A frantic scrabbling sound echoed from the shadowed stairwell, followed by a yelp and the distinct clatter of claws on slate. Kirion, the midnight-blue wyrmling, burst into the cavern. He skidded across the floor, his oversized wings flapping uselessly for balance, and crashed into Fenrik’s shins. He wobbled, shook his head, and then let out a defiant, high-pitchedscreeat the exploding ley-line, as if scolding it for being too loud.
“He followed you,” Fenrik said, wincing as the little dragon head-butted his knee. “Or fell. It’s hard to tell with him.”
“He led me hear, dear Kirion. I’m so glad he had the wits to hide,” I said. “You should have stayed in your hiding place, firend.”
“Miss Lysa! Master Fenrik!”
I craned my neck back. High above, peering over the edge of the jagged hole in the floor, which used to be the hallway, were two heads. Thorven looked like he’d wrestled a bear and lost, his beard singed and face smeared with soot. Mrs. Crane looked... immensely disappointed.
“The structural integrity is compromising!” Thorven bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth. “The Sentinel Beasts have stopped trying to kill us, which is good, but now they’re cowering under the hydrangeas, which is bad!”
“Also,” Mrs. Crane shouted, her voice cutting through the magical roar, “The West Wing has developed a severe list to the left! If you act now, we might save the tapestries! And for the love of the stars, Master Fenrik, button your shirt!”
Fenrik actually glanced down at his chest, looking affronted.
“Also, the House says ‘good luck’!”
“Right, down the hatch.”I yanked the cork with my teeth, spat it onto the floor—Kirion immediately pounced on it—and swallowed the ruby liquid in one gulp. It tasted like spiced honey blood tea.
For a second, nothing happened. Then the world snapped into high detail. I gasped, my back arching as pain vanished. The ache in my hip? Gone. The exhaustion in my bones? Evicted. The swirling confusion of the last hour? Replaced by theabsolute, unshakeable conviction that I could punch a mountain in the face and the mountain would apologize.
“Lysa?” Fenrik reached for me, his expression alarmed.
“I’m fantastic!” I shouted, though I hadn’t meant to shout. My voice vibrated in my own ears. “I feel shiny! It feels like it should be majestic!”
“Your eyes are glowing,” Fenrik said, stepping back warily. “Very... brightly.”
“Detailed!” I pointed a finger at the ley-line. “I can see the threads! Look at them! It’s not a mess, it’s a really terrible magical knitting project!”
The surge of power was agonizing, yes—a golden fire burning through my veins—but it was the good kind of agony. The kind that made you want to run a hundred miles or reorganize a library by colour in five minutes flat. It was golden, sparkling mania. My mind was so clear and I could see that Quieting had never been about stopping the flow, only about changing its shape. If a current could be shaped, it could be redirected. If it could be redirected, it could be transformed.
“Okay,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet. The floor felt bouncy. Was stone this bouncy? “I’m going to fix the plumbing.”
“Plumbing?” Fenrik asked.
“The big glowy plumbing!” I grabbed his shoulders. He felt very solid. “Stand back, Lord Broody. I’m about to do science!”
I spun toward the column of fire, threw my arms wide, and laughed. It was probably a manic sound, but frankly, withenough Dragonheart in my system to jump-start a comet, I didn’t care.
I shoved my hands into the column of silver fire. It should have vaporized me. It should have stripped the flesh from my bones and scattered me across the valley. But the Dragonheart extract apparently altered my density. My blood felt like molten lead, singing a violent harmony with the ley-line’s roar.
“Fenrik!” I shouted, the sound lost to the gale but felt through the bond I could see so clearly between us. “Don’t hold it back! Give it to me! All your anger, you are one angry lord, I see, and scared, all the fear, pour it in!”
I felt him step up behind me, his chest pressing against my back. His hands clamped over mine, his fingers tangling with my own right in the center of the geyser. The contact sparked a detonation of light. His magic flooded into me, blinding silver. It was the storm over the mountains; it was the crash of the ocean against the cliffs. And my magic rose to meet it. My gold. His silver.
The Law of Arcane Entropy states that magic cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Kelda had tried to stop the flow, to bottle the ocean. I was not going stop it. I was going to braid it. My magic had never been incomplete, it had been alone. Weird, but this warmth didn’t erase the cold I accumulated all these years, it merely gave it somewhere to belong. His silver steadied me. My gold answered.
Quiet,I commanded.Listen.I grabbed the chaotic strands of waste magic, the volatile byproducts of Lumenvale’s comfort,and I twisted them. I wove Fenrik’s raw emotional power into the structure, using his storm to turn the waste into fuel. It was like knitting with lightning. The screaming frequency of the ley-line began to smooth, shifting from a shriek to a deep hum. I knew what it would cost. There would be no taking it back.
“No!”
The shriek tore through our concentration. Kelda had peeled herself off the wall. I knew she eventually would, I just hoped it would be too late. The magnitude of the power we were wielding had probably burned through the fog of her stupor. She staggered toward us, her eyes wide and bloodshot, her face twisted.
“You’re ruining it!” she screamed. “It’s mine! I earned it! I waitedthirteen years!”
She lunged, not at us, but at the fissure itself. She thrust her hands into the periphery of the flow, chanting guttural words of binding, attempting to siphon the power, to steal the weave I was creating. She tried to force the river to stop flowing, but the ley-line wasn’t a dumb beast. It had been tortured for a decade, choked by her “valve,” poisoned by her suppression. And now, for the first time, it was breathing. It tasted the harmony between Fenrik and me, the perfect balance of chaos and order, and it recognized us. It recognizedher, too as its parasite so a shockwave of rejection slammed into Kelda. The massive energy she tried to inhale snapped back, creating a feedback loop that turned her own body into a conduit for the decades of accumulated rot. At last, I understood what my mother had donehere. She hadn’t been trying to win anything like this woman was, but to stop the madness.
The air around her shimmered and ripped apart. Her Veil magic, the layers of illusion she’d painted over herself for years, evaporated in the furnace of raw truth.
