Page 232 of The Legacy of Ophelia
I looked from the misty white frame of Lucidius’s spirit to the swirling pool of fire rippling along the cavern’s edge. The final step of the Undertaking. A melding of oranges and yellows and blues that was one of the most potent sources of magic on Ambrisk. A gate to the heart of the mountains. Even from here, the heat seared.
Why should I do it? Why should I go back? To keep fighting battles we’d already lost, with my father’s traitorous blood in my veins?
No. That wasn’t all it meant, was it? It couldn’t be.
Going back also meant living. Right? It meant feeling the love that made a sacrifice so easy and working to heal a broken spirit. It meant the victories and defeats of battles, the thrill of waking up every damn day to ice-blue eyes and a low laugh.
That’s what the point of Hectatios’s and Brenna’s messages had been, right? They weren’t the typical riddles of the ritual, but reminders of the path forward. A question ofhow does one go onand the promise that it would be hard but worth it. It had to be.
There had to be something on the other side of the Spirit Fire, or else what was the point of burning?
Or—my resolve faltered as the dagger at my waist heated—maybe the way to the quiet was staying here. Here within these cavernous walls. Becoming a blessed spirit, claimed by the dead. Going to the Spirit Realm.
You don’t have to fight anymore if you want to go.
Look up.
The sky was a pinprick high above, smoke obscuring the stars. My chest tightened. I looked between my father and the Spirit Fire, decision made.
Chapter Ninety
Ophelia
The first sensationI registered after hours of numb silence in the guest house was tearing. I screamed, crashing to the floor of the sitting room where we’d all gathered after Damien took Malakai.
“Alabath?” Tolek shouted as he caught me, pulling me back onto the settee to rest against his chest. My wings were limp over the soft velvet cushion, the agony extending to every part of my body. We’d been sitting here all day with our friends, barely anyone talking, no one daring to hope.
“Holy fucking Angels,” I said through gritted teeth. “It hurts!”
It was ripping. Like threads were woven through my flesh, pulling fiercely against the skin, all the way down to my spirit. Tugging my bones and blood and self.
“What hurts?” Tolek asked, concern bleeding through his voice even as he fought to stay calm.
“My—Ahh!” I cried out, unable to form coherent words. They barely made sense as they floated through my mind.
“Is it the seraph power?” Jezebel asked. She must have been kneeling on the foot of the settee, but I couldn’t pry myeyes open. Everything was heavy, like the exhaustion after a battle hard fought. Like I was being stuffed into a suffocating nothingness.
“I don’t know.” Tolek brushed my sweaty hair back from my brow.
“She’s not feverish or bleeding,” a steady voice said, near enough to be assessing me. Everyone was blending together beneath the sharp hum of my soul being ripped apart. “It could be an internal injury from the battle.”
It’s not, I wanted to say.It is so much worse.
“It’s not seraph power,” a knowing, bell-like voice said. Thank the fucking Angels. “And it’s not an injury. It’s the Bind. It’s severing.”
A cracking female voice—one ragged with tears—answered, “But soul bonds only sever if one party dies.”
An emptiness settled over me, and I blinked open heavy eyes, meeting a crystal blue pair. Mila shook her head as if she was asking me to say it wasn’t true.
But if my Bind was severing, that meant Malakai…
Malakai had truly died.
The hollow sensationwas a void in my spirit. I was compressed into this space of endless nothingness—nothing but pain and something severely lacking.
An emptiness where a sense of someone else belonged.
I sat before the sitting room window until the sun was setting over the desert. Setting on a day that marked a change in the entire realm, in all of us within this house.
