Page 18 of Infernal Crown (Cursed Darkness (DarkHallow Academy) #3)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EVREN
The first day passes like a held breath.
I watch from the corner of our shared room as Lysithea practices channelling divine power without destroying everything she touches.
Her control improves with each attempt, but the effort comes at a cost to her.
Sweat beads on her forehead as she focuses on lifting a teacup without reducing it to ash, her silver-marked skin glowing with barely contained forces that could reshape continents.
The sight takes me back to those early days after my resurrection, when I had to relearn how to exist without accidentally draining the life from everything around me.
Death magic clings to you once you’ve crossed that threshold, marking you as something that belongs more to the void than to the world of the living.
But death magic destroys selectively, precisely.
What flows through Lysithea threatens to remake everything it touches according to alien concepts of perfection.
“Better,” Verik murmurs, checking the stress fractures she’s left in the walls. “The resonance is more stable.”
I count the cracks spreading upward from where she stands.
Seventeen major fractures, each one perfectly straight despite the irregular stone.
Divine power imposes its own geometry on reality, forcing chaotic materials to conform to mathematical ideals.
Even her mistakes carry the grimoire’s fingerprints.
She sets the cup down intact and slumps against the wall, exhaustion written in every line of her body. “How much longer can I keep this up?”
“As long as necessary,” Dathan says, but his voice carries doubt. His fear is like acid in my veins. He’s watching the woman he loves transform into something beyond his reach, divine power rewriting her nature with each passing hour. We all are.
The fear tastes familiar. I remember the months after my death when speech felt impossible, when every word seemed to carry too much weight for my resurrected throat to bear. Words had become foreign things, sounds that belonged to the living world I’d left behind.
Lysithea’s transformation follows a different path but carries similar isolation.
Divine power lifts her above ordinary concerns, making our attachments feel distant and increasingly irrelevant.
I see it in the way she looks at us now, with love tempered by the kind of patience you’d show to cherished but ultimately transient pets.
I could offer reassurance, tell them we’ll find a way through this. Words come easier now than they did during those silent years, each sentence a victory over the void that tried to claim my voice along with my life. But empty comfort serves no one, and the truth weighs heavier than speech.
Death taught me patience during those years of silence.
When you’ve died and returned, when you’ve felt the universe trying to erase your existence entirely, you learn to observe without rushing to fill every pause with sound.
The others need my silence more than my voice right now, space to process what they’re witnessing without my commentary adding to their burden.
Lysithea looks at me across the room, seeking the stability I represent. Death magic doesn’t just end life; it severs connections, dissolves bonds, and reduces complexity to a void. The grimoire’s vision of universal unmaking should terrify me more than anyone.
Instead, it fascinates me.
“The Crown’s influence is spreading,” she says, her voice making the windows rattle. “I can feel it changing how I think.”
I study the way she speaks now, each word precisely chosen and delivered with crystalline clarity.
The passionate intensity that once characterised her speech has cooled into something more measured, more divine.
Her accent remains the same, but the rhythm of her sentences follows patterns that feel alien, as if she’s translating thoughts from a language humans were never meant to understand.
“That’s the point,” I reply, my words carefully measured. Speaking still requires conscious effort, each sentence constructed deliberately rather than flowing from instinct. “The grimoire expects you to embrace its vision. The more convincing your conversion appears, the better our chances.”
“But what if I actually convert?” The question tears from her throat like a confession, momentarily breaking through the divine composure to reveal the terrified woman beneath. “What if I reach the moment of choice and genuinely want to remake everything?”
Verik and Dathan exchange worried glances, but I study her face with the patience death taught me.
Fear drives her question, not conviction.
The godly power flooding through her carries the grimoire’s philosophical framework, but her core identity remains intact.
I’ve seen what true conversion looks like, watched people surrender themselves completely to forces beyond their comprehension.
Lysithea fights the influence even as she channels it.
“Then we stop you,” I say.
The words shock them all, but truth often does.
During my years of silence, I learned to observe without the filter of social niceties, to see what people need to hear rather than what they want to hear.
Lysithea’s eyes widen, silver fire flickering in their violet depths as my bluntness cuts through her new detachment. But she accepts it.
“Evren,” Dathan starts, but I cut him off with a gesture.
The motion feels strange after so many years of communicating primarily through expressions and body language. Words felt borrowed. Now speech comes more naturally, but gestures still carry the weight of my silent years.
