I looked at Riven. His eyes locked on mine, the silver in his irises tracking my every breath.
The connection between us—the singing in my marrow, the quiet that settled over my magic when he was near—it wasn’t just a coincidence of war. It was a terrifying symmetry. It was a pull that made me want to cross the room and press my hands to his chest, just to feel the circuit close.
According to the texts, we were an archaic counter-measure forged to keep the world from unravelling. But looking at the tension in his jaw, I knew we weren’t a completed machine. We were simply two people holding a power we barely understood. I stood up, pushing my chair back.
“If we are the weapon, we need the firing mechanism,” I said. “How much longer on the ledger translation?”
Aelira gathered the leather-bound ledger from the table. “Liora’s arithmancy is brilliant, but incredibly dense. I need a few more hours to decode the mechanics of the Eclipse. Eat. Rest. I will find you when I have your answers.”
My brain struggledto process Aelira’s revelation. Halves of a whole. Sword and shield. The weight of it should have consumed me, but as we walked through the dim corridors, my stomach interrupted with a loud growl. Even waiting for the apocalypse, people needed to eat.
“You’re pouring half the bag in there! It’s tomato soup, Torvin, not a pudding!” Karys shouted from the kitchen.
“I am balancing the acidity, Karys,” Torvin fired back. “Which you would know if you didn’t consistently burn water every time you tried to boil an egg.”
I leaned against the stone frame of the kitchen. Their bickering breathed life into the bunker’s dead air. Riven claimed a chair in the corner, his posture rigid. He didn’t relax, but he let his gaze drift towards the steam.
“Need a hand?” I asked.
“That’s the plan,” Torvin said, “provided you stop Karys before she ruins the batch and we all go hungry.”
Karys rolled her eyes, but stepped back to let me stir. As Torvin reached for a spice jar on the high shelf, his sleeve slid down. A small tattoo sat on the inside of his wrist—an upturned crescent moon.
“What’s the ink?” I asked.
Torvin paused, turning his wrist over. “This? Symbol of the Dark-born Aetherkind. I’m a shadow wielder.”
I looked at Karys. “You have one too?”
She wiped her hands and flipped her wrist. A jagged starburst sat mirrored on her skin. “I carry the Light.”
Riven stood, the chair legs scraping the stone. He came closer, eyes locking on the marks. “Have you ever seen them together? Bound as one seal?”
Torvin shook his head, ladling thick red soup into four bowls. “Never. These marks have existed separately since the early days of Vaelor, thousands of years before the Exiles crashed onto this world.”
“How does that work?” I asked, taking the bowl Torvin handed me. “You’re twins. How do you end up with two entirely different magic types?”
“Aetherkind blood refuses to mix,” Karys said in a low voice, taking a seat at the wooden table. “Our mother is Light-born. Our father was a shadow wielder, like Torvin. The magic splits down the bloodline, giving you one or the other.”
“Does your father fight with you?” I asked, sitting across from her.
Karys looked down at her spoon. “He was killed before we were born.”
Orphans. I looked at the steam rising from my bowl, thinking of my own father. I had his memory; I had the certainty that I had been loved. I glanced at Riven. He had been raised by Korenth—a monster who saw him as a tool, not a son. He had been truly alone.
I let a pulse of magic drift towards him, a low hum of comfort meant only for his marrow. His eyes met mine, the silver in themsoftening as he caught the emotion. He didn’t speak, but the tension in his jaw eased.
We ate the rest of the meal in a comfortable silence. It was just the four of us. Goran had mentioned earlier that he and Dane would eat later, assuming Dane finished shredding the spare clothes they’d found for his shifting drills.
As I scraped the bottom of my bowl, weighted footsteps echoed from the corridor. Goran appeared in the archway, ducking slightly to clear the frame. He looked completely unbothered, though his knuckles were bruised.
“The pup is resting,” the giant rumbled. “Aelira is ready for you. She is waiting in her library.”
The stone corridorsshrank with Goran and Dane in tow. We left the twins at the junction, their footsteps receding towards the surface as they headed out for reconnaissance. Inside the library, the scent of ink and dormant centuries settled over us once more. Aelira emerged from the stacks and set two volumes on the table with a dull thud—the leather-boundEchoes of Shattered Dawnand Liora’s ledger.
The image of the twins' tattoos gnawed at me. Torvin's crescent moon. Karys's jagged starburst. I had seen those exact shapes before, bleeding through the margins of my mother's notes. Only Liora hadn't drawn them apart; she had forced them together.
I stepped to the table before she could open the ledger. "Aelira, I have a question," I said. I pulled my mother's history book towards me and flipped it open. "We saw a seal in Liora’s copy of The Echoes. She sketched a design—a dark arc holding a jagged core."
