“Fenrik, run!” Lord Stormgarde bellowed, his voice losing its strength, drowned out by the rising shriek of the line.
“No!” Fenrik reached the edge of the ritual circle. He threw his hands up, a clumsy, instinctive shield of grey magic to try and cover his parents.
“I saidrun!”
The woman looked at her son and then she clapped her hands together. A shockwave of blue force slammed into Fenrik’s chest, throwing him backward. He flew through the air, crashing into the hallway, sliding across the stone just as the silver mass in the center of the room expanded.
I threw my hands up to shield my eyes, a scream tearing from my throat as the white light swallowed the parents, swallowed the screams, swallowed everything. I tried to turn away, to shield my eyes from the annihilation of the two people screaming in the center of the storm, but the vision held me paralyzed. The light was a physical weight, bleaching everything white, but in the periphery of that blinding radiance, there was a patch ofshadows that didn’t move. I forced my gaze through the glare, squinting against the magical wind. A figure stood outside the ritual circle, untouched by the chaotic winds tearing the library apart.
It looked like a somewhat younger Lady Kelda, her face unlined, her hair less aggressively coiffed. She wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t weeping. While Lord and Lady Stormgarde poured their life force into the desperate, failing shields, Kelda stood still. Her arm was extended, in a gesture of command.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
Her hand was a rigid claw, fingers hooked as if dragging something heavy through water. The air around her shimmered with that same wrongness I had felt in the manor’s hallways, the signature of Veil magic. But she wasn’t creating an illusion. She was weaving a grotesque funnel.
The screaming mass of raw silver energy, the fracture in the ley-line, bulged outward. It wanted to explode, to consume everything in a radius of miles. But Kelda’s invisible grip caught a tendril of it. She isolated a dense, writhing clot of that power and with a sharp, brutal jerk of her wrist, she threw it. I watched as Kelda guided that parasitic sludge past the parents’ failing shields and drove it straight into the chest of the boy sprawled on the floor.
Fenrik arched off the stone, a soundless scream tearing his mouth open as the silver mass slammed into his sternum. I saw the moment the parasite latched onto his heart, the silver veinsflashing up his throat, seizing his vocal cords, and drowning his magic in a foreign noise.
He collapsed, writhing.This wasn’t an accident,my mind screamed.It wasn’t a curse he inherited. It was an assassination.
Kelda watched him fall, then she simply let go. She dropped her hand. The subtle weave of Veil magic guiding the energy snapped. Without her containment, the rest of the ley-energy crashed down. Lord and Lady Stormgarde vanished in the shockwave. The stone floor melted. The books fused. The windows shattered, and in that split second before the debris hit her, I saw Kelda’s face change. The cold calculation vanished, replaced by a mask of horror and grief so perfect it made my skin crawl. She threw up a personal shield, not to save the family, but to save herself for the performance she was about to give.
Why?The question hammered against my skull. Why keep him alive only to torture him? If she wanted the power, why not let the explosion take the heir, too? The vision shuddered, skipping forward. The molten floor had cooled to a dull slug-trail of black glass. The air hung heavy with the smell of smoke and copper. And there, amidst the ruins of what used to be his life, Fenrik crawled. He was unrecognizable from the man I knew. This boy was covered in ash, his clothes shredded, his hands scrabbling uselessly against the fused stone where his parents had stood moments ago. He kept retching, his body rejecting the violent intrusion of the magic Kelda had shoved into his chest. She knelt beside him. Unlike Fenrik, she was clean. Not a smear of soot marred her pale green robes. She looked like astatue of compassion. She reached out and stroked the hair back from his sweat-slicked forehead. It was a gesture of tenderness that made bile rise in my throat.
“I saw...” Fenrik choked out, his voice a jagged ruin. He tried to push himself up, his grey eyes wide and unseeing, flashing with that new silver light. “Kelda... I saw you. The energy... you pulled it. You threw it at me.”
“Hush, sweet boy,” Kelda murmured. Her voice was too low for the vision to catch yet, but the memory was crisp enough that I could see the tension in her jaw. “You’re in shock. The ley-line snapped. It was a tragedy, Fenrik. A terrible accident.”
“No,” Fenrik said. He clutched at his chest, where the silver veins were already darkening. “The vector... the trajectory was intentional. You were outside the circle. You anchored the thing. I calculated the—“
“You calculated nothing,” she cut in. The warmth evaporated. “You are delirious with grief. Look at you, you’re broken.”
She moved her hand from his hair to his temples. Her thumb pressed right over the pulse point. Fenrik flinched, trying to pull away, but he was too weak. The silver markings on his throat flared, and he gagged on the power choking him.
“It hurts,” he sobbed, the defiance crumbling into pure agony. “Make it stop.”
“I can,” she whispered.
The sound of the memory seemed to drop out, or perhaps she spoke below the threshold of sound, but I was close enough to the glass to see her lips move.
You won’t remember this. You’ll think it was grief. You’ll know I’m helping.
Her fingertips began to glow with a strange, oily shimmer that looked like the hazy distortion of Veil magic. She pressed them hard into his skin. Fenrik’s eyes rolled back, the whites showing, as his body went rigid. Then, something happened to the image in the glass. The scene rippled like disturbed water. The edges of the memory blurred, the colors shifting. I blinked, rubbing my eyes, but the distortion wasn’t in my vision, it was in the record itself.
In the rewritten image, Fenrik was no longer thrashing or accusing. The struggling boy smoothed out. He sat up straighter, his bloody face calm, almost resolute.
“I accept it,” the illusion-Fenrik said, his voice overlapping with the real Fenrik’s previous screams, creating a discordant harmony of lies. “I need the power, Kelda. Give it to me. I’ll bear the curse if it saves my legacy.”
“A noble sacrifice, Lord Stormgarde,” the Kelda in the reflection said. In reality, the Kelda kneeling in the rubble watched the boy convulse as she veiled him.
“You monster,” I shouted.
The vision flickered and died, plunging me back into the dark room. The vacuum had shattered somehow, because I could hear my gasp.
A wet, scaly nose prodded my hand. I jumped, tripping over my own boots. Kirion stood there, blinking his yellow eyes, his head tilted to the side. He let out a soft, questioningchirrup.
“You missed the dramatic reenactment of the worst day of your master’s life,” I said, rubbing the spot between his horns. The scales were hot, but steady, my earlier work holding firm. “Count yourself lucky.”
