A fracture of fate, p.1
A Fracture of Fate, page 1
A Fracture of Fate
The Resonant Arcana
Book Five
Nicole R. Taylor
A Fracture of Fate
(The Resonant Arcana - Book Five) by Nicole R. Taylor
Copyright © 2025 by Nicole R. Taylor
All rights reserved.
This book is written in British/AU English.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.nicolertaylorwrites.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
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About Nicole
Prologue
Faith Evans started down the path toward Ellesmere Lake, her overloaded satchel banging painfully against her leg.
Her compass needle spun wildly, its brass face catching the morning light that filtered through the mist. She tapped the glass, but the needle continued its frenzied dance. Not good. The last time she’d seen readings like this was when one of Professor Hardy’s experiments had almost blown a hole in the side of the College of Artifice’s western wing.
Faith pushed her way through the undergrowth, her surveyor’s coat catching on thorns. The woods surrounding the lake pressed close, branches weaving together overhead. Through gaps in the canopy, she glimpsed patches of sky—proper sky, not the perpetual twilight that had hung over Nightreach for thousands of years. But if the rumours proved true, then the lavender haze had lifted when the city’s ley lines had reconnected with the rest of the world.
The lake revealed itself in fragments through the trees. Silver water rippled beneath the morning mist, the surface disturbed by currents that shouldn’t exist in a landlocked body of water. Magic thrummed through the ground beneath her boots, the ley lines surging.
The College would need detailed readings. Magic had been bottled up in Nightreach for so long there was no telling what effect it might have on the wider world, let alone within the city limits. It was an exciting, yet dangerous, time to be alive.
Her current assignment had come directly from Professor Theo Hardy himself. His letter had been insistent she make this her first and only priority. The accompanying package was full of witness statements describing crystalline formations that sprouted like ice along Ellesmere’s edge. The reports painted a disturbing picture: structures that grew overnight, humming with raw magical energy.
A twig snapped beneath her foot. The sound echoed oddly, as if the air itself had thickened. Faith paused, her hand instinctively touching the protective ward stone in her pocket. The forest felt different here—charged, expectant. The familiar comfort of fieldwork had abandoned her, replaced by a crawling sensation between her shoulder blades.
Through the trees, the lake’s surface rippled with unnatural movement. The mist clung too thickly, too low, defying the morning warmth. In all her years mapping magical anomalies across Nightreach and the land bordering the city, she’d developed an instinct for danger. That instinct screamed now.
Faith’s fingers traced the worn edges of her compass. Its erratic movements had only grown worse as she approached the lake. The needle swung in impossible arcs, sometimes spinning full circles before stopping dead, pointing at nothing.
Pausing, she took out her resonance gauge and balanced it on a flat stone. The device’s crystalline core pulsed with an irregular rhythm, more like a failing heart than its usual steady beat. She adjusted the calibration dials, but the readings refused to settle.
The air felt wrong. Magic clung to everything like morning dew, but thicker and with an almost slimy quality. Even the soil beneath her boots radiated a strange energy that made her skin crawl.
Faith pressed her palm against the earth. Wild power, long buried, began to stir, and the sensation jolted up her arm. Her fingers trembled as she opened her field journal, its pages already filled with a week’s worth of increasingly concerning observations.
Site E-7, northwestern shore approach, she wrote, her normally neat handwriting wavering. Residual magical saturation exceeding known parameters. Gauge readings inconsistent with standard ley line behaviour.
The needle swung again, settling on a value that defied every principle she’d learned at the College. Faith double-checked her calculations, but the numbers held firm. This wasn’t simple interference from the freed ley lines. The pattern felt orchestrated, as if something was conducting the flow of power beneath the surface, but that couldn’t be right. No one else was out here.
She sketched the waveform displayed on her gauge, adding notations about the frequency and amplitude. The signature matched nothing in the College’s archives. Whatever caused this distortion was new, or perhaps very, very old. Maybe something had been disturbed by the reconnection of Nightreach’s ley lines.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Faith glanced over her shoulder, but the misty woods revealed nothing. Still, she couldn’t shake the sudden feeling that something wasn’t right. That something was watching her.
Her pencil moved across the page: Persistent sensation of observation from an unknown source. Continuing to the shoreline to take further readings.
She collected her resonance gauge and continued down the track. The trees parted, finally revealing Lake Ellesmere’s shore.
Faith’s breath caught in her throat as she stepped onto the beach.
