The sudden sharpness of his tone made us all look at him. “What if it was incompatible?”
He leaned in, planting his palms flat on the surface, the tendons in his hands standing out like wire.
“Assume Korenth didn’t understand the medium,” Riven said, his voice dropping to a low, rough timbre. “He thought he was just extracting magic from a child. He didn’t understand the nature of the Vessel Aelira described.”
He touched the centre of his chest, the fabric of his shirt stretching over the hidden scar.
“He spent ten years raising me in isolation, feeding the power, grooming the magic until he decided it was ripe enough to harvest.”
Riven’s eyes were cold, distant.
“He attached a raw Silverite extractor to my chest. He tried to draw the magic out,” Riven whispered.
Dane went still, his gaze fixed on the table as if he could see the ghost of the machine Riven was describing.
“But if the Vessel acts like a womb…” Riven continued, his voice regaining its edge. “It holds the power only until birth. Once the Spark is awakened, the Vessel becomes rigid. It flows outward. It cannot be forced back in.”
“And that caused the feedback loop,” Aelira realised, her eyes widening. “You think the casing rejected the flow?”
“I think that is the truth,” Riven said slowly, staring at the wood grain as if he could see the fire there. “I was in pain. Panicking. I tried to wrench the extractor off, to stop the process. But my magic was already surging against the constraint.”
He looked up, his eyes dark.
“Infinite resistance meeting infinite force. The structure couldn’t hold the contradiction. It atomised.”
“Like trying to force smoke back into burning wood,” Dane muttered from the sidelines. Goran caught Dane’s eye, a grim understanding passing between two wolves.
The implications hit me hard.
“He doesn’t have the Shadow Vessel anymore,” Riven said. “I destroyed it. The Shard I brought with me is all that’s left.”
“So what is he using?” I asked, looking between them. “He needs a Silverite core to hold the charge for the Eclipse. If Riven’s is in a box…”
“He’s using the other one,” Riven said softly.
He looked at me.
“If you are the Light Spark, Selene, you had a Vessel too. Before you were awakened. Liora and Eamon must have had it.”
The pieces of the past ten years locked together, locking into a terrifying picture.
“My dad…” I whispered.
“Ten years ago,” I said, my voice unsteady. “He retired overnight. I remember the night he came home, his right hand crushed, claiming a raid had gone wrong. He swore he was just getting too old for active duty.”
I looked at Aelira.
Aelira closed her eyes, a look of crushing sorrow crossing her face. “Yes. In a cache far away from the city. And ten years ago, the Dark Ones found it.”
“Eamon tried to defend it,” I realised, the memory of his injury taking on a new, terrible shape. “But he failed. They have the Vessel now.”
Goran bowed his head slightly, a rare show of deference. “He didn’t fail, Selene. He bought you ten years of silence. That hand was a small price for a decade of safety.”
“And now he has used it to build the new machine,” I said, my voice steadying. “The core of the engine at Highspire… It’s my Vessel. An empty casing waiting to be filled.”
“We can’t dismantle it,” Riven said. “Taking it apart requires time we won't get. Korenth will have the core locked down under a heavy guard.”
“Then we overload it,” I said, looking at him. “We do exactly what you did back then. If I touch that device and pour everything I have into it, it will hit the empty Light-Vessel.”
