Page 193 of The Blood Rites

The fiery clone dives at Kael and clamps a flaming hand around his neck. The smell of burning meat is instant and sickening.

Kael howls, and the sound is not human.

I run forward without thinking, raising my hands and dragging up every scrap of light I can. The clone has no wrist, no body I can sever. It’s just fire, Atheron’s will given shape. So I turn on the source.

Atheron sees me coming and tries to shield his face, but he’s too slow. I focus the Mana into a blade, like Kael did in the Dome. This is no time for shields. I aim for his wrist.

The light hits, a razor cutting through the dark. It shears Atheron’s hand from his arm, cauterising as it goes. His scream is pure shock, and I flash back to the last time my light met his skin during a trial.

I don’t even have time to glance at Kael because the light does something else, too. It collides with the swirling vortex between them, a churning mass of fire and shadow, barely holding together.

For a breathless moment, the entire world goes white.

Then it detonates.

The explosion launches me off my feet, spinning me like a ragdoll through the air. I hit the sand once, twice, then tumble into the sea. The water is freezing and darker than anything I’ve known. The ocean grabs me and drags me under, tumbling end over end with no sense of up or down.

I open my mouth to scream, and my lungs fill with salt.

I cannot swim.

My last thought before the world goes black is of Kael, and the hand that has always reached for me.

Twenty Six

The first breath is not a breath at all. It is salt, entering in a single, devastating rush, burning on the way in, flooding every hollow space behind my teeth. The sea is so black it doesn’t even bother pretending to be water. It feels like falling straight into the absence of everything. I try to scream, but only muffled bubbles escape.

My body remembers drowning. From the dreams. Every cell in me is primed to thrash and fight, to claw my way up—but there is no up, and I don’t know how. There is only cold, and hands that are not hands closing over my face.

The world has always been full of noise, more so here than anywhere else: a rumbling, a humming. The first thing I notice—before even the seeping cold and the choking—is that the hum is gone. For the first time since I crossed the sea to the Heartlands, the Mother Shard’s power is cut off, severed from the inside of my skull. The silence is so profound it almost makes me forget I’m dying.

I sink deeper. The water is so cold it burns at first, then numbs, then disappears altogether. My senses are reduced to a single point, the image of Kael’s hand, always reaching for me, and then, not even that. There is only the dark, the salt, and the weight of the world trying to put me to sleep.

Time slips sideways. Maybe I am already dead.

The further I sink, the less the water moves. The ocean becomes a liquid coffin—so still I’m not sure if I’m floating or falling, or whether the water is simply parting to make room for my descent. Light seems a distant memory. Sound becomes something only whispered about. All my pain seems to fade, replaced by the patient chill of the sea. The hum is still absent, so there is nothing to remind me I’m alive.

Then—impossibly far below—a faint blue-white glow opens its eye.

It is not a light in the sense of Mana, or fire, or even the sun. It is the suggestion of light: a memory of it, leaking up from the abyss. It has a colour that belongs to nothing I’ve seen before.

I do not move. I cannot move. The ocean will not let me.

But the presence in the deep begins to stir, slow and deliberate. It is unlike anything I have ever seen or dreamed. It is old, older than the world, and so tired it can barely carry the syllables it speaks. The voice is not words but a pressure against my skin, a series of shapes pressed into my mind.

Child of my blood.

I shudder. I try to say no, or yes, or what are you—but I am water, and I have nothing.

The glow intensifies. It pulses once, twice. Every beat is like a heart that has not worked for generations, pumping nothing but memories through the waters of the world. Then, slowly, it resolves into something like a form—not one you could draw, or even one that could exist, but a succession of images blurring together all at once. Antlers, vast and branching, fractal and endless like veins or vines, each one drenched in crystal that catches the blue-white glow. Chasms of bone and teeth, overlapping, woven with flowers and dying light. A body in chains, so large the water warps around it, the chains themselves made of ice or glass.

A name rises through the water.

Shardfather.

Not spoken. Remembered.

Dozens of eyes blink open one after another. They are not eyes in the human sense. Each one is like a sun in the sky, fading.