And when the blows stopped falling and his mind slowly flickered back to life, Thyrian stood in the middle of a circle of bodies and finally, for the first time in his life, truly understood what it meant to be sun-crowned.
His breath, haggard and broken, was the only sound.
His shoulders heaved as he surveyed the men he’d slain, his sword arm limp and bleeding. The men’s torches had all sputtered out, dropped by owners who no longer needed them. His own inner light, too, had flickered and died the moment the last man had fallen. All that was left was the cold blue-silver light of Ikna’s Wolf, grinning down at him from the crack in the wall.
And then—a screeching wail, like a dying bird falling from the sky.
Thyrian pitched sideways, falling to the ground, landing half atop the fallen swordsmen. His blade clattered to the floor. Pain seized his side and fire roared in his skull.
Someone kicked him onto his back, but he couldn’t scramble away.
He couldn’t move at all.
Panic froze his veins as a man rose into view above him, lowering a smoking, silver tube. Ethershot.
“Prince Thyrian. I wish I had a dagger to spare for you. Perhaps in the morning.”
He’d been shot—but it had to have been a paralyzing round, seeing as he wasn’t yet dead.
Serk leaned down, scanning Thyrian’s face with cold amusement. “You’re too late,” he sneered. “The ritual has already begun.”
37 | The Ritual
Ether pulsed around Vylaena, rippling over her skin as she struggled to keep a hold on it. She’d never commanded this quantity before; everyone knew it was foolhardy to try. To attempt to order this much ether without something going wrong? It was supposed to be impossible.
She’d always been good at focusing her mind; growing up, it had been a useful mechanism to control pain, and a skill that had made her uniquely qualified to create ether-forged weapons. Now that single-mindedness served to work against her as she handled the ether, her thoughts latched onto controlling it and keeping it close while the raven-haired priestess kneeling on the Breaking Stone shouted an invitation to her goddess.
How desperate Vylaena was to let the ether loose—even if that meant her death and that of everyone around her. At least Eyren would be dead, too, the rutting ass, not kneeling at the other side of the Stone and grinning at the priestess as if she were some erotic dancer performing a private show.
But she’d been commanded not to rebel, and so she kept a hold on the ether, even as it twisted around her, pulling at her essence, testing the boundaries of her mind. It wanted shape, but she refused to oblige it, and the ether was growing restless.
I must not let—
I can’t. I can’t.
Have to find a way—
I can’t!
The priestess suddenly went rigid, and Eyren called out, “Now!”
The command immediately overrode Vylaena’s will.
She pushed.
Her arms pressed forward; the ether shot off her fingertips and onto the priestess, flowing over her body like a second skin. The woman’s eyes had gone jet black—whites and all—and her head tilted back in a soundless scream. But then—
“NO!”
An unholy noise flooded from the priestess’s mouth and sliced through Vylaena’s core as if she’d taken a dagger blow. She saw the other ether-touched wince in response.
“SISTER!”
A second voice sounded through the noise, cutting it off with startling abruptness. The priestess pitched sideways, then righted herself, then pitched the other way.
“NO, I WON’T—”
“THEY WON’T HAVE YOU AGAIN!”
Slowly, the priestess pushed herself back up. She stared around the cavern like a bird caught in a cage, her head darting here and there—and then her eyes landed on Vylaena.
Pure, gold eyes.
Asta’s eyes.
Vylaena took another breath and pulled.
The ether surrounding the priestess gave a hiss, and reformed into a hundred thousand silver pins, dancing over her skin. Waiting for the order.
“Vylaena, please... don’t do this...” Asta begged, gold eyes wide.
But Vylaena no longer had control over her body.
She closed her fists.
✽✽✽
“You’ve proven annoyingly hard to kill,” Serk spat, glancing at the body closest to Thyrian with blunt disgust. “Especially with that Shadowheart bitch constantly at your side.”
