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LONG OVERDUE

ELYRIA

Elyria once told Evander that he felt like good luck. When he laughed and asked her what she could possibly have meant by that, she grinned.

“Your eyes,” she said, heat burning in her cheeks from the admission. “They look to me like twin pools of liquid luck. I feel like I could dive straight into their golden depths and never surface. Never want to. And I only have to stare into them to feel like the most fortunate fae in all Nyrundelle.”

Now, those eyes stared at nothing. Their golden glow was extinguished. Elyria drew a trembling finger over Evander’s eyelids, shuttering them for the final time.

Evander’s own black blood traced lines down his face as she let her touch linger. The weight of what she’d done clutched her in a vise, suffocating her, squeezing her insides. She took a strangled breath, and it was like the very air had turned to bitter ash.

He was the whole reason Elyria was here—why Kit had dared to take on the Crucible, committed herself to the Sanctum. They’d had no idea of knowing that the heinous visions they received of him in this corrupted form were sliced straight from the truth.

Elyria had thought it a nightmare. Kit had thought it a calling. She’d thought that coming here and conquering the Crucible might bring her brother peace.

Was that what Elyria had given him?

With his final breath, when the Evander she’d known and trusted and loved had returned—if just for a moment—he’d thanked her. Perhaps he had long wished to free himself from Varyth Malchior’s corruption and the dark magic tying him to this place.

She hoped beyond hope that was true.

Nearby, Cedric coughed, still recovering. Elyria breathed infinitesimally more easily when she saw that he appeared to be doing so quickly. There was a blue tint to his lips and a tremble in his limbs, not to mention the fact that he was sopping wet, but he seemed mostly unharmed. He was conscious and aware, shivering but straight-backed as he continued hacking into his hands.

Thraigg slumped down next to him, clapping the knight on the back with his unbroken hand as if doing so might help expel any remaining water from his lungs.

Zephyr, her skin paled to a sickly shade of green, helped Nox into a chair before waving her hands over the nocterrian’s wounded midsection. Elyria couldn’t help but notice how weak the glow of her magic seemed.

Across the room, Kit was still unconscious on the floor, her chest rising and falling in a steady but shallow rhythm that had Elyria’s heart constricting with every breath. Elyria had just taken a step toward her friend when a sudden flash of light stopped her in her tracks.

She watched with wide eyes as Evander’s slain body lit up from the inside and a celestial mark—the same one she’d watched the Arbiter place on each and every champion’s forehead before they’d entered the Sanctum—appeared between his brows. Ribbons of shadow snaked out from the hole in his chest, scattering in the air as his body erupted in blue flames, just like those that had consumed Brandon Cormac’s body before Elyria went through the Gate.

The chamber shook, the walls reverberating as if the Sanctum itself was erupting too. Or perhaps the magic that Evander had trapped within its walls, whatever sick machination he’d employed to interfere with the third trial, was simply being released.

And then Evander’s body was gone, the fire consuming even the pool of corrupted blood that had gathered beneath him. Nothing remained but the gaping hole in Elyria’s heart and the lingering stain of him on her clothes and skin.

Long overdue, the Crucible finally claimed him.

“Any change?”

Zephyr shook her head as she checked the blood-soaked bandage wound tight around Kit’s chest. The sylvan mumbled a few words in a language Elyria did not know and waved her hand. The red that had wept through the bandage evaporated, leaving only a fresh, clean, flesh-colored wrap in its wake.

Elyria might have been impressed by the way Zephyr wielded her healing power, had this not been the fourth or fifth time she’d seen this particular trick over the past several hours. Despite both Zephyr and Elyria’s attempts at repairing the hole in Kit’s chest, all they’d been able to do was stem the very worst of the bleeding. Her wound was not healing as it should. It had slowed, thank the stars, but she was still losing blood.

Worse still, she had not yet regained consciousness, and in the hours that had passed since the stabbing, she’d developed a fever as well.

Elyria thought she knew what helplessness felt like, but as she watched sweat bead on Kit’s forehead, it was all too clear she didn’t know a thing.

This would not do.

Standing so abruptly that Zephyr let out a noise of surprise, Elyria strode over to the table where Cedric, Thraigg, and Nox were eating. She tried to hide her look of disgust over the fact that they could do so at all. She was certain the wafers, cheese, and grapes would all taste sour and ashen on her tongue. But she supposed she couldn’t begrudge them the replenishment of their energy. Surely, they would all need it.

Whatever magical manipulation Evander had enacted, it clearly hadn’t affected the Crucible’s more hospitable interferences. Food and drink appeared in the Sanctum, as it always had. Still, there was no sign of what came next, no word regarding the next—the final?—trial.

“What do you think he meant when he said those things about the Arbiter?” she asked, bracing her hands on the tabletop and looking pointedly at the three champions.

