Lorien’s light flared again, a final push, trying to drive Calista back. Her shadows pressed relentlessly through. Over and over, their divine magic collided, until she finally forced him to his knees.
His breath shuddered, his light dimming to a singular fragment in the center of his chest. He clutched that fragment so tightly its light was nearly lost within his fist. “You think this will end me?”
Silent tears slipped down Calista’s cheeks. “No.”
The fragment slipped through his fingers, hovering between them for a breath.
“But that is not my intention.”
The light splintered and shot up like three arrows through the circular skylight in the middle of the ceiling, shattering it.
As glass showered the vision, I flinched, jerking back to the present with a gasp. The first place I looked was to the ceiling, noting the glinting, jagged teeth in the center—all that remained of the once impressive skylight.
Shattered so long ago, but the evidence still remained.
What other lingering effects of that day still haunted this world?
I knew the stories of Lorien and Calista’s doomed love. Of how she’d chosen the human king, Argoth, over him. And then Lorien had supposedly murdered her in a fit of jealous rage, and he’d spent the following centuries making certain Noctaris paid for her choices—that no Shadow Vaelora would easily rise up and take her place.
Everyone in the Rivenholt Palace and the royal city knew these stories; they’d been reciting them to me ever since I’d crash-landed among them months ago.
None of them had mentioned the scene I’d just witnessed. They didn’t speak of curses, or of Lorien being struck down while bleeding from…what?
What exactly had happened that day?
My head was swimming. No part of me wanted to see Lorien as a victim of any kind, yet I heard myself ask, “Why did she do it?”
Lorien hesitated.
“She must have had a reason.”
“…I wanted to change the way our kind were treated. She—or that foolish human king she loved, rather—didn’t agree with my plans.”
“Which were…?”
“Unimportant.”
They seemed important tome, but I had far too many other questions to let the conversation stall there. I looked to the center of the room—to the circular symbol in the floor—and asked, “When she spoke of scattering your flame…that fragment I watched split into three, was that your…your…”
Soul.
The word was right on the tip of my tongue, but that was where it stayed. Maybe I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that he evenhada soul—much less one that Calista had so viciously ripped away from him.
He folded his arms across his chest, tapping his fingers against his bicep. “It’s why I’ve been unable to move on, even after all this time. Why I’ve been forced to crawl from body to body, like some fucking parasite, rather than the divine creature I was meant to be.”
“Why didn’t she just kill you?”
“I assume because she was afraid it would violently disrupt the magic of Soltaris, and then her beloved King Argoth might have suffered the consequences. So I was made to suffer instead.”
I shifted uncomfortably under the weight of his words, trying to settle on the meaning behind them.
I’d never considered his immortality might be acurse.
“Of course, itultimately disrupted the flow of magic anyway, didn’t it?” Lorien looked to the broken skylight, his eyes glazing over. “The balance was forever altered that day…likely in ways she didn’t intend.”
I thought of my current struggle to bring life back to Noctaris. A chilling possibility struck me: Was this another reason why the Aetherstone would not release more magic, no matter what I did? Why everything felt so…messy?
She had cursed him.
