravel into threads of pure, golden-white light, flowing into the Wildspont, joining with his love. In seconds, he is gone, leaving behind only a surge of brilliant, overwhelming energy and the faint, lingering scent of ancient grief, finally at peace.
But the Wildspont, its ritual aborted, its power unbalanced by Kasian’s final, sacrificial act, screams.
The gentle, humming thrum of the cavern rises to a deafening, piercing shriek. The luminous water begins to boil, to churn, the light shifting from silver-blue to a white-hot, furious intensity. All the energy Kasian gathered for his ritual, all thepower he just fed into it with his own life force, has nowhere to go. It is a river dammed, and the dam is breaking.