Cedric blinked at her. “Hello to you too.”

Elyria rolled her eyes. “Hi. Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight.” The right side of Cedric’s mouth quivered, scar and all. “Now, what do you think he meant?”

“Ye might want to be a little more specific, lass.” Thraigg squirmed, his fingers toying with the makeshift splint Zephyr had fashioned him.

“Stop touching it,” Nox scolded, smacking the dwarf’s good hand.

“It itches.”

“And it will continue to do so as it heals. Zephyr said as much,” Nox said flatly. “So, you might as well get used to it.”

“Ye’re one to talk. I see ye pawing at yer stomach every few minutes. Leave the bandage be or it’ll start bleeding again, ye stubborn bastard.”

“Do as I say, not as I do.” Nox shrugged, though Elyria caught the hint of a wince as they did, as if the motion pulled at their wound.

Thraigg let out a noise that might have been somewhere between a whine and a growl, but he did as the nocterrian commanded and placed his hand on the table. “As I was saying, ye may need to repeat it for those of us who were nursing our wounds?—”

“Wounded egos, more like.”

“—while that maniac was monologuing.” Thraigg drummed his fingers on the table and shot Nox an annoyed look.

Their exchange was so sibling-like that Elyria momentarily found herself at a loss for words. She didn’t think Nox and Thraigg had spoken more than a handful of times the entire while they’d been in here. Though she supposed if any experience was going to bond people, it would be this one.

Or perhaps she hadn’t noticed because she’d been preoccupied with...other things. Her eyes flicked to Cedric before quickly returning to Thraigg’s rugged, scarred face.

“He revealed that he was the reason that we did not hear from the Arbiter before the Trial of Magic,” she said. “And when I asked what he’d done with them, he said?—”

“Something about not being able ‘to do a stars-damned thing to a celestial,’?” Cedric finished for her.

Elyria nodded. “What do you think he meant by that?”

“Maybe the bastard misspoke,” Thraigg said. “The Arbiter’s s’posed to be the mouthpiece of the celestials. In his twisted mind, maybe he lumped ‘em together.”

“He also referred to the Arbiter quite specifically as her ,” Elyria said.

“I caught that too,” said Cedric.

Elyria felt his warm brown eyes settle on her face, but she didn’t feel like he was really looking at her.

“But I don’t understand it either,” he added.

“And either way, if whatever he did is what sealed the Arbiter away from us, shouldn’t we have heard from her—them—whoever, again by now?” Elyria asked.

Nox stroked a long indigo finger along one of their horns. “Curious.”

“Why is it curious?” Cedric asked.

Several seconds passed before Nox responded. “How much do you know of the Crucible’s history?”

“I know it all,” Cedric said, pride buffeting the words.

Nox raised a brow. “Do you, now?”

Elyria couldn’t tell if their tone was mocking or sincere, but she supposed it didn’t really matter.

Cedric’s jaw flexed. “It was—is—my duty as a champion representing the realm of Havensreach to learn as much as possible about the Arcane Crucible, of course.”

“Of course,” Nox repeated, and again, Elyria found the sentiment behind their words difficult to discern.

“Why do you ask?” she prompted, eager to learn where this line of conversation was going and what it had to do with what Evander said about the Arbiter.

“Tell me what you know of the origins of the Crucible,” Nox said to Cedric, ignoring Elyria. Both she and the knight frowned at the nocterrian.

“I—surely you don’t need me to give you a history lesson,” Cedric protested, clearing his throat as if he were suddenly nervous.

“I’m simply curious as to whether the human version of events matches what I’ve come to understand after being in here myself.”

“And what is it you’ve come to understand?” Elyria asked.

Yet again, Nox ignored her. Her face heated. If Nox was after a history lesson, she would gladly give it to them. If only to refocus this conversation on what she wanted to know. “After Queen Daephinia sundered the realm in three and the Shattering took both her and the dark sorcerer Malakar from this world, the celestials?—”

“Not you,” Nox interrupted, their crimson eyes flashing between her and Cedric. “Him.”

“Why?” Elyria asked sharply.

Finally, Nox deigned to reply to her. “Because I have a hunch, and I like to see if my hunches play out. Take a seat and listen, Revenant. You just might learn something too.”

Elyria groaned but fell into a chair next to Thraigg, pulling one knee up in front of her and wrapping her arms around it. She looked expectantly at Cedric and Nox, her chin tilted up, head cocked to one side—the picture of impatience.

Cedric sighed and scrubbed his hands down his face. “Fine. How far back do you want me to start, exactly?”

Nox smiled, their teeth glinting in the light flickering from sconces dotted about the chamber. “Start where all stories should,” they said. “At the beginning.”