“He wanted me to be human!” I snapped. “But I’m not, am I? Humans aren’t ‘awakened.’ Humans don’t have power that scares their own parents.”
Aelira sighed. She walked to a nearby shelf—a section protected by a rune-etched glass door. She tapped the lock, her finger shining with a faint, pale light, and the glass swung open.
She slid out a book. It was enormous, bound in cracked black leather, the spine ridged like a dragon’s back. She placed it on the table and opened it.
The pages were vellum, thick and yellowed. It showed twodistinct spheres of energy—one blindingly white, one pitch black—encircled by protective runes.
“The magic of the universe seeks balance,” Aelira began. “It is a fundamental law. When the Veil—the barrier that separates Aurathen from the void—is threatened, the Aether responds. It creates a counter-weight.”
She tapped the white sphere.
“At the beginning of our time here, when the Exiles arrived, two Sparks were brought into existence. One of pure Light. One of pure Dark. They were created to ensure balance.”
She looked at me.
“These Sparks were not born like humans are, Selene. They were created as a failsafe,” Aelira said. “A final counter-measure designed to restore balance if the wars between Light and Dark threatened to destroy this world as they did the last.”
She tapped the page, her finger resting between the white and black spheres.
“They were encased in Silverite structures woven into the metaphysics of your bloodline. We called them Vessels. They were like wombs, Selene, made of star-metal and deep magic, designed to hold the Spark in stasis until the world needed them.”
She looked up at me.
“You are the Light, Selene. You were created to prevent the destruction of the world. But the mechanism requires two poles. A circuit cannot close with only one contact point.”
Aelira turned her gaze towards the place where Riven stood. “But the Dark Spark was lost. Stolen long ago by the Dark Aetherkind to weaponise it. To twist it.”
The room stilled. I looked at Riven, recalling his scars. The dream he mentioned once—tables, needles, extraction. The way he spoke of being a “specimen” in a lab at ten years old. Stolen.
I held his gaze. “It’s you,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Aelira said gently.
Riven pushed off the wall. He walked slowly to the table, staring down at the black sphere on the page.
“Eamon told me,” he said quietly. “The night he gave me the journal. He called me the Shadow Spark, but I refused to believe it.” The realisation turned his voice hollow. “That’s why Korenth never killed me. He kept me close all those years.”
“He knew what you were, or at least he suspected the truth,” Aelira confirmed. “Varessia and Korenth arrived in this world along with us. They remember the old ways. They assumed that if they could control the Shadow Spark, they could control an immense power.”
She shook her head.
“But they missed a fundamental truth: without the Light, there is no Dark. Your power was incomplete.”
She looked at him with sorrow.
“You were never meant to be imprisoned, Riven. The Dark Spark was meant to be a guardian. They were trying to turn a shield into a sword.”
Riven stared at the book. His hands formed tight fists at his sides.
“So we’re weapons,” he said bitterly. “That’s it. We’re just biological failsafes created to clean up a mess we didn’t make.”
“In a sense,” Aelira corrected. “But you are also the hands that wield them. You have a choice. You can let the power consume you, or you can master it.”
“The design required absolute unity. Your sparks were held in the Silverite structures for millennia to preserve that purity. You are two halves of a whole, kept apart by time and malice. Light and Shadow. Sword and Shield.”
She shut the tome with a dull thud.
“And now that you have found one another, the alignment between you is the only thing strong enough to stop what’s coming.”
