I stand over Castor, blinking back tears that rise and fall as memories. His face hits me like a physical blow, bloody and serene in defeat, the curve of his jaw and arch of his brows mirroring Penelope's features with devastating precision.
Yet it is not her face my thoughts turn to.
Purple fabric against pale bark. Bruised hands hanging still. The particular shade of silk reserved for those who serve.
I never wept for uncle Darius, not truly.
The realization arrives with the weight of iron. I ran from his body. Buried the sight of him in the Inner Hell where Kaelenya warned me not to send things. Let the darkness take root. Let it grow teeth.
I cannot remember what he looked like before the noose. Cannot recall if his eyes were open or closed. Whether the tree's shadow fell across his face or left it bare to moonlight.
I know only that I fled. And in fleeing, made his death into something I could not touch.
The Skathrith's hunger surges through my veins.
It hovers above me, larger than before, its alien light casting writhing shadows only I can see. Thin ribbons of Castor's blood spiral upward, drawn into the construct's ethereal form. Something builds in the bond, not words but pressure, a pulling sensation behind my ribs like the sense of emptiness magnified a thousandfold.
My hand lifts without conscious thought, fingers splaying toward Castor's prone form, silver light flickering along my skin. The Skathrith's need surges through my veins, a dark and malevolent heartbeat demanding satisfaction. But Penelope's face flashes through my mind. Her wide eyes when she peered up at me. The scar that marks her skin. The raw humanity in her gaze.
"No."
The word comes out barely above a whisper, but I force my hand down. The Skathrith's light flares in protest, sending violent tremors through realms of folded space. I plant my feet, shoulders squared against its pull, and speak again, voice steady against the construct's furious roar. "No."
A wave of light explodes outward as the Skathrith retreats, filling the space with an unnatural quiet. Castor's blue eyes narrow, peace replaced by naked hatred.
"Do not." His voice remains controlled despite the trembling in his limbs. Each word precise. "Do not dare show mercy, demon. Not now."
Energy floods across my skin. Not just my hands, not just my arms. Everywhere. The coating spreads like liquid mercury, flowing over every inch of flesh until I am encased in radiant silver.
Then it begins to rotate.
The shell spins around my body, faster and faster, a gyroscope of cutting light. The world changes. Sound vanishes first, not fading but severed, as if someone has wrapped my head in perfect silence. Castor's chamber becomes a painting behind glass. Colors shift, prismatic at the edges where the rotation blurs reality.
Gravity releases me.
The sensation drops my stomach, weightlessness crashing through my body as the invisible threads connecting me to the earth are cut. I float, disconnected, existing in a pocket of space that no longer answers to the world's rules.
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My heartbeat thunders in my ears. My breathing fills the silence. These are the only sounds that remain. Everything internal, everything me.
I create a stress point without thinking. The flow of rotation stutters, curves, and I rise.
The chamber stretches beneath me, growing distant with each passing heartbeat.
Distance becomes uncertain. I cannot tell if I am rising slowly or impossibly fast. The rotation continues without thought, as natural as breathing, but the rhythm of it fills my awareness. A pulse, a heartbeat, faster than my own.
The air inside the field sits perfectly still. No wind. No temperature. Just neutral existence.
I am alone in here.
Below, Castor's mouth moves. I see it clearly despite the distance, the distortion. His lips form the word. Coward. I see it in the shape of his mouth, in the rigid line of his jaw. But the sound does not reach me. The rotating shell cuts it away, leaves only silence and the thunder of my own pulse.
I watch him speak again. More words. An accusation, a curse, something that twists his features with cold fury. But I exist in a different world now, separated by the spinning edge.
The silence makes it worse somehow. His hatred rendered pantomime. Fragile. Unreal.
I escape the chamber through the opening in the ceiling, flee into open sky.
Sunlight pierces my vision through the prismatic shell, forcing my eyes to narrow against its intensity. No, not sky. A vault of glass hammered into a lattice that curves away until it becomes horizon. A false sun burns inside it, bright and cold, throwing light that feels painted rather than born.
My momentum carries me higher, the rotation's rhythm steady and sure. The Skathrith's ethereal glow mixes with natural light, creating patterns I cannot name. I glance down at the receding hole in a patch of strange earth. The construct hums with something that feels like satisfaction, like fullness.
I can fly.
The realization settles cold in my chest even as I rise higher into the fractured light. The rotation continues without effort, without thought. Creating stress points feels like redirecting flow, natural, intuitive. The field responds to intent more than action.
This should be harder.
The thought surfaces through the muted awareness. Full-body coating. Maintaining rotation. Severing gravity while manipulating stress points for directional control. Most Optimates would struggle with any one of these elements. Together, they should be impossible at my level. Cyra had not gained flight until her third year at the Mere.
But the Skathrith has changed. We have changed. The bond runs deeper now, more synchronized. The rotation feels as natural as breathing because some part of me no longer distinguishes between my movement and its power.
I allowed it to feed on its own kind. And it rewarded me with this. Flight wrapped in silence, disconnection dressed as freedom.
The thought sits heavy in my gut even as I rise higher into the fractured light. I increase the rotation's speed. The shell spins faster, and my ascent accelerates in response. The relationship is direct, immediate. Faster rotation, faster flight. But the world outside blurs further, colors bleeding together until I can barely distinguish metal from sky.
Light screams upward from below.
I see it through the distortion, a lance of coherent energy cutting through the prismatic air.
The beam strikes.
Pain explodes across my shoulder, but worse, far worse, the rotation stutters. The spinning shell fractures around the wound, otherworldly light breaking like shattered glass. I feel the field trying to maintain itself, trying to complete its circuit around my body, but the damage disrupts the flow.
The rotation collapses.
Sound crashes back into existence. A roar of sensory input after the profound silence. Wind tears at my face. Temperature slams into my skin. The false sun's light burns my eyes without the prismatic filtering.
Gravity returns.
Like a rope snapping taut, the world's pull seizes my body with brutal, immediate force. The weightless disconnection vanishes, replaced by the sickening sensation of falling. Truly falling, as flesh and bone subject once more to every physical law I had severed.
The world spins. Colors stop shifting. Distances snap back into terrible clarity. I am falling, and I am alone in a way I was not before, because even the Skathrith's presence feels distant now, the bond strained by the field's collapse.
Through watering eyes I glimpse movement far below. Five figures among metallic trees, weapons raised, tracking my fall with practiced precision.
Deliberate. Coordinated. Waiting.
Then the branches rise to meet me.
Impact.
Book One of Shattered Empire is complete on Patreon.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)