Thyrian struggled, to no avail—he was truly paralyzed. And yet...
“Where is she?”
Well. At least his mouth worked.
Serk shrugged vaguely. “With the others. Performing her duty.”
Goddesses, no. If she... that truly meant...
“You abducted her.”
“I saw an opportunity and took advantage,” Serk replied.
There was an odd feeling in Thyrian’s right leg—an itchy, unpleasant sort of discomfort. He flexed his thigh out of reflex and was shocked when he felt the muscle respond.
What...?
The itching was spreading, across his groin to his other thigh, and up his stomach, leaving a calm, normal feeling in its wake.
The soulstone.
He still had it in his pocket. His right pocket, where the itching had started. Slowly, achingly, it was dismantling the ether that paralyzed his limbs.
“Who are you, anyway?” Thyrian asked, trying his best to sound defeated. Unthreatening. “Why are you helping him?”
Serk eyed Thyrian with a sharp glance, but replied, “I was Eyren’s tutor, once. One of them, at least. I was outed from court when he was a boy, when the king’s council found out about my experiments on the Marked. But when he learned of the Breaking Stone, he remembered me and thought I might possess the insight he lacked. He wrote to me and offered a deal.”
Thyrian tried not to move as the itching spread down to his toes. He flexed them, slowly, in his boots.
“I would offer my expertise in etherlore and aid Eyren in his quest. And in return, once he had Ikna’s power, he would return me to my rightful place as King of Ieda.”
That was a surprise. “And what about King Urskur?”
“My smug, useless brother. The Claiming should never have chosen him over me. I, who had the blessing of the Cult of Living Shadow! I, who was to be bestowed with their most guarded secrets and lead Ieda back to greatness! It chose him.”
Serk spat, and Thyrian resisted the urge to flinch out of the way. “He exiled me. To this rotten muck heap of a kingdom. But I’ll claim my rightful place. I’ll take back—”
Thyrian sprung, grabbing his sword as he shot upward. Before Serk could take another breath, he’d lodged his blade in the man’s chest.
“If you hurt her, I pray the goddesses tear your soul apart,” Thyrian hissed.
Before Serk had hit the ground, Thyrian was already lurching for the crack in the wall.
✽✽✽
The ether-pins sliced through the priestess’s skin, embedding themselves deep within her body. The goddess stuck inside the priestess screamed, as Vylaena commanded the ether to drag Asta’s essence out of the mortal woman’s body.
Gold light, tinged black in places by ether, flooded from the priestess’s open mouth. And even as Vylaena wished desperately to stop it, the dagger in her chest forced her to push the ether further, forcing the gold light from the priestess’s mouth and pressing it into Eyren’s waiting arms.
He soaked it in, head flung back in a cruel mockery of the priestess’s posture. A cruel, euphoric smile split open his face, and he absorbed Asta’s essence with a wide embrace.
No. I can’t—I can’t—
For all her posturing and declarations, she was doing a terrible job extracting her mind from Eyren’s control.
Rebel, damnit. REBEL!
But any thoughts associated with ether-forging were deflected by the dagger, and she could only watch in horror as she slowly
tore a goddess into pieces.
Sweat beaded on her brow. Her hands shook. Her teeth chattered as pure dread and outrage swelled within her chest.
The body often breaks while the mind remains strong.
She’d said it a hundred times. It was one of the first things she’d ever been taught. And now, as her body quivered beneath primal rage, she wondered if she might use that very warning to save her world.
So she tried something she’d always been discouraged from doing. Something that had been beaten and bruised and cut out of her from the moment she’d been pulled from her mother’s womb.
She embraced it.
All of it.
She dove headfirst into the outrage, the terror, the open-hearted fear. She breathed in the anger and the sadness and the bone-chilling desperation that threatened to tear her body apart. She allowed it to consume her, feeding off the emotions of all the ether-touched around her, accepting their weariness and their pain and, beneath it all, their love for life that kept the smallest pulse of hope alive in their broken chests.
