Page 223 of The Legacy of Ophelia
Ophelia
I pouredevery last ounce of power I retained into keeping that wall stretching toward the heavens, draining myself. I wouldn’t need it anymore.
My spine was shredded from the stairs; my arms, wings, and legs heavy and limp like they’d been weighted by boulders.
“Aimee?” I forced out again as my lungs seized, her name high and broken on my cracked lips. My aching head swam, gold blistering around the Storyteller’s frame, around the entire square.
Violet lightning bolted from the sky, striking the top of the wall and melding with the pure gold light. The added power sent a wave of euphoria through me. The clouds continued to feed into my magic, to warp and twist the surface of the seraph power, until it appeared a veil was being torn right in the center.
And behind Aimee, four more forms wavered, too distorted within the light for me to make them out.
“Hello, Ophelia,” Aimee said. The gold chain belt around her low hips and matching stacked necklaces gleamed as she bowed her head.
“We came looking for you,” I coughed out over the dust in my throat. My fingers curled into the stairs, debris digging into my knees. “The other Storytellers—they didn’t know you.”
“I know, Chosen Child. I am sorry I was not there.”
It was too late. Too late for apologies. Too late for her help. We’d needed answers before, but now…now, we were out of time.
Echnid paced liked a caged beast behind me, his mortality a curse now that he couldn’t fight back.
“You woke the beasts,” Aimee said, gazing across the square through the shimmering violet streaked wall of light. Awe shone in her eyes. “They are here to help.” Her voice rained around me like a light mist, touching my skin and healing where it hurt.
With my fading strength, I looked around the square, too. At the wolves now baring warriors, as large as thelupine daimonsthat guarded the tundra during the Undertaking. At the human and warrior and spirit allies who had arrived at the last possible minute, full of the vigor our dying forces needed. At the phoenixes and sphinxes, the gryphons and khrysaor and Sapphire, whom I’d woken. Woken to get them here. All leading to this moment, when a girl had to die in order for everyone else to live.
“They’ll be okay,” I choked out, each word sharp with the tang of my blood.
“I am sorry it came to this,” Aimee said.
But how could she say that, truly? It wasn’t her doing. The gods had always planned to use me. At least this way, I’d be taking out the worst of them with me. From the Spirit Realm, I’d plot to do away with the rest. With my father, with Lyria, with all those who’d come to save us tonight, we’d keep going.
Softly, Aimee said, “When you are done, we will dispose of the god.”
Digging my shredded palms into the step beneath me, I staggered upright. The Vincienzo dagger glimmered on the ground, the blade nicked but humming with magic. The kind that knew it had a task to complete. And like the dregs of magic within me, ithungeredfor it.
Echnid was mortal, I reminded myself as I wrapped my fingers around the hilt.
I can kill him, I encouraged as I lifted the Vincienzo dagger high, trying not to look at the sharpened point.
But right before I lowered the blade to my own heart, a scream tore through the air, “Ophelia, stop!”
And I met Malakai’s eyes right as he shoved Lucidius’s dagger into his chest, at the heart of his North Star Bind.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Ophelia
“NO!”The scream shredded my throat. My entire body. I was being ripped apart as the wall of Angellight dissolved into a shower of sparks and roaring golden flames.
Echnid screamed as Malakai fell, and my shimmering, agonized fire swam over him. The god collapsed, blood gushing from his chest, and his body withered upon the steps.
Without my conscious direction, what was left of my magic rose. It was a tide ready to drown. A storm seeking to demolish. A captive monster devouring its dying master whole.
Leashes of light tied his limbs down as fire licked up Echnid’s arms and legs, scorching every inch of his mortal body. It drove beneath his skin and boiled his blood. Raised a torrent in his bones and sent inky fingers to shred his veins. It pried his ribs open and ripped his lungs out his back, a set of glorious, bloody wings.
And I killed the god from the inside out.
This,I told him as he met my eyes, all of our screams drowning in the night.This is who you wanted me to become.
