“Hurry,” she said, nodding toward the altar at the base of the tree.
I moved even faster than before—too fast to allow myself any time to think. I could focus only on my target, on the swing of my blade, on the choice I was making.
The grove cried out as Grimnor cut through the spelled, ancient wood, the sound like a thousand birds screeching as they took flight.
The fragment tumbled free, landing in the dead leaves at my feet.
I picked it up. It was light as a feather and cold as snow. Images flashed through my mind as my fingers closed around it: a garden at night; a woman running; a palace looming in the background.
All around us, the forest began to wilt. Leaves curled into themselves. Flowers blackened and fell. The trees bent backward, bark peeling, thick branches snapping as easily as dried twigs.
In my hands, the fragment of Lorien’s soul was soon doing the opposite, waking with a fierce heat, becoming hot and bright. I held it to my chest, as if I could use its warmth to fill the emptiness I felt as I scanned the dying grove, searching for the comforting ghosts of my mother and father, for some sign that I’d made the right choice.
“Put that out of sight,” Aleks said, appearing so suddenly at my side it made me jump. Fear burned in his eyes, and his voice was strange. Angry, almost.
Startled as I was to hear him speak to me like that, I couldn’t seem to do as he asked; even as the shard burned against my palms, I couldn’t let it go.
“Nova,please?—”
Then the sound of a building collapsing roared in from the distance, loud enough to rattle me to my core.
I shoved the soul fragment into my pocket and started to run.
EIGHTEEN
Nova
Shaking and breathless, I walked through the remnants of my childhood home.
In a few places, the structures remained largely intact, showing only the normal dust and wear of seven years’ time.
In others, the damage that the combination of Shadow and Light magic had done on the night of my birthday was finally apparent—finallyreal. The entire area around the grand veranda, where I’d watched my father meet his end, had now collapsed. The worst of the destruction swept inward from this point, forming a haphazard trail of cracked tiles, chipped plaster, and crumbling stone.
I followed that trail to the room where my mother had once been frozen.
For seven years, I’d visited this room in hopes of understanding the spell that had trapped her. Of finding a way to break it. A way to save her.
Now, the spell was finally broken.
But she was gone.
I wondered briefly about what had become of her body—was it buried under the rubble, crushed beneath this fatal reality that Rose Point had finally caught up to?
Was she nothing more than dust and bones by now?
In the end, I decided I didn’t really want to know.
After searching through several more equally empty rooms, I dropped to my knees, overcome by an exhaustion both mental and physical. Phantom darted down from the perch he’d claimed on my shoulder, a shadow that materialized into a small dog who bounded from room to room.
He found no signs of any life, either.
Eventually, he returned and sat sadly beside me, his pointed ears pinned back against his skull.
I staggered to my feet, and we kept moving—though to where, I wasn’t sure. Orin caught up and silently fell into step with us. When I finally found the courage to ask him my questions, he tried to help me make sense of the world, as he always had.
They died that night. The manor was wrapped in a protective spell, preventing the fall that should have been. The grove kept feeding into the spell, year after year, keeping it all frozen in time.
It was only an illusion.
