“I accepted my cage,” Emil says. “A cage of darkness and a black marble floor that once belonged in a throne room, and I accepted that I couldn’t escape it, even as it stole my flesh and tore at my skin and left me with nothing but a crown for thousands of years. I accepted it because I knew that one day, I would finally seize the last of that cursed black metal and then…”
His heavy exhale sounds into the silence.
“Then it would be over. But it was not.”
As he speaks, the echo whispers quietly, repeating every word he says, but now in a voice that’s growing fainter.
And still, Emil speaks. “Because there you were. You and your shadow panthers, running through my cage. So free. As if that dark space was pure bliss to you.”
He lifts his head, but only slightly. Only enough for me to see more clearly his clammy forehead and a streak of blood near his hairline.
As the echo repeats exactly what he said, I reach for him, intending to brush his hair away from his face so I can see him more clearly.
“You saw me,” he says.
“You saw me,” says the echo.
My hand pauses, my fingertips so close to him.
“You gave me your heart’s power and freed me,” he says. “You filled my chest with air and gifted my mind with free will and you looked at the world with an awe and a thirst for knowledge that would surely swallow it all.
“I kept waiting for you to show your malice. I waited for you to harm without reason and to kill without thought. I maneuvered you into situations where you would face light magic creatures and old magic creatures and dark magic creatures—angels and vampires and wolves and dragons—and each time, you let them live. You made peace and walked away.”
The echo is so quiet now that I can hardly hear it.
“I encouraged you to unleash your rage on the world, and I waited for you to do it because I needed a reason,” Emil says. “A reason to cut the thread between us, end the magic you don’t even know you control, and free myself once and for all.”
Emil gives a harsh laugh. “I put you in front ofThe Book of Dark Magicand you tore it up. I gave you an orchard fullof power and you drove your claws through it. You plucked its pieces from your body as if they offended you.”
“Except one,” I whisper.
“Yes.” He’s quiet for a moment. “But only because you couldn’t reach it and you were unable to trust me?—”
He coughs suddenly, a dry cough that seems to catch in the air, echoing back at us.
“I broke your heart,” he rasps. “And still, you chose hope.”
I was already tense but now I am stricken and still. My fingertips hover near his face and yet I can’t seem to close the gap between us.
I still have questions. So many unanswered questions, but there’s one that might help me finally determine whether or not he truly is my enemy.
“What did my mother say to you before you took her heart?”
He coughs again, another dry sound, and this time, the air around me chills so sharply that it makes me shiver.
“She told me not to break.”
The echo says, “She told me not to break.”
He finally looks up, raising his head and then his torso.
His pale green eyes are threaded with blood, his lip is split and bleeding, and a crimson gash rests across his forehead above his left eye. His chest is crisscrossed with lashes that have cut deep into his flesh, one so deep, I can see his rib bone.
My hand flies to my mouth.Oh!
So many wounds… And he isn’t healing…
He coughs blood as he says, “But… my Veda… my Enemy… I’m breaking.”
