My fingers brush the worn leather, trembling. “This is . . .”
“The beginning.” Alexander covers my hand with his, firm and warm. “If you’re certain this is what you want.”
I look up at him. “And if anyone asks?”
“You’re exactly where you belong.” His thumb skims slow, deliberate patterns over my wrist. “Everything else stays between us.”
“And the gala next week?” I ask, hating how my voice betrays my fear that this moment, this connection between us, might shatter at the mention of my sister. “You still want Aria there?”
“Luna, you know I worry for her.” He leans in, his voice dropping into that intimate cadence that makes the rest of the world vanish. “She needs to resurface, to remember who she is. And you may be the only one she’ll listen to.”
“She’s . . .” I falter. “Locked Dominic out. Changed the wards. Won’t respond to his messages and refuses the gifts. It’s as if she’s methodically cutting off every lifeline.” A chill ghosts over me as I remember Dom’s presence. The violence curled beneath his skin, and the way he looked at Aria as if she were a hunger he couldn’t tame. “I never liked him. There’s something broken in him. Like he doesn’t know the difference between love and possession.”
“And yet,” Alexander muses, something calculating beneath his concerned expression, “he may be precisely what we need.”
I stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“Your sister’s isolation worries me, Luna. And while Dominic Blackwood is a blunt instrument, sometimes a controlled threat is the most effective catalyst.”
“You think she’d come just to see him?”
“Perhaps,” he says carefully. “Dominic might be useful in this instance. For all his faults, he does seem to have a certain . . .effecton your sister.”
“You’d trust him to help?”
“Trust?” Alexander chuckles, low and dry. “No. But usefulness and trust aren’t the same thing.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I say quickly. “If she thinks he’ll be there, she may agree.”
“Good girl.” His approval wraps around me. “Show me you can handle this, and there might be a place for you in the research division sooner than you think.”
My pulse leaps. “You mean it?”
“Prove you understand what’s required, and I’ll show you everything your parents kept locked behind closed doors.”
Eclipsera festers below, alesion split wide across the velvet dusk, its glass-veined arteries hemorrhaging light like something too obstinate to surrender. From sixty stories up, the city sprawls in warped grandeur, Founders’ Crest slicing through the clouds while everything beneath it spirals downward in concentric circles of privilege and decay. From this height, the illusion still holds. Crystalline towers lance toward the stars, magic pulses along arterial streets, and the entire metropolis pretends it isn’t rotting from the inside out.
The Aureum Quarter blazes below Crown Heights. All polished innovation, curated chaos, and creative overindulgence masquerading as culture. I remember the Valencian sisters’ studio next door, back when we lived in that district. Their apartment was a volatile gallery. Spells streaked across half-stretched canvases, and experimental enchantments crackling in the air like storm-soaked ozone. Their Puddle Paw—one of those liquid-shifting familiars that artists adore for their ability to absorb stray magic—would melt into quicksilver pools whenever I scratched behind its ears and curl around my ankles. I loved that creature more than I should have.
Then one morning, it was gone. No warning, no explanation. Just Father’s voice, glacial and final. “Sentiment is aweakness, Aria. Ellis women don’t weep over lost pets. We create the future. We don’t get attached to things that hold us back.”It was the first time I learned that in Eclipsera, love could be seen as a liability.
Now I watch my former sanctuary glow with someone else’s dreams, while Everreach tries desperately to mirror upper society’s shine, but their spellcraft flickers with no substance. Below that, the Rift District festers with quiet resentment, where the “elevated” workforce pretend their relocation from the Lower Rings wasn’t a generous reprieve. As if housing, stipend tiers, and access to minor rubies isn’t worth their gratitude. And at the city’s lowest edge, where the old drainage basin once ran, those slums constrict like a garrote. Unrefined currents bleed into the streets, turning every enchantment fissile, every casting an act of desperation.
Two months ago, I might’ve been there. Not in the gutters exactly, but in The Den, buried in the curated grit of Rift District nightlife, letting Dom’s intoxicating chaos erase every inherited expectation, every legacy carved into my bones. His illusions were addictively precise, built for indulgence and designed to numb. Now, I haunt this tower like a ghost with too much self-awareness, another fallen heiress dressed in gilded melancholy. Not that I’ve ever had the temperament for true tragedy.
I brace myself against the obsidian railing, savoring the bite of aged whiskey as it cuts down my throat. The blood ruby pendant resting at my collar thrums with a low, familiar warmth, a gift from my parents that saves me from the crude necessity of opening veins for spells. My fingers find it automatically, a habit woven into muscle memory, triggered whenever my thoughts stray to them.
Seventy years ago, they altered the entire magical economy with these gems. Not that Eclipsera cares. Not anymore. Silva Academy textbooks reduced their work to footnotes, glossing over the era when magic devoured bodies whole. When bloodletting was a necessity, not a choice. Mother used to tell me stories about those days, but even her accounts felt clinical and stripped of weight. Sanitized folklore meant to pacify children. Fairy tales about a timewe’d collectively buried because it made the current system look too comfortable.
As my glass empties, I press my thumb to the rim, releasing a controlled pulse of power. The whiskey rises in a steady swirl, refilling to the precise line. A trivial spell, really, but one that underscores how easily we come to expect even our smallest luxuries.
The latest issue ofTheWhispersilk Presslies open across the table, its illusion-inked pages rippling with moving images of my parents’ funeral. The headline shimmers in calligraphic gold.‘The Legacy of Innovation: Can Aria Ellis Carry the Flame?’Beneath it, my face stares back from graduation day at Silva Academy—top of my class, three published theories on blood magic augmentation before my thesis was even submitted. The golden girl of Eclipsera’s academic circles, thanks to Alexander Darkmoor’s carefully spun stories about my “extraordinary potential.” Long before their deaths, he’d positioned me as heir apparent, parading me through society functions like a prize thoroughbred.
The article drones on about “Eclipsera’s devastating loss” and “the uncertain future of magical advancement,” managing to write three pages about my parents’ death without once mentioning them as actual people. Not a single mention of Father’s appallingly bad jokes, or Mom’s obsession with jasmine tea. Nothing about Luna either. Just endless speculation about whether I’ll “rise to continue their legacy” or let “Ellis innovation die with their bloodline.”
Mom’s leather-bound journal lies beside it, its pages fluttering in the evening breeze. I’ve read it so many times the corners have frayed beneath my fingers, worn down from obsession disguised as diligence. I tell myself I’m still searching for answers, buried clues, and the moment it all unraveled, but I always circle back to the same entries. The same brittle passages, hoping, stupidly, that this time I’ll find something more than observation. Something that feels like love.
Instead, I find confirmation of what I’ve always suspected. From the very beginning, I was a means to an end.