Crystalline spires erupted from the water’s surface, their translucent formations stretching skyward. The structures caught the morning light, fracturing it into prismatic shards that danced across the rippling surface. But these weren’t the delicate clusters she’d expected from the reports. These formations stood metres tall, their surfaces rippling with veins of energy that pulsed in time with the disturbed ley lines beneath.
The crystals seemed to drink in the mist, creating halos of fractured light around their bases where they breached the water. The shapes defied reason, angles collapsing inward until they formed patterns so unnatural they made her vision blur when she looked too closely. Each formation hummed with a deep, subsonic frequency that vibrated through her bones.
Faith pulled out her journal with trembling hands. But how could she capture this? The crystals shifted as she watched, not growing exactly, but…changing. Facets rearranged themselves like living things, creating new patterns faster than her mind could comprehend.
Faith halted at the water’s edge, drawing a slow breath that misted in the cool air. The lake stretched before her, its surface mirror-smooth despite the energy coursing through the area.
Her reflection stared back at her, but something wasn’t right. She tilted her head, and her heart skipped. The reflection followed a heartbeat too late, as if time itself had gone slack.
Her fingers tightened around her compass. The needle spun faster now, whirling like a possessed thing. The crystal formations seemed to pulse in response, their inner light strengthening with each rotation.
The woods pressed close against her back, empty of life. No birdsong broke the silence. No leaves stirred in the branches overhead. Even the persistent background hum of ambient magic felt muted here, replaced by something else. Something watching, waiting.
Faith scanned the treeline, searching for movement, any sign of another presence.
Nothing.
All that she felt, was that crawling sensation between her shoulder blades, and a certainty she wasn’t alone. The crystalline spires cast strange shadows that seemed to shift when she wasn’t looking directly at them, and the delayed reflection in the water made her doubt her own movements.
It reminded her of the Fold in a way, how reality seemed to bend…but it couldn’t be that. The liminal space, and all the nightmarish creatures that had existed within it, had dissolved into nothing days ago. It was gone.
Faith knelt beside the nearest crystalline structure. Her hand trembled as she reached out, expecting the bite of cold stone against her skin, but the crystal’s surface radiated warmth.
A rhythmic pulse travelled up her arm, resonating with the ley lines that criss-crossed beneath the lake shore. The sensation intensified, settling into a pattern that matched the surge and ebb of magical energy flowing through the ground. Her fingers tingled where they pressed against the crystal, as if tiny electrical charges danced between her skin and its surface.
She rifled through her satchel for her thaumaturgic resonance meter, careful not to touch the crystal again. The device’s needle jumped erratically as she held it near the surface. The readings made no sense. Magic didn’t behave this way naturally—it required careful manipulation, precise formulae, years of study to achieve even simple harmonics.
Yet here stood these impossible structures, perfectly attuned to the ley line network, as if they’d grown that way on purpose. As if something, or someone, had shaped them.
The warmth from the crystal seemed to intensify, its inner light pulsing stronger. Faith’s hand burned with remembered contact, that unnatural rhythm still echoing through her bones. She’d need to document this thoroughly, but first, she had to know if this was natural phenomenon, or had someone deliberately tapped into the newly freed ley lines?
Faith’s heart stuttered as movement caught her eye. A ripple across the lake’s surface where there should be none. The water bulged upward, then settled, but the distortion remained, like a lens warping reality itself.
She froze, muscles locked in place as her reflection twisted. Her mirrored self cocked its head left while Faith’s own head remained straight. The image stretched, limbs elongating past human proportions before snapping back like elastic. The sight sent bile rising in her throat.
Magic crackled through the air, sharp and acrid. The crystalline formations surrounding her lit up in response, their hum deepening to a bone-shaking resonance. The sound burrowed into her skull, reverberating through her chest cavity until she could no longer distinguish her heartbeat from its pulse.
Faith’s breath came in short gasps. Every survival instinct screamed at her to run, to put as much distance between herself and this wrongness as possible. But her legs wouldn’t respond.
The reflection rippled again. Her mirror image’s mouth stretched into a too-wide smile—one she definitely wasn’t wearing. Its eyes blinked independently of her own, and its fingers… Faith watched in horror as they lengthened, reaching toward the surface from below.
The crystal beneath Faith’s touch fractured with a sound like breaking ice. Her heart lurched as crystalline tendrils shot up her fingers, spreading across her skin in delicate, frost-like patterns. The growth raced past her knuckles, spiralling around her wrist with terrible purpose.
