Calypso didn’t wait for him to finish. He pointed his hand with the purple bracelet downward, and a blindingly bright purple lightning bolt shot from it, striking the ground with such a thunderous crack it was as if the earth had decided to split apart.

  And it actually did start splitting: where the strange lightning struck, a crack formed between Calypso and all of us standing opposite him. The ground beneath us shook like a powerful earthquake. I was already sitting on the ground, and now I pressed myself even lower, paralyzed by the horror of everything happening. The crack spread sideways at lightning speed, as if cutting Calypso off from everyone. I don’t know how far that crack extended, but clearly for several miles, covering a huge area.

  The crack was growing not just in length but also in width, though slowly. And with each inch, a column of purple light shot up from the ground, from that infinitely deep abyss, rising high into the sky — as high as a skyscraper. This light stretched along the entire crack like a massive glowing screen, dividing Forland into two parts — beyond the purple line and before it.

  I was sitting close to this edge and swallowed nervously, looking down into the terrifying abyss. Bright purple light poured out from below, and no bottom was visible. And there probably wasn’t one — where would a bottom come from at a rift in reality? Because this was exactly that — a rift in reality, not just earth splitting apart. No creatures were crawling out of this fracture, but that didn’t make me feel any calmer, honestly.

  “This is a shadow veil,” Calypso explained, his eyes flashing with distinctly bright purple light.

  “Absolute shadow protection designed to neutralize any hostile parties. It won’t let through anyone who wishes me harm or is even just uncertain they don’t want to harm me. Even the slightest dark thought, and the shadow veil will burn that person on the spot. But it will freely let through anyone who comes to me in peace. And I swear on my Spark that I won’t harm, won’t lay a finger on anyone who crosses this line with peaceful intentions toward me,” as he said this, Calypso snapped his fingers, and a scarlet spark flashed at their tips as confirmation of the magical oath on his Spark.

  “If you don’t intend to harm me, just cross this line, come to me. Show me that what the general said really doesn’t matter anymore. Prove through action that circumstances have changed and I should listen to you. Should be easy. Unless it isn’t.”

  Ilforte didn’t move. He continued to watch Calypso silently, his expression unchanged. Unchanged on the outside, but inside… Oh, judging by his vibrating aura, the Mentor was ready to scream from the emotions overwhelming him. But he stayed silent and made no attempt to step forward.

  “Silent… I see how it is,” Calypso smiled crookedly.

  “Not sure, are you? Scared, I understand. Not sure you’d survive crossing that line. Not sure you don’t want to harm me, right? Don’t bother answering. It's all obvious to me anyway…”

  “Remove this shadow veil immediately, Mr. Brandt!” the general spoke up again, looking anxiously at the glowing crack in the ground.

  “And hand over your bracelet to the Inquisition!”

  “Hand over the bracelet? This one?” Calypso raised his eyebrows, nodding at his hand.

  He raised his hand with the bracelet and looked at it with a strange expression.

  Right before our eyes, the communication bracelet artifact began to change: first it flashed with bright purple light, first greatly increasing in size, then shrinking and seemingly ‘absorbing’ into his hand, transforming into something like a tattoo. A vivid tattoo pulsing with purple color. The communication bracelet disappeared in the process, transformed into an energy tattoo on Calypso’s wrist. How he did it, I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  The bracelet artifact on my own wrist beeped a warning that the connection with my warden had been lost.

  “Oops… Looks like surrendering the bracelet is no longer an option,” Calypso sang with a saccharine smile.

  “I’ve fully accepted Effu, and now he goes wherever I go.”

  “You didn’t accept him, he accepted you,” Ilforte said quietly.

  “Calypso, listen…”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about shadow magic, so why are you so sure Effu consumed me and not that I allowed him to merge with me?” Calypso said, utterly irritated.

  “Cal…” I whispered barely audibly, not even knowing what I wanted to say to him.

  Stop him? Change his mind? Talk some sense into him? But how?..

  “Remove this shadow veil immediately and hand over your bracelet to the Inquisition, Mr. Brandt!” the general repeated in a booming voice.