Feeling flooded her body, screaming through the passages of her blood. It filled her, breaking through every bottled-up emotion, every suppressed desire, every piece of armor she’d painstakingly built over her inner wounds.
And slowly, one by one—each movement as difficult as pushing a boulder up a mountain—she forced her fingers to unfurl.
The dagger in her chest creaked—an awful sound of metal against bone—and for the second time in her life she screamed, allowing the pain to fuel her rage even further.
No. I will NOT.
I WILL NOT.
I. Will. NOT!
She wrenched her arms back, ripping the ether from Asta’s essence.
The dagger in her heart shattered.
The ether-touched around Vylaena collapsed, their daggers disappearing into curls of inert ether. She, too, fell to her knees, wondering if the gaping hole she felt inside her chest was real. She couldn’t tell anymore.
She looked up. The priestess twisted violently, with inhuman movements, shaking off any remaining ether like a violent earthquake given form.
The whole cavern shook. Ether swirled and churned through the air, flashing with blue light as Vylaena relinquished her control of it. Wild and screaming, it wound around the Stone like a rabid beast, desperate to find the purpose that it had been teased and then unceremoniously denied.
Eyren took the priestess in his arms, trying to physically shake the goddess out of her body. But the woman’s eyes were blank, mortal. Asta was gone, and the priestess was dead.
Vylaena tried to stand, but a gust of ether-fueled wind knocked her sideways. She grunted as every bone in her body seemed to shatter against the ground, but she forced herself onto all fours using the shoulder of a nearby collapsed ether-touched to aid her.
It was growing harder and harder to see. Ether swirled through the room, angry and belligerent, dangerous in this place that held so much power. She saw Eyren scrambling from the Stone and knew she would be too slow to catch him if he ran.
“Vylaena!”
Vylaena turned, and for a moment thought her eyes were tricking her—she saw Thyrian, bloody and hobbling, wearing a strange leather hood, stumble into the cavern from one of the darkened archways.
“I can’t,” he croaked, his voice weak. He was slumped against the wall; he could barely keep himself upright. “I’m sorry. Take this.”
He tossed his sword, and it skidded across the tiled floor.
Into Vylaena’s waiting hands.
Vylaena stood, unsteady in the churning storm, and turned toward Eyren. He, too, struggled against the wind, but he was still making progress toward the archway to her left.
“Eyren!” she shouted, pouring all her remaining fury into putting one step in front of the other. The sword in her hands was so, so heavy...
Eyren turned, and his eyes—solid gold at the irises now, not brown—flew wide at her approach.
Vylaena raised her sword, its blade whistling through the ether-soaked air.
Eyren raised an arm to block her—
—she let the blow fall...
The ether screamed again, and the whole cavern shook as explosions of blue light tore holes in the polished walls.
Vylaena was knocked sideways, stone raining down upon her, and for a moment she lost her breath. Through the thick, swirling ether, she saw Eyren, clutching the bloody stump of his right arm, scurry through the collapsing archway.
And then she heard a queer, metallic noise, like armored boots on stone—a whole horde of boots, in order to be heard above the racket of the etherstorm...
But darkness pulled at her consciousness, a needy friend promising relief.
Utterly spent, she allowed it to embrace her.
38 | The Ambassador
Screams echoed around her, mournful and pained, their maker obscured by dense darkness that pressed against Vylaena like a prodding finger. Accusatory. Frightened.
And then the screams faded, and there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
✽✽✽
Vylaena woke to a plaster ceiling and the sound of birdsong.
Goddesses, she thought as she blinked at the deep orange light streaming from the sheer curtains of her palace bedroom. Oh, sweet goddesses do I ache.
She held a hand up to the light and saw it was webbed with yellow bruises. I’ve been asleep for a while, she concluded.