She tried to pull away, but her arm wouldn’t respond. She hadn’t been touching it. She hadn’t—
The numbness crept higher, a cold emptiness that left her skin pale and translucent. Where the crystal touched, sensation vanished—not frozen, but absent, as if those parts of her had never existed at all.
Faith reached for her magic, the familiar warmth that had always answered her call. Nothing. The power slipped through her grasp like water, drawn into the crystalline web that now encased her forearm. She watched in horror as her own magical essence twisted and reformed within the growth, transformed into something alien and wrong.
“No, no, no—” The words caught in her throat as she attempted a basic ward, the simplest protection taught to first-years at the College. The spell dissolved before it could form, its components scattered and reshaped by whatever force controlled the crystal.
The numbness reached her elbow. Faith’s fingers had gone completely transparent, like glass caught in sunlight. Through them, she could see the distorted shape of her reflection in the lake, still moving on its own, still wearing that terrible smile.
She tried another spell, then another, growing desperate as each attempt was not just blocked but rewritten. The magic turned to crystal the moment it left her body, feeding the growth that now crept past her bicep. Her arm hung uselessly at her side, transformed into something that no longer belonged to her.
The crystal sang as it spread, a high, pure note that resonated with the larger formations rising from the lake. Faith’s own magic, twisted and changed, joined the harmony.
Panic clawed at Faith’s chest as understanding crashed through her. The crystalline structures weren’t mapping the ley lines—they were reshaping magic itself into this cold, alien form. Her transformed arm caught the morning light, fracturing it into impossible colours that burned her eyes.
The numbness crept across her shoulder, spreading tendrils of emptiness beneath her skin. Each pulse of magic through the network sent fresh waves of transformation rippling through her body.
“Help!” The word emerged distorted, her voice cracking like splintering glass.
Her own magic betrayed her, flowing out of her core and into the crystal web that claimed more of her with each heartbeat. The sensation wasn’t painful—it was worse. It was absence, a void spreading through her being, replacing everything that made her her with perfect, crystalline silence.
The vibration reached her bones, resonating at a frequency that threatened to shake her apart. But instead of breaking, she felt herself aligning with it, her essence reorganising to match its song. The crystal’s hum became her heartbeat, became her breath, became—
Her consciousness stretched, thinned, fragmented like light through a prism. The last thing Faith registered was the sensation of her thoughts crystallising, transforming into facets of something vast and incomprehensible.
Her last human thought scattered into prismatic shards of memory and sensation. Then she was gone.
Silence descended over Ellesmere Lake.
Where Faith Evans had stood moments before, a new crystalline formation now rose from the shore, its facets capturing and refracting the morning light. Her leather satchel spilled its contents across wet sand, tools scattered where she’d left them, their frantic readings petering out to nothing. The compass needle had finally stilled, pointing unwaveringly toward the lake’s centre.
Through the trees, no wind stirred. No birds called. The morning mist clung to the water’s surface, undisturbed. Only the steady pulse of magic through the buried ley lines remained, threading between the crystal monuments…waiting.
Waiting and remembering.
Chapter 1
Runes ignited beneath Vesper’s fingertips, burning ancient sigils into her vision until darkness and light became indistinguishable. Fragments of memory spun like shards of broken glass while the Echo’s power thrummed beneath her skin, a cacophony of impossible notes that set her nerves ablaze.
She stood once more before the ancient stone, its surface alive with a cold, hungry radiance that bore into her soul, demanding recognition, demanding surrender.
The memory warped and stretched. Magic crackled through the air, raw and untamed. The Echo’s consciousness brushed against her own, vast and terrible and beautiful all at once. It tasted of copper and starlight, of forgotten songs and buried secrets.
Vesper’s body arched beneath sweat-soaked sheets as the remembered sensation of power coursed through her. The Echo had known her, had reached for her with tendrils of pure magic that sparked recognition deep within her core. In that moment of connection, she’d glimpsed centuries of stored memories. Countless lives and deaths, triumphs and failures, all preserved within the stone…or what lived within it.
Her body convulsed as power surged through her veins, every ounce of her Resonant ability crystallising into a single, terrible purpose. Her hand struck the ancient stone, which fractured beneath her touch with a sound like a thousand screaming voices. Power exploded outward in a devastating wave that threatened to tear her apart. Even as she began to shatter, the Echo reached for her, recognised her, its tendrils caressing her consciousness with terrible intimacy, as if she were something both familiar and foreign.
