Page 206

With a shaking hand, I pulled one of the fragments free. There was hardly any blood to be seen—only a dark rim around the edges of the wound.

A flare of light engulfed it.

And then the skin…healed.

Silent tears dripped down my face, dropping onto his.

“Chaos. Why are you crying?”

My nickname.

But he had spoken it in a different voice.

Lorien’svoice.

“No,” I whispered. “No.”

His body shook with silent laughter. A great sigh followed—like he was settling into a pleasantly familiar place after a long journey—and the rest of the shards slipped from his body. They were no longer black as they hit the ground; there was no sign of any magic in them at all.

“Finally,” he breathed.

I dug my fingers into him.

“Let go.”

I didn’t.

I…couldn’t.

He moved with inhuman strength, snatching my shirt and throwing me down as he pushed himself up. He glared at me, then rolled the stiffness from his shoulders and looked toward the center of the room.

The dome of magic around us expanded outwards, until it encompassed the platform and the Aetherstone. A stone that was alive once more, feeding into the shard of Luminor that had landed in the groove close to it. A powerful current of magic streamed between the shard and the Stone, making the platform beneath it all tremble.

Lorien forgot about me, moving toward the crackling bridge of energy without a backwards glance. As he approached it, heseemed to pull some of that energy toward himself. To absorb it. And for an instant, he appeared to shift, to grow into a beastly, beautiful shape that made the room and all its magic pale in comparison. A god given form and flesh.

It wasn’t just the influence of the Stone creating this effect, I realized—it was all of his power being concentrated into this form, no longer divided between himself and Aleksander and the Sword of Light.

The world shook as he reached into the current of magic before him.

I fought my way to my feet. I had little strength left, and no sword or any other weapon within the dome he’d trapped us in—and I doubted I could have wielded any of those things against him, even if I’d had them.

But I found myself staggering toward him all the same.

He started to swirl his hand through the current, forming some of the energy into a solid shape.

My steps grew quicker. More desperate. More clumsy. I threw myself at him, trying to wrap my weight around his arm and drag him away from whatever he was planning.

He overpowered me easily, slinging me to the ground, my shoulder striking hard enough that I felt something in it shatter. The shard from Luminor flew into his hand. He stepped after me, looming over my crumpled body for a moment before he dropped, pinning me on my back and easing the piece of the broken sword into the hollow of my throat.

“You’ve been so useful to me,” he murmured, “but now you’ve become nothing but anuisance.”

I closed my eyes. Tightly. I didn’t care about the pain in my shoulder or the sharpness at my throat.

It was his face I couldn’t bear to focus on.

Not while he was speaking in that awful,wrongvoice.

He was quiet for a long, horrible moment, dragging the broken sliver of the sword across my skin.