by Terah Edun
Thanar shook his head in confirmation.
“Vana?” Ciardis asked in mute desperation.
“Gone,” Sebastian said quietly as he reached for her.
She held up a hand and batted him away.
She didn’t want to hold his hand. She didn’t want comfort. She wanted revenge.
In a way she had been anticipating this all along. When she had first found Caemon she had thought he was dead even then. Until now he’d just been on borrowed time.
“Who did this?” Ciardis asked.
“Seven,” said Sebastian. “He was gone by the time we got there but the magical signature was his. I recognized it from Kifar.”
Ciardis looked over at Thanar and asked calmly, “How’s your magic doing?”
He looked at her with a raised eyebrow but all he said was, “Something’s dampening my gift. But it’s growing stronger. A few minutes before, I couldn’t light an orb. Now I’m pretty sure a substantial fireball would be available.”
Sebastian said, “It’s the palace structure. I can feel it weakening internally.”
“Meaning?” Ciardis asked.
Sebastian responded. “Wards, spells, and residual magic will be failing. Systems of protection and defense.”
Ciardis smiled. “Even around the emperor?”
“Even him,” Sebastian confirmed after glancing around the room they were in.
“Good,” said Ciardis. “We’ll deal with him first. Seven can wait.”
“What do you mean?” Sebastian asked.
Ciardis was busy holding up her hands and calling in sparks of power. They were faint, but she could already see the lightning forming in the palms of her hand, so she ignored the persistent stinging nettles in her fingers and the painful throb in her back. Both probably were lingering symptoms of being imprisoned in the darkness and cut for the emperor’s pet’s blood magic.
She wasn’t worried about it too much. Pain was much better than being dead. Which is what her twin brother was. The brother she had barely known. The brother she had just begun to get to know.
“I mean,” Ciardis said carefully as the lightning grew and reflected in her eyes, “that I am tired of this game.”
“The emperor’s game?” Thanar said slowly with dark, hidden eyes.
Ciardis looked over at him with a smirk. “Precisely that one.”
Thanar uncharacteristically sighed and said, “I understand you want revenge. But this might be neither the place nor the time.”
Ciardis lifted her hands and asked coldly, “What time would be better than this? Than now?”
Thanar dragged a hand roughly over his mouth. “A time when we’re not sitting ducks.”
“He means that whatever got us here made us weak,” Sebastian growled. “Our gifts feel like dormant children. They are waking, but it is not enough. I can’t even feel the land.”
Ciardis’s mind raced. “But you can feel some of it, yes?” she asked, looking the prince heir directly in the eye.
“Yes,” said Sebastian in frustration. “Yes, I can. But it took a load of it just to find you. We’re not ready to take on my uncle.”
Ciardis nodded. “And Maradian knows that.”
“Yes, so?” Sebastian said as he looked at her askance.
Thanar said in a tone of dark amusement, “I think I see where you’re going with this. An attack would be unexpected.”
“And foolish,” Sebastian rushed to snarl.
“But not impossible,” Ciardis said as she looked at them both side by side with an eager glint in her eye. She honestly wasn’t sure if she was eager to die or if she really believed they could get inside the emperor’s protective cordon fast enough to kill him instead.
But she forged on with her earnest belief regardless. “Our gifts are internal and come from our reservoirs of magic. They can no sooner be turned off by outside forces than our hearts stopped, not unless we’re dead.”
Sebastian and Thanar didn’t say anything.
Finally Sebastian asked softly, “But is it enough?"
Ciardis looked him dead in the eye. “It’ll have to be. I can’t say that if you choose not to do this you can go. Because I can’t. This will only work if we’re together. Working as one.”
“As we promised,” Thanar said.
She looked over at him and nodded, echoing softly, “As we promised.”
They both looked over at Sebastian.
The prince heir grimaced, ran tired fingers through his hair, and then said, “Fine, you crazy fools. As we promised. Besides what better day to die than the one in which the entire empire hates me?”
Ciardis laughed. “The only one dying here is his Imperial Majesty Maradian Athanos Algardis. I promised my friends I would come back for them. If I can’t do that, the next best thing is Maradian’s head. I think Vana would enjoy that.”
Thanar smiled. “I think she would too.”
Sebastian chortled. “Can you imagine Meres’s face at that?”
Ciardis rolled her eyes and said, “Let’s go.”
She stepped outside the door.
She was quite surprised to see the palace crumbling. She and Sebastian had done a substantial amount of work towards this goal but this was more than they had ever destroyed.
The walls weren’t cracking, they were literally disintegrating before their eyes.
Pieces of the floor were turning to quicksand, and some sort of liquid was pouring down the walls.
“Cozy,” said Thanar sarcastically.
Sebastian grimaced. “Much of the palace is built on a nexus. One that connects the Aether realm to this one.”
Both Thanar and Ciardis looked over at him in surprise.
“A nexus?” asked Thanar.
“So that’s how you opened that gate in your rooms so long ago?” Ciardi mused.
“Yes, part of it anyway” said Sebastian in answer to their questions with a roll of his eyes. “But this time it’s destabilizing the entire structure. I believe my uncle drew on far too much power for whatever he was doing before.”
“Altering people’s realities with blood magic you mean?” Ciardis said bitterly.
“Maybe,” said Sebastian pointedly. “But the issue now is that our reality is warping to match the Aether realm in its most unstable state. Which isn’t good for this palace or for us.”
Thanar snorted at the understatement as they watched a screaming woman drop through the ceiling and down into the quicksand-like floor before they could even react.
“Well, we can’t stay here,” the daemoni prince declared.
“We’re not going to,” Ciardis said softly as she looked back at the dead body in the room they were leaving behind. That body symbolized more than just one death. It was the death of all her friends. The death of all the people in the city by the sea. It was a physical symbol of Maradian’s malevolence. It was the reason he had to die.
“This was all at Maradian’s instigation?” she asked with a slow breath as she turned back to the palace in turmoil.
“All of it,” Thanar assured her. “He played this like a game of master chess and he won.”
Ciardis gave a dry laugh. “Not yet he hasn’t. Where is the emperor now?”
Sebastian and Thanar shifted uneasily. They clearly didn’t want to tell her.
Or they don’t know, she whispered to herself.
Ciardis looked at them both with a dark, evil smile.
That was all right, she knew just how to find him. Her magic was coming back, and she felt it unlocking things inside her she never would have dreamed of before.
It was time to pay the Emperor of Algardis a call.
Sebastian followed her through the rubble.
No one got in their way. The ones that saw them turned right back around and fled in the opposite direction.
As the palace became more unstable, Thanar began to clear the way with broad swaths of power.
Ciardis smiled. If they thought the palace had been torn up before, we’re abo
ut to reduce them all to quivering fools.
Walls fell.
People screamed.
Fires burned.
Still they walked through the palace in search of one man.
When they found him Ciardis took a hand to either side of her.
She stepped forward and they stepped with her.
“Let’s go be the triumvirate he fears so much,” she said, the promise of death in her eyes.
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About the Author
Terah Edun is the New York Times bestselling author of the Courtlight, Crown Service, and Algardis series, set in the eponymous Algardis Universe. Her books boast exhilarating adventures, breathless romance, and incredible fantasy for readers of all ages. You can visit her online at www.terahedun.com.
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