Page 46 of Blood Court (Cursed Darkness #2)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LYSITHEA
“An impressive, if rather juvenile, display of power,” Blackgrove observes, his gaze sweeping over the carnage without a flicker of emotion. “Are you quite finished?”
“Yes,” I murmur. “Sorry.”
He snorts. “Are you?”
I lift my chin higher. “No, not really.”
He looks marginally impressed. “That’s better. Don’t you know you shouldn’t lie?”
“Do. Not,” Verik growls. “This whole thing is a nightmare worthy of Dathan.”
“Aww,” Dathan says, chuffed with the compliment. “Thanks, buddy.”
Blackgrove looks between them like he has just noticed they’re standing there.
His gaze slides over them, dismissive. “An accurate assessment. This entire debacle is a testament to your collective lack of foresight.” He steps over a pile of what used to be my wardrobe, not a speck of dust landing on his immaculate shoes.
“You shattered a fundamental law of this realm with your emotional outbursts and expected what? A red carpet?”
“Where is the grimoire?” I demand, my voice still raw.
“How would I know? It’s not mine, now, is it?”
“Has anyone ever told you, you are infuriating?” Verik states.
“Not in a while,” Blackgrove says, giving him a look that could kill a lesser being.
“We got rid of the Warden,” I say. “It’s gone. We expected to enter the Sovereign Forge; instead, we ended up back here.”
“You broke the Warden?” Blackgrove asks, his voice intense as he comes closer. “How?”
“With the truth.”
“Hmm,” he says with a half-smile. “Must’ve been some truth.”
I glance at Evren. “It was. But what happens now?”
“You enter the Sovereign Forge.”
“How? We were transported back here!” My frustration is welling up again.
Blackgrove purses his lips and sighs. “I see.”
“You see? That’s it?”
“What would you like me to say, Miss Lysithea?”
“Help us,” I grit out.
“I can’t. We never got this far.”
I can see it costs him to say this. It’s not a failure on his part.
Simply, he was the starting point. We are the finish line, but right now, it feels like failure.
“How can we find the grimoire? We need it to enter the Sovereign Forge. To complete it. To do all the things we are supposed to do.” I implore him, and he seems to take pity on me.
He gives a long, weary sigh, the first genuine crack I’ve seen in his perfect, infuriating facade. “The Tenebris Vinculum is not a lost pet, Miss Lysithea. It is a sentient force. It has a will.”
“And its will is to fuck off at the worst possible moment?” Verik snarls.
“Its will is to survive,” Blackgrove corrects, his gaze pinning me. “You annihilating the Warden has given it what it wants.”
“It’s already in the Forge, isn’t it?”
He nods. “Probably.”
“But now we are going around in circles because we can’t get into the Forge without the grimoire.”
He turns to Verik and gives him a long, hard stare. “Can’t you?”
He blinks. “You think I can create a doorway?”
“Why not?”
“So why did we get removed from the Blood Court and sent back here?” I ask.
“The Blood Court no longer exists?” He phrases it as a question, which makes me suddenly very uncertain about our future.
If he doesn’t know, we are fucked. Royally fucked.
The words hang in the air, a final, damning verdict.
The Blood Court, gone? Just like that? We were its prisoners, its Arbiters, bound to its ancient law.
Now it’s just… not there? A wave of dizzying freedom washes over me, followed immediately by a fresh wave of panic.
We’re untethered. No rules, no path, just a void where the next step was supposed to be.
“Maybe not gone-gone, but gone for now.”
Blackgrove gives me a look that’s almost approval.
“Precisely, Miss Lysithea. The realm has been operating on broken systems for too long. You destroyed one. Now, build something new in its place.” He turns, his coat swirling around him.
“And do try to be less destructive in the future. The paperwork for this is going to be a real bore.”
And then he’s gone. Vanished into thin air, leaving us standing in the wreckage of my life. However, the wreckage of the room is fixing itself. DarkHallow’s healing magic has kicked in, and it’s slowly rebuilding.
Hope flares in my chest again. If DarkHallow can rebuild, so can we. All is not lost. This is fixable and doable and all the things.
“Right,” Verik says, turning to face us, his eyes burning with hellfire and pure, unadulterated purpose. “Let’s go build a door.”
Dathan lets out a humourless laugh. “Where, exactly, are we building this door?”
“Square one,” Verik says, his gaze locking with mine. “The Ossuary Tower. The point where we tore through reality in the first place.” He holds out a hand to me. “Ready to break the world again, Siren?”
I take his hand. The Court is gone. The grimoire is gone. All we have is each other and a ridiculously bad plan.
“Always,” I say. “Al-fucking-ways.”
We leave my room, the magic of DarkHallow erasing the evidence of my enormous tantrum.
The destruction outside the room is worse.
I don’t look at it. I don’t have time to feel guilty or mourn the losses.
We have a fucking realm to save and right now, selfish as it is, I need to focus on me, on us.
If we cock this up, we will be fucked even more than we are right now.
The walk back to the Ossuary Tower is a funeral march for our old plan. The tower looms, a skeletal structure pointing at the black sky. It feels like coming home.
We reach the top room. The air is still charged, humming with the memory, busting into the Blood Court.
Verik walks to the centre of the chamber, his boots crunching on fragments of bone dust. He doesn’t hesitate.
He crouches and slams his palms against the floor.
Hellfire erupts. Focused. A scalpel of pure creation.
“Thea,” he grunts, not looking up.
I’m already there, kneeling beside him, my hand on his back.
The power surges from me, a willing sacrifice.
This time it’s different. It’s not a desperate tear in reality.
He’s building. We’re building. Dathan and Evren stand back-to-back, a perimeter of nightmare and death around us.
They watch the shadows, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The stone floor yields. It melts under Verik’s command, a pit of absolute darkness. It’s forged from hellfire and my song, bound by sheer, bloody-minded will. A doorway made of us.
The pit solidifies. There is a single, stone step that we can see, and beyond it, a profound, star-dusted darkness.
“Well,” Dathan says, his voice a low rumble. “That’s new.”
“New is good,” I mutter and rise. “Let’s go.” I take Evren’s hand and squeeze it. He nods. Some of his bigger demons have left him after his confession, after my promise to him. I will do everything in my power to restore what was taken from him and fuck the consequences.
I lead the way, bringing Evren with me. Dathan and Verik follow. The air tastes different. Static, heavy with magic that complements mine.
“A leap of faith,” I mutter as we descend further steps into the pitch black.
Verik lights up a hellfire orb to light the way, but it barely touches the darkness. I feel my way, my free hand trailing along the wall, my feet testing before I step.
The stone under my fingers is slick with something I don’t want to identify. The air grows colder, heavier. Each step down feels like a step into a grave. Verik’s hellfire orb flickers, spitting sparks like a dying firework. The darkness here is a living thing. It drinks light.
“It’s dampening the magic again,” Verik grunts behind me, his voice tight with effort.
“We must be getting close, then. Ev?”
He squeezes my hand before he pulls it free to work his icy death magic on the dampening spell.
The stairs end abruptly. My foot meets flat ground. We’re in a vast, circular chamber. The darkness is less absolute here. Faint lines of silver light criss-cross the floor, walls, and ceiling, like a web of captured starlight. It’s not the Sovereign Forge. We haven’t gone deep enough.
“What now?” I murmur, my breath fogging in the cold.
“Uhm,” Dathan mutters before all hell breaks loose.