  “If you disobey my order, you’ll be exiled from Forland immediately. I’ll revoke your permission to teleport between worlds, the Water Cordon will add your aura to the database. But if you comply with my order immediately, I won’t revoke your permission and…”

  Calypso looked at him like he was a complete idiot.

  “Shove your permission up your ass,” he said crudely.

  “Who the hell are you to forbid me to do anything? And haven’t you figured out yet that teleportation between worlds is already impossible anyway? Once a world is fractured, it becomes locked within itself until restoration, or until the point of total absorption.”

  “Ah, so that was your plan all along, wasn’t it?” the general said in a grumbling voice.

  “Lock us all in here, in this world, and dictate your terms from Armarillis, right? Fortemin dictatorship in all its glory…”

  “I’m gonna smack you for saying that!..” Elza hissed angrily, starting to move forward.

  Zael literally held her back by force, pulling her back with the words:

  “Let’s not make things worse. We all need to calm down. We’re all on edge, but we need to keep cool heads.”

  Elza ground her teeth but fell silent, only trying to incinerate Mackelberry with her glare.

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  “I’m done talking to a clown like you, General,” Calypso said coldly, not letting Mackelberry finish.

  “I don’t even want to dirty my hands on you. I didn’t plan to fracture reality, I had nothing to do with the pentagrams that someone unknown was drawing to summon Effu. I don’t know why they were even trying to summon Effu here I don’t know the end goal. And I’m not enslaved by Effu, I’m acting of my own free will right now. But since no one here believes me… Fine… then we’re leaving.”

  “We?..”

  “Me and Lori. Let’s go, Lori. We’re leaving.”

  “Leaving where?” I whispered.

  “Away from here,” Calypso grimaced, turning and preparing to walk in the opposite direction.

  “We’re leaving Forland and never coming back. Lori?”

  Calypso turned around and stared at me, confused. I hadn’t moved, still sitting on the ground and watching Calypso with alarm.

  Leave with him?.. Where, for fuck’s sake? And more importantly, why? And where would this ‘leaving’ lead? And what would happen here to everyone I love? The ‘shadow stranger’ was still out there somewhere, and his goals were still unclear…

  “So you… don’t trust me either?” Calypso asked coldly.

  “You also think I’m some pathetic victim who’s fallen under the influence of the primordial spirit of chaos?”

  “I believe you…”

  “You’re lying,” Calypso cut her off harshly.

  “I can feel very clearly right now that you’re lying.”

  I drew a shaky breath, hugging myself.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  “I want to believe you. I want to understand everything that’s happening, but right now I’m… scared. There’s bad energy radiating from you, Cal, and it frightens me. I want to be with you, but at the same time I don’t want to go anywhere…”

  “You want to stay with all of them?” Calypso snorted skeptically, nodding toward our colleagues and particularly my parents.

  “They’ll lock you up within four walls again without me.”

  “They’re my family…”

  “And what am I?” Calypso asked sharply.

  “What am I to you, Lori?”

  I drew another shaky breath, feeling like I was about to be sick from all the stress I’d endured today.

  “So, Lori? Are you coming with me?” Calypso repeated his question without waiting for an answer.

  Calypso meant the world to me. But so did my family. How can you choose between the person you love and the family you love?

  He extended his hand to me, and I stared at it with a lump in my throat. I wanted to scream, cry, beg Calypso to come to his senses and stop scaring me, all at once…

  “I’m… not sure it would be right to separate from our colleagues and leave right now,” I whispered barely audibly.

  “In these circumstances, we need to act together, as a team…”

  But Calypso heard anyway. Heard and said coldly:

  “So… you’re choosing them.”

  “I don’t want to choose anyone!” I said firmly, louder now.

  “There’s no need to choose! There’s room in my heart for everyone I love! And I firmly believe everything can be resolved peacefully! We… we all just need to calm down and carefully analyze the whole situation. Yes, the rift is closed, but the danger hasn’t completely passed… As long as Effu exists in this world, it won’t. Calypso… Take off the bracelet. Please! Effu will take control of you eventually, even if he really hasn’t yet…”

  “The bracelet is now part of me, and it can no longer be removed. And I’m more than fine with that,” Calypso said with a strange, smug tone.

  And that tone scared me to death.

  “But that’s not who you are!..”

  “Not who I am meaning what?” Calypso asked coldly.

