“He tried to reap you,” I said, the horror of it settling in my gut.
“He tried to siphon me,” Riven corrected. “I’m not sure what exactly he was planning, but he tried to empty my magic.”
He stared out at the passing streetlights.
“But he miscalculated. I was ten years old, and the magic was feral. Something went completely wrong, and the lab exploded.”
The Rupture.
The pieces slammed together in my head. The explosion that Liora wrote about in her journal—the one that woke my own magic and forced her to bind me—it was Riven. It was him fighting for his life in a lab while they tried to hollow him out.
“That was the surge my mother felt,” I realised, my voice trembling. “The event that destabilised me… it was you breaking out.”
Riven looked away, staring into the dark. “The timing is exact. My explosion… it must have sent a shockwave through the ether. It triggered your awakening.”
His voice dropped, rough with guilt.
“It forced your mother to sacrifice herself to contain you. If I hadn’t broken that machine… she might still be alive.”
“Don’t,” I said, my voice hardening.
He looked back at me, surprised by the steel in my voice.
“None of this was your fault, Riven. You were a child in the hands of a monster. You survived. That is the only thing that matters.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he gave a stiff nod and turned back to the window.
“I learned,” he said quietly. “After that, I learned to be useless to him. I hid the power deep, where his sensors couldn’t track it. I played the role of the broken experiment, just strong enough to be an enforcer, too weak to be another power source. I stayed a few steps ahead of him just to stay alive.”
The car felt too small suddenly, filled with the ghosts of our shared catastrophe.
“But I knew he hadn’t stopped,” he continued. “I knew he was just waiting for another chance. And when I saw your mother’s research… I realised she must have been tracking him before it happened. She saw the path he was taking. She knew he was hunting for an anchor.”
He looked forward as the iron gates of Duskfall Manor loomed out of the fog.
“She wrote those books as a warning. She knew she might not be there to stop him, so she left instructions on how to do it.”
I pulled the car up the drive. The manor stood dark and silent, a fortress against the sea.
We got out. The air smelled of salt and brine.
Riven led the way up the stone steps. He stayed close at my shoulder as he unlocked the heavy door.
Inside, the house was freezing. It felt suspended in time. We started to climb the wide staircase. The stillness was oppressive—the kind that pressed against your ears. We reached the landing. Riven took a step towards the corridor on the left?—
And froze, his hand snapping out to stop me, fingers digging into my arm.
“Riven?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. His body was rigid, vibrating with sudden, violent tension. His eyes were fixed on the shadows at the end of thehall.
The atmosphere in the place warped. It rippled, like heat haze rising from tarmac.
A faint, metallic taste hit my tongue. A wrongness in the air that shouldn’t be there.
Riven’s wards. The familiar buzz against my skin had vanished.
They were gone.
