“What?” Auradelle moved closer, studying the transformation. His eyes had gone wide. “That’s not possible. The texts said—”
“Maybe your texts are shit,” I gasped out. “Maybe you can’t predict everything. Maybe you’re just a sad old man who’s spent so long staring at corruption he’s forgotten what beauty looks like.”
He slapped me, hard enough to make my ears ring. But I laughed, because what else was there to do? I was dying or transforming or both, strapped to a nightmare machine while my marks bloomed impossible flowers, and somehow that was funny.
“What is that girl doing?” Auradelle demanded, finally noticing Mora’shumming.
“Singing, my lord,” a guard replied. “Should we stop her?”
Auradelle considered, then shook his head. “No. Let her waste her voice on useless sentiment. It changes nothing. The Convergence is nearly here.”
But he was wrong. I could feel it changing something. Mora’s song resonated with something deep in the stone, and my marks were blooming faster, releasing more pollen. Where the pollen touched the conduits, they flickered, their green light stuttering.
Through the bond, clearer now, I felt Kaelren in the tunnels below. Rage incarnate, corruption spreading fast, his humanity dissolving with each guard he killed. But underneath the rage, I felt something else.
Love.
Desperate, furious, impossible love that defied patterns and iterations and everything that said we were doomed to fail. Love that was willing to become monstrous if it meant saving me. Love that didn’t care about balance or realms or the proper order of things.
And trust. He trusted me. Trusted that I’d told him the truth about the seed, that I’d given him the key to breaking this cycle. Even now, bound and being torn apart, I felt his absolute certainty in me.
I sent everything I had through the bond—not words, just feeling. Trust. Hope. Love that burned brighter than any corruption.
“Come on,”I whispered, knowing he’d feel it even if he couldn’t hear the words.“Come find me, you overprotective asshole.”
And somewhere in the darkness below, I felt him roar my name.
34
Kaelren
The tunnels opened into the Heartspire’s bowels like a wound giving birth to infection. We emerged into a corridor of living stone, walls pulsing with that sick heartbeat I’d been feeling for the last hour. My corruption responded to it, spreading further, turning my words into grinding stone when I spoke.
“Move fast. Kill everything.”
My team formed up behind me, ready for whatever surprises were about to be thrown our way.
And Peeble, glowing with barely contained fury on my shoulder, their tiny form vibrating with rage.
“Elle’s in pain,” they said. “So much pain. They’ve started the ritual.”
Tell me something I don’t know.
“This whole place is designed to use your corruption against you. The walls, the floor, even the air is calibrated to draw power from marked ones. It’s a trap designed specifically for you.”
“Good. Let them try,” I growled.
The first wave of Bloomguard found us in the narrow passages, exactly where Auradelle wanted them to. They came with weapons that gleamed with an oily sheen, faces hidden behind masks that made them inhuman. Pretty faces twisted into plant-like horror, beauty made wrong. I could smell the corruption on their blades, mixed with something else, something that made my marks burn.
I didn’t bother with strategy. I just killed.
My hand went through the first guard’s chest, corruption spreading from the wound until he dissolved into shadow and screams. The sound he made as he died echoed through the corridors. The second lost her head to my blade—when had I drawn it?—the cut so charged with corruption that her body crumbled to ash before it hit the ground. The third tried to run. I pulled him into my corruption from twenty feet away, watching him dissolve like sugar in acid rain, his mask cracking to reveal eyes wide with the kind of terror that came with knowing it was the end.
“Kaelren!” Vashael shouted. “Control yourself!”
But I was past control. Past caring. Elle’s pain echoed through our bond, each pulse of agony making my corruption spread faster, making me more weapon than man. I could feel it eating at me from the inside, turning everything that was Kaelren into something else. Something worse. Something that existed only to reach Elle, to save her or die trying.
The corruption had a voice now, whispering in the back of my mind.“Let go,”it said.“Stop fighting. Become what you were meant to be. Become destruction incarnate. Become the ending of all things.”
