"A backlash from what?" I press, leaning over the counter. "Nyxara, please. The voice in the fire was mine."
"Take the stone." She points a trembling finger at the artifact. "Take it and leave my stall. Now."
"Not until you give me clarity!"
"Clarity is a death sentence!" Nyxara snarls, the ember threads in her clothing flaring with agitated heat. "You reek of the Venn rot, and you carry the anchor of the Blackflame. You are a walking cataclysm, human. I will not burn for the ghosts of a slaughtered coven, and I will not tangle my life in the crossfire of Khaelor Venn's curse. Get out!"
The finality in her voice is absolute. The privacy ward hums with a hostile, rejecting force.
I snatch the relic from the counter, shoving it deep into my satchel.
The trek back through the service tunnel is a blur of physical exhaustion and agonizing terror. I drag myself up through the iron grate just as the faint, bruised light of dawn begins to bleed through the high clerestory windows of the manor.
The estate is quiet, settling back into its freezing, pressurized dormancy. I slip into my bedchamber, my muscles shaking uncontrollably as I sit on the edge of the mattress, staring at my trembling hands.
Your magical identity is fractured.Nyxara’s horrified whisper loops endlessly in the quiet of the room.
I press the heels of my palms against my eyes until sparks bloom in the dark. The voice that cast the apocalyptic rot in my vision—the raw, tearing desperation in the throat—sounded exactly like me. But that is impossible. I am twenty-nine years old. The massacre of the Blackflame Coven happened a century ago.
A cold, creeping paranoia takes root in my chest. Is the obsidian relic a parasite? Since the moment I touched it in the ruin, it has hummed against my skin, bleeding its ancient, blood-soaked history into my blood. Is it projecting the psychic agony of the slaughtered coven into my subconscious? Is the dark magic of the stone actively warping my mind, twisting my own inner voice in the vision until I hallucinate that I am the one chanting the curse?
If the incomplete ritual is desperately searching for a missing anchor, perhaps the relic is trying to forge one. Perhaps it is trying to hollow me out, infecting my blood and overwriting my identity with the psychic ghost of a dead witch so the curse can finally complete its cycle.
The monster of Venn Manor is sleeping in the western wing, carrying the agonizing weight of a century of isolation. And I am sitting in the dark, shivering uncontrollably, terrified by the suffocating realization that I no longer know where the relic’s haunted magic ends, and my own mind begins.
14
KHAELOR
Four days. Ninety-six hours of deliberate, agonizing evasion.
I stand in the shadowed alcove of the grand foyer, the ambient rot of my aura pulled tight against my ribs. I watch Mireya descend the central staircase. She does not move with the stubborn, athletic grace that defined her arrival at Venn Manor. Her steps are slow, listless. She grips the heavy iron banister as though it is the only thing tethering her to the earth.
When she reaches the landing, the meager light from the clerestory windows strikes her face, and a sharp, violent ache splinters behind my chest.
She looks like a ghost haunting a house that has not yet killed her. The golden undertones of her brown skin have leached away into a sickly, translucent ash. Beneath her wide dark eyes, heavy bruises of exhaustion have settled, stark and terrifying against her pallor.
She has not entered the dueling hall for four days. She has abandoned the library. If she senses my presence in a corridor, she instantly pivots, disappearing into the servant passages before my curse can even brush her skin.
She reaches the base of the stairs. I step out of the alcove.
The air pressure between us plummets. Mireya freezes.
"You did not report to the training floor.” The reprimand grinds against the salt-rimed marble, a dark, abrasive thrum that devours the quiet.
She immediately takes a step backward, putting the breadth of the staircase between us. "I am... unwell today, Lord Khaelor. My research requires me in the east wing."
She does not meet my eyes. She stares fixedly at the rusted iron buckles of my boots.
I step forward. The distance narrows from twenty paces to ten. The heavy, lethal gravity of my form washes over her. She takes another rapid step back, her spine hitting the stone edge of the balustrade.
"You are starving yourself of sleep," I press, closing the distance to six paces. The fierce, feral possessiveness in my blood violently thrashes against its cage. I want to reach out. I want to close my corrupted hand around her jaw, tip her face up to the dim light, and drag the truth out of her throat. I want to know what phantom she unearthed in my family’s archives that put that hollow terror in her eyes. "You avoid the shared spaces. You retreat as if the rot has finally breached your immunity."
"It is not your magic," she whispers, her voice a frail, fractured thing.
"Then what is it?" I demand, my tone dropping into a dangerous rasp. I step into her immediate perimeter, stopping three paces away. The heat rolling off my bare arms is blistering. "What did you find in the catacombs, Mireya?"
She recoils, shrinking against the banister as if my very presence is an accusation. "Nothing. I need to return to my quarters."
