Weightlessness is a lie. Even in the void, there is the heavy, suffocating pressure of my own pulse.
Thump... Thump... Thump...
I woke to the sound of nothing. No wind. No singing mist. No mechanical clicking of Vane's wretched spiders. My eyes snapped open, but for a terrifying moment, I thought I was still blind. The world was a blinding, seamless expanse of white—not the white of silk or clouds, but the white of a page before the ink hits it.
"Kaelen?" I tried to scream, but the name came out as a raspy, dry croak.
I tried to sit up, and a jagged, white-hot bolt of agony lanced through my chest.
"Ah... fuck!" I collapsed back onto the floor—if you could call it a floor. It felt like solid glass, cold and unyielding, yet as clear as water.
I looked down at my chest, my breath hitching in my throat. The mirror shard was gone. The lace of my dress was a scorched, blackened ruin, exposing the skin of my sternum. Where the violet crystal had once been, there was now a crater of raw, shimmering silver. It wasn't bleeding blood; it was weeping a thick, luminous mercury that pooled in the hollow of my throat.
The Source hadn't just broken. It had inverted.
Scrape. Hiss.
A few yards away, a dark shape disrupted the perfect white horizon. I dragged myself toward it, my fingernails screeching against the glass-like surface. My legs felt like leaden weights, my muscles uncoordinated and weak.
"Kaelen!"
It was him. He lay facedown, his leather duster shredded as if he'd been put through a meat grinder. One of his arms was twisted at a sickening angle, and the blue glow of his skin—the "Scion" blood Vane had mocked—was fading, flickering like a dying candle.
I reached him, my hands trembling as I rolled him over. His face was a mask of crimson and soot.
"Kaelen, wake up. You bastard, don't you dare leave me here alone," I choked out, shaking his shoulders.
Cough. Splutter.
His eyes flickered open, grey and clouded with pain. He looked at me, but his gaze didn't focus on my face. It went straight to the silver wound in my chest.
"Isyra..." he whispered, his voice sounding like gravel grinding together. "You... you did it. You actually broke it."
"I killed us, Kaelen," I said, a hysterical sob escaping my lips. "I shattered the Source. Look at this place. There's nothing left. No trees, no manor, no sky. We're in the goddamn middle of nowhere."
Kaelen groaned, clutching his side as he struggled to sit up. I had to brace his back with my shoulder, the silver mercury from my chest staining his shredded leather.
"We aren't nowhere," he panted, his eyes darting around the white expanse. "We're inside the ley line. The explosion... it didn't destroy the power. It collapsed the space around us. We're in the marrow of the world, Isyra."
"I don't care about the world's marrow!" I snapped, my voice cracking. "I want to know why you lied! Agent 09? A 'Scion'? You were bred for me? Like a fucking hound?"
Kaelen looked away, his jaw tightening. "Not for you. For the power. The Guild... they knew the Valendris line was becoming unstable. They needed a 'Ground'. Someone with enough of the blood to survive the heat, but enough of the Guild's conditioning to control it. I was a tool, Isyra. Just like your lock."
"Then why?" I gripped the front of his duster, pulling him close until our foreheads touched. "Why help me? Why not just hand me over to Vane?"
Kaelen's eyes finally met mine. The stormy grey was rimmed with red, but the clarity there was terrifying. "Because the first time I saw you through that archive window, before I even stepped foot in the manor... you weren't a Source. You were just a girl looking at a bird. And I realized... if they took you, that girl would die. And I'd rather burn with you than watch them turn you into a battery."
Hummmmmmm.
The white floor beneath us vibrated. A low, rhythmic sound, like a distant drum, began to echo through the void.
"What is that?" I asked, looking around.
The white wasn't empty anymore. From the distance, dark, jagged lines began to crawl across the floor—like ink spreading through water. They were cracks. The void was fracturing.
"The instability," Kaelen cursed, trying to stand but falling back against me. "By shattering the crystal, you've unanchored the local ley lines. If we don't find a way out, this pocket dimension is going to fold in on itself. We'll be crushed into nothing."
"How do we get out? There are no doors! No windows!"
"The silver," Kaelen pointed to my chest. "The mercury. It's raw, unrefined Essence. It's the stuff the world is built from. If you can shape it... if you can will it to become a path..."
"I don't know how to shape reality, Kaelen! I barely know how to walk in these goddamn shoes!"
I looked at the silver liquid. It was pulsing now, reacting to the cracks spreading toward us. The black lines were wider now, revealing a bottomless, starry abyss beneath the white glass.
CRACK-SNAP.
A piece of the floor a few feet away simply vanished into the black.
"Isyra, listen to me," Kaelen grabbed my face with his good hand. His skin was cold, his life-force draining fast. "The Guild didn't just breed me to survive you. They bred me to guide you. My blood... it's the map. Yours is the engine."
He grabbed my hand, the one stained with soot and violet light, and pressed it against a deep, bleeding gash on his own chest.
"Don't," I whispered.
"Do it!" he roared. "Fuse the blood! Use me as the anchor! Create the door, Isyra, or we both die in this white hell!"
I felt his blood—hot, metallic, and humming with a blue resonance—mingle with the silver mercury leaking from my heart. The sensation was unlike anything I'd ever felt. It wasn't a burn. It wasn't a chill. It was a connection. For a second, I wasn't just Isyra. I was the forest. I was the mountain. I was the history of every Valendris woman who had ever lived and suffered.
I saw the "Curtains" again. But they weren't in the manor. They were the fabric of reality itself, draped over the void.
"Open," I commanded.
The silver and blue blood erupted from our joined hands, swirling into a violent, iridescent vortex. The white void screamed as it was torn apart. The black cracks rushed toward us, the floor beneath our feet disintegrating into nothingness.
"Isyra! Don't let go!" Kaelen's voice was barely audible over the roar of the collapsing dimension.
I gripped his hand with every ounce of strength I had left. The vortex grew, a doorway of swirling liquid metal and starlight, showing a glimpse of a dark, damp cave on the other side.
We lunged for it, our bodies tangling as we threw ourselves into the rift.
The transition was a sensory nightmare. I felt my skin being peeled back, my bones being rearranged, my very soul being squeezed through a needle's eye.
WHUMP.
We hit solid ground. Hard.
The air was cold. Damp. It smelled of old stone and bat guano. I gasped, my lungs burning, my fingers digging into wet limestone. We were in the Echoing Cave. We'd made it.
I rolled onto my back, staring up at the dark ceiling of the cavern. The silver light in my chest had dimmed to a faint, rhythmic glow. Kaelen lay beside me, unconscious again, his breathing ragged and shallow.
I looked at our joined hands. Our blood had dried together, staining our skin a strange, bruised purple that wouldn't wash away.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The sound came from the mouth of the cave. Not mechanical. Not human.
I sat up slowly, my heart freezing.
Standing in the entrance, silhouetted against the moonlight, was not Vane or Seraphina.
It was a woman. She wore a dress of tattered black lace, and her hair was a wild, tangled mane of white. In her hand, she held a rusted iron key.
She looked exactly like the portrait of my mother.
"You should have stayed in the white, Isyra," the woman said, her voice a hollow, haunting echo. "The world isn't ready for what you've become. And neither is he."
She pointed the key at Kaelen, and a thin, golden chain erupted from the shadows, wrapping itself around his throat.
To be continued...