Her chest was covered with bandages, and someone had slipped her into a nightgown—one of those white, frothy things that noble ladies wore. She tore it off at once, ignoring the screams of protest from her chest that made her black out twice.
A little more tentatively, she scooted out of bed and attempted a few steps, holding onto one of the bed posts for support.
She was fine. Whatever damage had been done to her, the worst had passed.
Relief swelled in her belly as she fetched a tunic and pants, stuffing her bruised feet into her old boots. It took her considerably longer than she liked.
Answers. She needed answers. Had Eyren gotten away? Had the etherstorm blown itself out? Was Asta... was Asta...
Vylaena padded over to the door she shared with Thyrian and turned the knob. She peeked inside to find the prince at his writing desk, his back to her, the windows of his bedroom thrown open to the heavy light of late afternoon.
For a moment she merely paused, observing him, settling back into the familiarness of his presence: his broad, sturdy back, the careless wave of his dark hair, the sense of quiet competence he always exuded. It was... oddly centering for her, after everything that had...
Answers. She needed answers.
“Hello,” she said.
Thyrian jumped. He whirled around at once, eyes wide. He, too, was nursing some bruises, and there was a long cut on his cheek that was still mending, but he was whole. No lasting damage that she could see.
“Vylaena,” he breathed.
His tone was heavy with relief and... something else.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her, abandoning his desk. He crossed the room in three long strides, halting just before her, his brow furrowed with concern and a shade of that something-other that she couldn’t quite identify.
For a gut-twisting moment she thought he might reach out and tug her to his chest. But he maintained his distance, giving her a cursory once-over. “We weren’t sure you’d make it.”
“How long was I out?”
“Six days. Barely breathed the first two; Flinx got an ether-touched healer from the cathedral out here to work on you, and even he had his doubts you’d pull through. I was... I was...” Thyrian paused, his eyes searching hers as if he might find the word he sought there. She was suddenly very aware of how dry her mouth was.
“Nervous,” Thyrian finished.
Vylaena stared back, noticing another cut on his face, just under his left ear, curving over his jaw. He’d shaven since she’d last seen him. “It seems yo
u...”
She froze.
“I what?”
Vylaena’s heart hammered in her chest, sending painful aches through her healing muscles. She lowered her eyes, reaching out to touch Thyrian’s bare forearm, just below the folds of his rolled-up sleeve....
And pinched him.
“Ow!” he cried, flinching. “Hey! What was that for?”
Vylaena’s eyes widened, and she pinched him again. Harder.
Thyrian twisted away. “Rutting Ether,” he growled, “did you lose your mind while you were in that coma?”
No, her mind wasn’t lost; it was racing. And her feet were following in pursuit.
“Vylaena!” Thyrian called out, as she surged for the door. “Vylaena, wait!”
She ran.
She ran to the hallway, through the corridors of the palace, up a flight of stairs. She ran past faceless nobles and servants who squealed in surprise at the Shadowheart bolting full-speed through them, a bewildered, shouting prince at her heels.
“Damnit, Vylaena, you’re going to kill yourself!”
She didn’t stop running until she reached Alaric’s rooms and had pushed through his guards, throwing open the front doors.
Alaric was seated at a couch, Flinx at his side, sharing a gigantic tome between them. Scrolls and books were scattered around the couches and central table as if they’d upended the entire library into Alaric’s sitting room.
“Your Highness, she just barged in, we—”
“It’s alright,” Alaric said, sliding the tome onto Flinx’s lap and standing at once. A brilliant grin broke across his face at the sight of Vylaena. “Return to your posts.”
Vylaena waited until guards closed the doors behind her, Thyrian panting at her side.
“Tell her,” Thyrian gasped, “that she’s going to kill herself if she runs like that.”
“She’s never listened to me before,” Alaric scoffed, raising an eyebrow at Thyrian.
Ether-Touched (The Breaking Stone Trilogy Book 1) Page 39
