I smoothed the edges of the new memories, blending them with the old ones. Doing that seamlessly was a true art. Too bad there was no crowd to impress. The dragon in his chest purred, sensing the despair I was feeding it. It curled tighter around his heart, a blanket I had knitted myself. I withdrew my hands, shaking off the residual static of his chaotic thoughts. Fenrik let out a long, shuddering sigh and slumped deeper into the chair, his face drawn. He looked defeated. Perfect.
I smoothed the lapels of my coat, ensuring the silver threading caught the dim light just so. Appearance was the first layer of any good spell. I turned to leave, when a splash of crude color on the side table snagged my attention.
It was a small, pathetic thing made of fired clay: a dragon, painted in garish blues and golds, with a chip in one wing. One of the Emberlin girl’s trinkets. She scattered them like breadcrumbs, trying to make this mausoleum feel like a nursery. I picked it up. It felt warm, suffused with the nauseating stickiness ofhope. It vibrated with the intent of its maker: comfort, safety, whimsy.
“Disgusting.” I closed my fist. It didn’t take much strength, sentiment is surprisingly brittle. The clay shattered with a crunch, like the snapping of a small bird’s neck. I opened my hand and let the blue dust sift through my fingers.
“She’ll learn soon enough,” I murmured to the silent room. “Sentiment is just a handle for someone else to grab.”
The air in the hallway shivered as I stepped out. I didn’t walk alone. I never did. My illusions, the phantoms of my memoryand will, detached themselves from the shadows of the corridor, drifting alongside me.
“Show me,” I said.
The shadows in the corridor eagerly obeyed, twisting and knitting together until they formed a viewing pane of smoky glass hovering at eye level. There she was, the little miracle worker. Lysa trudged down the winding cliff path, her figure small and insignificant against the backdrop of the storm I’d made. She huddled into her coat, clutching her bag like a shield. I leaned closer, savoring the slump of her shoulders.
I needed to see the break. It wasn’t enough to know she was gone; I required the visual confirmation that her spirit had fractured. That hopeful, vibrant naïveté that had so disruptively soothed my monster, I had to watch it curdle into despair.
Below, the lights of Abberwyn flickered. I could taste the town’s anxiety from here. Every frightened glance, every hushed rumor about the “unnatural healer” was a thread I had spun, and now the tapestry was complete.
“Run along, little girl,” I said, dispersing the image with a wave of my hand. “Go back to your potions and leave the tragedies to the professionals.”
The air warped. The stone walls dissolved into a flickering overlay of the past, my past. No, not the anomalies again.
“You show me what I ask you to!” I told the shadows.
To my left formed the spectral figure of my brother, Callum. He was laughing in this appearance, his hands glowing withunrefined magic. He looked exactly as he had at twenty-four, before the rot took him.
“I know they killed him, I don’t need a reminder” I told the phantom, though it had no ears.
The hallway twisted, showing me the memory I kept sharpest. The Stormgarde family, Fenrik’s parents, standing tall and arrogant at the valley’s convergence point. They called themselves protectors.Sin-Eaters.They claimed they filtered the town’s magic to keep us safe. Lies.
I watched the illusion of the old Lord Stormgarde wave a hand, dismissing my father’s pleas for access to the ley-line. They didn’t filter the magic, they hoarded it. They sat atop the greatest wellspring of power in Lumenvale like dragons on gold, letting the excess, the waste, poison the groundwater rather than letting a Morvain engineer a better solution.
“ Waste,” I hissed, walking through the ghost of Fenrik’s father. He wisped away into smoke. “Gallons of raw potential, poured into the earth to rot.”
To my right, the illusion shifted again. It showed Callum’s final day. The arcane entropy had gotten into his marrow, the poison the Stormgardes claimed to contain. It hadn’t been an accident; it had been runoff. Their “heroic sacrifice” was a leaky pipe, and my brother had drowned in the spill. The illusion showed him coughing up silver bile, his skin grey and cracking, begging for a relief that the “Great High Lords” of Stormgarde Manor refused to provide because it would “compromise the wards.”
“They call me the monster,” I said to the dying image of my brother, stepping through his convulsing form. “But I am the only one willing to fix the plumbing.”
The shadows coalesced ahead of me, forming a ritual circle again, theforgotten ritualsI had unearthed from the forbidden archives of the Academy. The Stormgardes believed the Sump had to be endured. The ancients knew better. The Sump wasn’t a drain, it was a battery if one simply had the stomach for it. If one was willing to calcify a living soul into the stone to act as a permanent regulator.
I saw the diagram glowing in the air before me: the Final Binding. It required a vessel, Fenrik of course. It required a controller, me. And it required the removal of all chaotic variables.
“I do not hate them for their power,” I said, my voice echoing in the shifting corridor. “I hate them for their wastefulness. They treat a god-tier resource like sewage. Now please stop showing me things I did not require!”
I swept my hand through the air, banishing the ghosts of the past. The hallway snapped back to reality. I was an architect surrounded by children playing with matches. If I had to break a few fingers to take the matches away before they burned the house down, then history would thank me. Assuming I left anyone alive to write it. If not, I could write it very well myself.
The house fought me with every step, until I reached the underbelly of Stormgarde Manor.
“Oh, stop whining,” I snapped at the ceiling. “You’re crumbling because your master is weak, not because I’m here. I am the cure, you ungrateful pile of stones.”
I pushed open the heavy oak door to the ley chamber. It was three floors under the ritual chamber where the little Emberlin girl had found my breadcrumbs: the letter, the mirror. How predictable. Heroes always went looking for truth in the dark, never realizing that darkness was simply a canvas.
“Come, Vesper.” From the shadows of the doorframe, my favorite creation peeled itself away from the darkness. Vesper wasn’t real, of course. She was a woven construct of smoke and Veil magic, shaped into the silhouette of a lady-in-waiting. I had given her the face of a girl who had been mean to me at the Academy. The rude cow was not even of nobiliar descent. I put her in her rightful place, now she existed only to hold my ingredients and nod when I spoke.
Vesper glided forward, holding out the heavy mortar and pestle. I trailed a finger down her smoky cheek. “You look tired, darling. Have I been working you too hard?”
She didn’t answer since I hadn’t given her a tongue. Voices were so tedious.