  “What am I not, Lori?”

  “You’re not a villain,” I whispered.

  “You’re my sweet Calypso, my gentle and tender man, who I…”

  I wanted to say “I love so much,” but at that exact moment my head felt like it had been shot through with wild pain, like a sharp mental attack. My throat seemed to clench in a spasm, and I fell silent, clutching my throbbing head. It started aching so badly in an instant that tears sprang from my eyes. It felt like the chaos spirit had just slapped me mentally, forcing me to shut up mid-sentence. The pause on my end was pretty awkward.

  Calypso meanwhile flinched as if slapped, jerked back sharply, pulled his hand away, and gave me a very ugly look.

  “Villain?” he hissed, looking as if he’d only heard that one word from everything I said.

  “Seriously? You don’t trust me that much either? You think I’m some pathetic little human whose mind Effu devoured without me even noticing?”

  “No!! Cal… damn… That’s not what I meant!..”

  Why did everything have to be so complicated?!

  “Nobody’s questioning your abilities! But Effu isn’t a force to joke around with or experiment on! Yes, damn it, I’m scared! I can’t wrap my head around how you can ‘make a deal’ with Effu. Make a deal? With Effu? With that titan who just shattered reality, killed a bunch of mages in one blow? With Effu, everyone fears? Who the Ancients barely managed to defeat? And he just listened to you, is that it? I don’t understand any of this… I want to understand, but you’re scaring me right now, Cal. And this Effu won’t let me reach you mentally. Please, just take off the bracelet, let’s discuss everything calmly!..”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Calypso said coldly.

  “I’m asking you one last time, Lori: are you coming with me? I can help you, Lori. Together we’ll be happy. I’ll make you powerful. You’re my potential Guardian, after all. And a Guardian is always potentially stronger than their Fighter, remember? Can you imagine how I could unlock your abilities? Come with me, Lori. Don’t be stupid.”

  I stayed silent. I was being torn apart by a storm of emotions. More than anything in the world, I wanted to step toward Calypso, embrace him, and wake up from this terrible nightmare. Wake up in our shared bedroom, stroke his muscular shoulders, kiss his cheek while he sleeps, and watch him smile in his sleep before opening his eyes… His normal pale gray eyes, not these glowing purple points that filled me with wild, primal terror.

  I was afraid — not of Calypso himself, but of the force lodged in his bracelet-tattoo. The destructive force of the primordial spirit of chaos, which I could feel even from this distance. It was a sticky energetic substance that now enveloped Calypso from head to toe like veins, pulsing with a bright energetic flash that was terrifying to approach. Right now that force was churning, as if it had finally gotten what it wanted, and that… frightened me. Repelled me and made me shrink in terror rather than joyfully throw my arms around Calypso’s neck. Effu’s energy had consumed Calypso’s aura so completely that I couldn’t even sense his own aura anymore…

  And then there was that phrase of his… ‘I’ll make you powerful’ — that phrase reminded me chillingly of what I’d heard in my head during my recent episode, when Calypso found me in the bathroom. That disembodied voice in my head had said the same thing: ‘I’ll make you powerful.’ My brain latched onto that similarity and seized up with terror. That voice had scared me then, and Calypso’s mood was scaring me just as much now.

  And I seemed to still be experiencing a mental attack that was driving my fear to some hysterical state. Was this Calypso accidentally affecting me, losing control of his magic, or was this Effu’s doing, deliberately keeping me at a distance? I couldn’t tell where my true emotions ended and the externally imposed ones began. Was I this afraid on my own, or was I still being ‘pushed away’ from outside?

  “So that’s a no…” he said, voice hollow.

  His eyes were no longer just tinted with purple light — they had become two solid slits glowing with purple light, with little humanity left in them, honestly. And his voice had become somehow metallic, even colder:

  “In that case… You can consider me a villain. Since everyone already thinks I am and has been expecting this from me, maybe there’s no point in trying to be good?”

  With those words he turned and strode quickly away — toward the now completely destroyed district. Into the depths of the purple fog that swirled beyond the shadow veil and gradually concealed Calypso. In that fog, only his lonely figure was visible, along with Alohar, the black raven, who had appeared out of thin air and perched on his master’s shoulder.