“She asked for honesty. If the Crown’s influence overwhelms her attachment to us, to this existence as it is, then yes. We stop her. By whatever means necessary.”
“You’d kill me?” Lysithea asks, though she already knows the answer.
The question hangs in the air like incense, heavy with significance none of us wants to examine too closely.
I’ve killed before, both before and after my resurrection.
Death magic makes ending life disturbingly easy once you understand the precise points where consciousness connects to flesh.
But killing Lysithea would be different, a violation of bonds that transcend normal magical connections.
“I’d unmake the godly influence and let you choose freely,” I correct. “Death magic specialises in severing unwanted connections. If the Crown’s power binds you to the grimoire’s purpose, I can cut those bonds.”
Death magic draws its power from the spaces between existence, the gaps where reality frays into nothingness. Using it against divine influence would be like performing surgery with weapons forged from entropy itself.
But I’d do it. For her.
She nods slowly, understanding passing between us. The others love her too much to contemplate harming her, even to save existence itself. But I died once already. I know the difference between ending someone’s life and freeing them from forces that deny choice entirely.
“Would it work?” Verik asks, his mind already calculating possibilities.
I consider the question with the thoroughness that survival demands.
Divine power operates on frequencies that intersect with death magic at specific resonance points.
The Crown’s influence would resist my attempts to sever it, but divine authority has its own weaknesses.
Gods think in absolutes, which makes them vulnerable to attacks that operate through negation rather than opposition.
“Against the Crown? Possibly. Against the grimoire itself?” I shrug, the motion carrying more weight than casual dismissal. “We’ll discover that tomorrow.”
The conversation dies there, each of us lost in private contemplations of what failure might cost. I return to my observation post by the window, watching darkness shift through the academy’s grounds.
DarkHallow exists in perpetual night, but even eternal shadow carries variations visible to those who know how to look.
During my years of silence, I spent countless hours at this same window, learning to read the subtle signs that distinguish one hour of darkness from another.
The way shadows angle differently as celestial bodies move through configurations.
The fluctuations in ambient magical energy follow patterns older than our civilisation.
The whispers of wind through stones that carry messages from realms where light has different meanings.
Tonight, the darkness feels heavier. More absolute. As if something vast approaches, preceded by the weight of its own inevitability.
I press my palm against the glass, feeling vibrations that travel through dimensions rather than mere matter.
The grimoire’s presence disturbs reality’s natural rhythms, creating ripples that spread across the void between worlds.
Even from whatever distant realm it currently occupies, its influence reaches toward us like gravity from a dying star.
Sleep, when it comes, brings dreams of endings.
Not the violent destruction that mortals fear, but the quiet cessation that follows when meaning itself dissolves.
I’ve experienced that particular form of death, felt existence slip away, not through trauma but through the simple absence of reason to continue.
The grimoire’s vision carries echoes of that same peaceful negation, which makes it more dangerous than any sword or spell.
I wake before the others, standing vigil as the second day arrives without fanfare.
Lysithea wakes soon after me. She moves through her morning routine, each action calculated to maintain the illusion of normalcy while preparing for cosmic deception.
Watching her prepare feels like observing a ritual of transformation. Every choice serves the performance she must deliver, the careful balance between divine authority and mortal origin that will convince the grimoire of her sincerity.
“Today,” she says, placing the Crown on her head with hands that shake only slightly.
The power of the gods floods through her immediately, transforming her.
The change is visible in her posture, the way she carries herself with confidence that spans dimensions.
Her eyes shift from violet to silver-veined black, pupils dilating to accommodate visions that encompass multiple layers of reality simultaneously.
The transformation triggers memories of my own resurrection, the moment when death magic flooded through my body and rewrote the basic equations of my existence.
But where my change felt like drowning in absence, hers radiates presence so overwhelming it threatens to blind anyone who looks directly at her.
“Remember the performance,” Dathan says, his nightmare magic reaching out to steady her. “You’re Lysithea who has accepted the burden of universal truth.”
“I am Lysithea who has accepted the burden of universal truth,” she repeats.
Her power doesn’t just speak; it proclaims, each syllable carrying the weight of absolute certainty. I’ve heard that tone before. From the grimoire. The fact that Lysithea can mimic it so perfectly terrifies me almost as much as it impresses me.