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The ley line pours into me, faster and faster, more than I’ve ever held before.
The mirror trembles in my hand, its edges beginning to crack, the silver frame warping under the strain of channeling so much raw power.
I turn toward Kelaros, the man who betrayed us twice, who left Elionn to crystallize, who murdered the last guardian of a dying court for his own ambition.
“You wanted power,” I tell him. “Let me show you what real power is.”
The mirror shatters in my hand, but the portal remains, suspended in the air. Through it flows pure magical energy, unfiltered by physical constraints, a direct connection to the ley lines that power the human and demon planes. Those same ley lines once powered the fae realms, before they locked the veil.
I reach toward it with both hands, and magic explodes outward in concentric rings.
Crystals rupture throughout the chamber, splintering into dust that hangs suspended as a field of frozen stars. Fractal fissures race across the crystal floor. Once-sentinel pillars begin to crumble as their surfaces peel away in translucent layers.
The court screams beyond the limits of sound, the force of it ringing through my transformed bones. Its death throes manifest as waves of conflicting magic. They paint the air with impossible colors, bleeding between spectrums as reality itself begins to fold.
“No!” Kelaros stretches his hands toward the ceiling as it starts to collapse, crystal shards raining down in a deadly hail. “Obey me! I am your King!”
The court pays him no heed. It responds only to me now, to the fragment within me aligned with the rhythm of destruction. What the hollow stag guarded for centuries, what Kelaros thought he claimed through violence, recognizes in me a final purpose.
Not preservation. Not renewal.
Release.
Veins of light explode along the walls, branching into patterns of such complexity they strain the eye to follow. They pulse once, twice, three times before shattering, each break sending cascades of crystal dust drifting through the air.
The destruction spreads beyond our chamber, racing through corridors and halls beyond my sight but not my awareness. The entire court convulses as millennia-old structures collapse into themselves as the magic binding them dissolves.
“Stop this!” Kelaros screams, clawing at the air in a desperate attempt to gather the court’s power back to himself. “The court must obey me!”
He fights the inevitable, his desperate commands going unanswered. The court has made its choice, accepting its end through my hands rather than a corrupted rebirth through his.
He lunges toward me, and a pillar crashes down between us, forcing him to leap aside. His movements grow frantic, uncoordinated, his control slipping as the court continues to disintegrate around us.
“What have you done?” he demands, panic finally breaking through. “You’ll die, too!”
The truth of his words doesn’t frighten me. I accepted this possibility the moment I told Thalindor to save Theron, accepted it even before then, when I traded places with Elionn as the anchor.
Kelaros stumbles as the floor shifts beneath him, one knee striking hard enough to send fractures spidering out around him. He stares up at me, and for the first time, genuine fear cracks his composure.
“You cannot control this,” he shouts over the rumble of collapsing structures. “The court will consume us both!”
Opal power floods my body, stronger than before, burning away the last vestiges of my humanity. My skin turns translucent, revealing the network of Opal veins that has replaced my circulatory system.
Pain has ceased. I have become a perfect conduit for power.
I walk toward him through the maelstrom, destruction trailing in my wake. Crystal spikes erupt from the ground where my feet touch, only to shatter moments later.
“You are no witch!” Kelaros crawls backward, his arrogance dissolving into terror. “What are you?”
The ceiling collapses, revealing a sky that folds into itself, layers of reality peeling back. Light bleeds through the tears, neither sunlight nor moonlight but the primordial radiance of raw magic.
I stand before him, cold and resolute. Before me stands the very type of monster I was made to hunt.
“I’ll be what remains when you are gone.”
38
UNTHREADING ETERNITY
