As if it was really so simple.
As if I could just trust him now, after everything he’d done.
“I was beginning to wonder about you,” he called, without looking at me.
I steeled myself and walked forward, my steps echoing in the still air.
“You said you wanted to make plans.” I swept a hand toward the crumbling entrance to the chamber that had served as our battleground not so long ago. “But what happened to yourplansto take control of the stone in there?” I demanded. “Your scheme to control all of its magic and destroy Noctaris?”
He kept his gaze on the distant peaks. “They were never my plans. Just lies I bought into because I wanted revenge against your realm. Because I didn’t realize what the Order had doneto Calista. How they poisoned her and turned us against one another.”
I was silent for a long time, waiting for him to elaborate.
He didn’t. It almost seemed like hecouldn’t, and it was unsettling to see him rendered into such a helpless state.
I folded my arms across my chest. Reconsidered the words I’d planned to say, the angry demands I’d planned to make of him.
Quietly, I said, “You truly did love her, didn’t you?”
He still didn’t look at me. “I killed her in the end. Nothing else really matters.”
Probably against my better judgment, I sat down beside him, keeping a careful distance. “Then you tried to kill me, because I carry her legacy.”
“And because Severin urged me to do it. To finish what I’d started. And because it was easier than admitting to myself thatwhat I’d startedmight have been a mistake—especially after spending centuries trying to justify what I’d done.”
It was the strangest part of this ordeal yet, to hear him admit that he’d been wrong.
“Of course, I didn’t manage to kill you.” He tilted his face toward me, as if he still couldn’t believe I’d survived, and he needed to see me for himself. “Something protected you and your brother that night, and I still don’t know what it was. Only that it broke me into pieces. Then the Order—the Light Keepers, or whatever masks they wore at the time—they took those pieces and tried to feed them into the weapon they were building.”
“…They wanted you to possess him.”
“Just another experiment they subjected your dear Aleks to.”
I fought the urge to bury my face in my hands again. The last person I wanted to witness another breakdown would be the man sitting beside me. But it was so tempting to just give in to the despair threatening to drown me.
I just wanted all these revelations tostop.
I fixed my eyes on the remains of a fallen statue far below us—a severed head of some lesser god I didn’t recognize—and I forced myself to keep talking.
“That’s the real reason he has some of the power of a Light Vaelora.” It wasn’t really a question; just the theory I’d always suspected but never wanted to fully believe.
“I don’t think it was part of the Order’s plans,” Lorien said. “They hoped he would just neutralize my magic, I’m sure. But he rejected the possession, and then hung on to fragments of my power and found a way to channel it instead. So, to answer your question…yes. He has it because he stole it from me.”
I thought of all the times Aleks had made my shadows disappear over the past weeks.
Was he neutralizing them, or collecting them?
Could he ultimately wield my own power against me, too?
“He might have been able to balance your magic temporarily, but it was never going to be the true Vaeloran bond,” Lorien said. “He was never going to be your true counterpart.”
I snorted. “And you are?”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to like it.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that makes two of us. But unless you intend to go against the divine plans of the gods themselves...”
