It began to vibrate with such intensity that the image of it blurred. The iron box rattled against the stone floor.
“It’s pushing back,” Riven gritted out, his muscles straining against the invisible weight. “The resistance is absolute.”
He pushed harder, forcing a pulse of Shadow magic down his arm.
The reaction was instantaneous. A shockwave of pure, invisible force blasted outward from the Shard.
The recoil slammed into him. It lifted Riven off his feet and drove him into the lead-lined wall before he crumpled to the floor.
The Shard sat on the pedestal, pulsing with a deep, bruising violet light, hissing as if it were freezing the air around it. But it was whole. Unbroken. Indestructible.
“Riven!”
I scrambled out from behind the glass window and into the room, running to him.
He was already sitting up, shaking his head to clear the fog. Dazed and winded, he remained upright. He stared at his hand—red and trembling, yet unburned.
His gaze snapped to mine, carrying a wild, victorious light.
“Nothing went in,” he said, pushing himself up from the stone floor. “It’s locked tight.”
Aelira emerged, checking the energy readings in the air. She looked at the luminous Shard with awe.
“The rejection was complete,” Aelira confirmed. “The Vessel refused the Spark. If you pour your full power into the machine’s core, Selene…”
“It will shatter the Extractor,” Riven finished, getting to his feet with a groan.
He looked at the Shard, now cooling back to its dark, inert state.
“It breaks the lock. And the Rift closes,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Riven said. “The theory holds. We have our counter-move.”
I looked at my hands. The hands that carried the Light.
“Okay,” I said, the fear in my stomach hardening into resolve. “Then that is exactly what I am going to do.”
My gaze landed on Riven.
“We have six days until the Eclipse,” he said, his voice low and steady. “We use every hour to prepare. We make sure that when we walk into that tower, we break the machine. And we survive it.”
THIRTY-THREE
Selene
The days of waiting were a slow suffocation. The Cistern tightened around us. Cut off from the sky, we measured time by the ache in our muscles and the dying glow-stones.
I sat on the edge of a stone bench, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. The air in the atrium was cool, recycling the breath of the earth, but the exertion of the last hour had left me burning.
My skin still prickled with the effort of the earlier session. For three days, Riven had pushed me to manifest a barrier, a delicate shimmer of Light designed to cling to my frame. It felt brittle at first, a glass wall ready to crack under the slightest pressure, but today the golden radiance stayed steady. The speed of my progress surprised even me. My magic remained a new, volatile companion, yet it responded to my commands with a readiness that felt almost aggressive.
Across the room, the dull thud of a fist striking muscle echoed against the stone walls.
“Again,” Goranrumbled.
Dane pushed himself up from the floor in silence, his chest heaving, sweat soaking his t-shirt. He looked restored, a stark contrast to the broken shape he had been a week ago. Una’s magic had been the catalyst, knitting his spine back together and accelerating the natural resilience of his Varkyn blood.
Goran was trying to force the old Vor-Kahn discipline of dematerialising matter into him, a trick to keep the wolf clothed while Dane usually shredded everything he owned. The pile of ruined grey joggers in the corner suggested the lesson wasn’t sinking in, though I viewed his failures with the boredom of a partner who had seen him naked in enough alleyways to lose all sense of modesty. He was desperate to awaken that dormant blood to save his tactical gear, but for now, he was just losing layers.
