Page 16 of Blood Court (Cursed Darkness #2)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EVREN

The cage of bones surrounds me.

I press my palms against the bars, feeling the ancient magic that holds them in place.

The whispers start immediately.

You were never meant to be resurrected.

Death rejected you once. It will again.

She screams for you, and you cannot answer.

The spirits of dead Harbingers materialise around the cage. Hollow-eyed, rotting faces that mirror what I should have become. What I was meant to become.

“Look at yourself,” one of them rasps, its jaw hanging loose. “Neither living nor dead. An abomination. You were supposed to stay dead, boy. Death had claimed you properly. But you couldn’t accept it, could you?”

The cage tightens around me. The bones shift, pressing closer, and I realise they’re trying to compress me back into the corpse I was meant to be.

“You cannot help anyone,” another spirit hisses. “You are death without purpose. Life without meaning. You exist in the space between, belonging to neither.”

The bones press tighter. I can feel them trying to reshape me, to force me back into the broken thing I was when I was spat out of the grave.

I won’t go back. Before her, I’d have welcomed the opportunity, but not now. Not after knowing her.

Closing my eyes, I think of Lysithea’s hands in my hair, her voice whispering my name like a prayer.

I think of the way she looked at me in the tower, seeing past the death magic and the walls I’ve built.

She called me hers, and for the first time since my resurrection, I believed I might be worth claiming.

“No,” I say, my voice stronger now. “I won’t go back.”

“You think she loves you? You think any of them do? You’re a walking corpse. A mistake that should have stayed buried.”

The cage contracts further. I can feel my ribs bending under the pressure. But I push back, my death magic flowing through the bones.

The bones respond to my will. Death magic pours into them like blood through veins. I am connected to them. They are part of my domain.

“I am not a mistake,” I rasp, my voice cutting through their whispers. “I am evolution.”

The cage shudders as I pour my power into it. The bones bend, not inward to crush me, but outward to break free. The dead Harbingers shriek in fury.

“She chose me,” I continue, the words coming easier now. “Broken. Dead. Wrong. She chose me anyway.”

The spirits recoil as my death magic flares brighter.

“I was dead,” I say, standing straighter as the cage expands around me. “I was nothing. But she made me real again. She brought my voice back. She made me matter.”

The bones snap outward with the sound of breaking thunder. The cage explodes in all directions, fragments of ancient magic scattering like shrapnel. The dead Harbingers scream as the shards pass through them, disrupting their forms.

I stand in the wreckage, death magic swirling around me like a crown of ice and shadow. The spirits flee, their whispers fading to nothing.

But the trial isn’t over. It still wants to test me. The air shimmers. The bone fragments and scattered dust of the crypt dissolve into a field of black, withered roses. Each one is a perfect replica of the one I gave her, but they are all dying, their petals crumbling into ash at my feet.

In the centre of the field, a figure stands.

Lysithea. But she is wrong. Her skin is a waxy, translucent white, the black veins of corruption a stark, living map beneath the surface.

My Death Sight flares, unbidden and absolute.

I see her ending. It’s not in the future.

It’s happening now. A slow, agonising consumption.

A voice, cold and ancient, speaks from the dying roses, from the grey sky, from inside my own skull. She is dying because of you. Your resurrection broke the laws of life and death. You created a debt. And now, she is the price.

The words are a punch of ice to the gut. The vision of Lysithea stumbles, a hand clutching her chest as the black veins creep up her throat. My Death Sight screams, showing me the finality, the exact moment her heart will stop. It’s seconds away.

Return to the grave. Restore the balance. Your death for her life. It is the only way.

I look at her, at the agony twisting her beautiful face. A part of me, the old, broken part, agrees. It’s a clean transaction. My worthless, borrowed life for hers. A fair trade.

But I see her in the tower, her eyes burning with a monstrous truth. Mine . A claim. A vow.

“No,” I rasp, the word tasting of grave dirt and defiance.

I reach out with my magic. I follow the burning thread of the Soul Scar, the connection that binds us. It’s a path through this illusion, a line of reality in a sea of lies.

The voice shrieks in fury. You cannot save her! The debt must be paid!

“Says who?” I challenge.

The laws of existence .

“Laws can be rewritten,” I snarl back.

The vision of Lysithea collapses, her breath a final, rattling gasp. The black veins reach her heart.

The Soul Scar thumps wildly on my wrist. It’s trying to tell me something, something I can’t hear yet. I press my fingers over it, and she stops dying.

No!

“Oh, yes,” I growl and take my fingers off the brand. Lysithea writhes in agony, and I press my fingers to it again. She goes still.

The answer to curing her curse lies within the Midnight Soul Scar. I just don’t know what it is yet.

The voice in my head sputters, a god getting a system error. I take my fingers away. It shows me her heart stopping again. I press my thumb to the brand, and she is healed. I take them away. It shows me her choking on her own blood. I press my thumb to the brand, over and over.

This isn’t a test of sacrifice. It’s a test of knowledge. It just handed me the answer key, but I need to figure out how to use it.

“You’re not a law of existence,” I say, my voice cold, dead. “You’re a lie.”

The field of withered roses dissolves. The grey sky cracks like cheap porcelain. The trial is breaking, its logic collapsing under the weight of my refusal to play by its rules.

I am not a debt to be paid. I am the one who will collect.

The illusion shatters completely, the sound of a thousand mirrors breaking at once.

I’m back in the tower room, the air thick with the smell of dust and old endings. The spirits are gone. The cage of bones is just a pile of rubble at my feet. The brand on my wrist is a quiet, steady thrum. A promise.

I know without a shadow of a doubt, I didn’t pass the trial. I broke it.

In doing so, I found the one thing that matters more than my life or my death.

Her.

We have the power to save her; we just need to find it within ourselves.

The Tenebris Vinculum won’t rescue her from her fate.

It is lying to her, to all of us. It is using it as the carrot, and we are the fucking donkeys following along, hoping to stop the corruption spreading through her body, waiting to kill her.

The rubble of the bone cage is real. The dust is real. I’m standing in the Ossuary Tower, the silence a deafening roar after the trial’s psychic assault.

A groan from the corner of the room makes me turn. Verik is slumped against the wall, his clothes shredded, his body a mess of blood and bruises. He pushes himself up, a low growl rumbling in his chest. His eyes find mine, burning with a fury that has nothing to do with me.

“Did we pass?” he grunts, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Don’t know about you, but I broke it,” I say.

He snorts. “Sounds about right for you. Good to hear you, and see you.”

I nod and turn as another figure stumbles across the room. Dathan. He looks like he’s seen a ghost, his usual swagger gone, replaced by a hollowed-out look I’ve never seen on him before.

“We passed,” he says slowly.

“We did, but where is Lysithea?” Verik asks.

Dathan and I exchange a glance, my sudden spark of terror feeding him for days as the chill sets in.

Where is she?