A harmony of ages, p.24
A Harmony of Ages, page 24
She looked at the destruction and saw the memories of the Echo.
A fire from three centuries ago overlaid the current rubble, buildings burning with flames that hadn’t existed for generations. The heat shimmered across her vision, smoke rising from structures that had been rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt again. Bodies from five hundred years back mixed with today’s dead, witches and mages slaughtered during the Great Schism lying beside those killed in Fermata and Fortis’ rampage.
Memories bled through the cracks in her fractured consciousness, seeping up from where they’d been contained for millennia. She was the vessel for all the memories that magic had created. All the echoes of what had risen in the aftermath of her cataclysm.
She saw witches hanging from trees in the hundreds, their bodies swaying in wind that no longer blew. The ropes creaked, a sound that echoed across centuries. Below them, mages performed experiments on captured witches still breathing, flaying skin to study how their strange and alien magic flowed through their flesh. Screams layered over screams, past and present merging into one endless sound of agony.
Threnody tried to push the memories away, but they kept coming faster, overwhelming her ability to sort through them. The Hollow Circle executing entire families for suspected collaboration, lining them up against walls and cutting them down whilst children watched. Plagues that had wiped out entire districts, bodies piled in the streets and left to rot because there was no one left to bury them. Wars fought and refought, the same hatreds resurfacing generation after generation.
Secret societies born out of the lust for power and immortality. The Covenant. The Empirical Order. Of those who’d tried to thwart them, but were too few. Praxis.
Massacres layered over massacres. Death compounding death until she couldn’t separate one atrocity from another, and couldn’t tell which bodies were real and which were memory.
Millennia of absorbed echoes flooded through her at once. Every horror humanity had inflicted on itself poured through the fractures Fermata had torn in her mind, overwhelming her ability to process any of it. The Echo had witnessed it all, had absorbed every magical memory for two thousand years, and now they were surging forward simultaneously.
A witch being burned alive overlaid a mage being torn apart by shadow magic. Their faces merged, became the same face, became every face of every person who had ever died screaming. A child dying of plague merged with another child crushed in the current rubble beneath stones that had fallen today and those that had three hundred years ago.
The sounds were worse than the images. Screams echoing across centuries, blending together until they became one endless note of suffering. The crack of breaking bones repeated infinitely. The wet sound of steel cutting through flesh, over and over, the same violence enacted in different forms but always with the same brutality.
She tried again to force herself to the present. To hold on to Threnos and their bond. But her own past kept pulling at her.
Standing in the centre of a circle of Arcana. Pain, humiliation, and rot. Corruption clawing at her soul as they tortured her. Their hands reaching inside her mind, peeling back layers of thought, violating everything she was. The corruption spreading through her people, inevitable and absolute, turning them into monsters who justified their cruelty with divine right. The pain had never gone away.
Her suffering had only amplified inside the Echo. Their lust for power, their corruption had never left their world. It was still here, poisoning everything it touched.
Threnody felt the compulsion to rewrite reality, to reshape it, to fix everything that had gone so catastrophically wrong, and clung onto it. It had been built into her from the beginning. That was why she was different. She had ascended more than any other Arcana, and she alone held the power to force dominion over all…if she chose it.
The devastation she stood in became all destruction. Every war humanity had ever waged, every act of cruelty, every moment of suffering compressed into this single square. She saw it all at once, millennia of horror layered on top of each other until the weight of it crushed her mind.
War leading to peace leading to war again. Power corrupting those who wielded it, factions forming around ideologies that justified atrocity, hatred spreading until entire populations turned against each other. The same cycles repeating over and over, and she had witnessed every single iteration of them.
Inside her, Vesper screamed. No! Stop this! You have to stop!
But the Resonant was drowning, falling deeper and deeper into the smallest corner of their shared space as Threnody’s fractured mind expanded to fill everything.
Rafe! Vesper cried out desperately. Rafe, please! I need you!
The name barely registered. Threnody knew it held meaning for Vesper, knew the Resonant loved this person with desperate intensity that transcended reason, but the memory felt irrelevant. What was one mortal’s love against thousands of years of accumulated suffering?
She felt the moment she had chosen to end them all rather than become what they wanted. The decision that had defined every moment since, the choice that had shaped millennia of existence as the Echo.
Erase everything. Start the world anew. Wipe the slate clean. Make it stop.
The compulsion wasn’t even a choice anymore. It was reflex, instinct, the only way to stop drowning in horror upon horror. She had done it once before and could do it again. This world had proven itself no better than the one she’d destroyed. I was just another cycle of suffering that would continue forever unless someone had the strength to end it.
Her magic responded to the thought. Power built inside her, vast and terrible, gathering from sources she shouldn’t be able to access. It pulled from the ley lines beneath her feet, dragging energy up through fractured pathways. It drew from the saturated air, condensing magic that had been bleeding from the battle. It reached into the fabric of reality, unmaking the foundations of existence to fuel what she was about to do.
More power than she’d wielded during the battle against Fermata and Fortis. More than she’d used to unmake Tenebrae. More than she’d gathered for the original cataclysm that had destroyed her entire civilisation…because this time would be different. This time she would make sure she took not just her people, but everything. Everything that had grown from the ashes of what she’d destroyed, every fragment of consciousness that had emerged in the thousands of years since. All of it erased, rewritten, made clean, so the corruption was cleansed.
Her magic continued building, unstoppable now. The opalescent light around her grew brighter, and the air began to warp, reality bending inward as her power prepared to unmake. Cracks spread through the cobblestones underfoot, glowing with energy that had no business existing in the physical world.
Vesper screamed one last time inside their shared consciousness. No! You’ll destroy us all! Everything we fought for! Everyone we love! You’ll end it all!
But her voice was barely a whisper, fading to nothing as Threnody’s soul expanded further. Soon there would be no Vesper left at all, just Threnody alone with her terrible purpose and the grief of millennia imprisoned in the Echo driving her to complete what she’d started so long ago.
Threnos was in front of her, his hands gripping her shoulders. His mouth moved, forming words she could see but not hear. The sound distorted, stretching across time, the syllables separating into meaningless noise.
“Threnody!” His voice finally broke through, ragged and desperate. “Stop! This isn’t who you are!”
But it was who she was. It was all she’d ever been. The one who ended things when they became too corrupted to save.
The world fractured around them.
Buildings began dissolving, their structures coming apart atom by atom as her magic spread outward. The cobblestones beneath her feet cracked and split, glowing with unstable energy. Past and present and future collapsed into each other, timelines bleeding together until everything existed in the same impossible moment.
She saw the residential quarter as it had been centuries ago, pristine and whole and full of life. She saw it burning during the Great Schism, flames consuming everything whilst people fled through smoke-filled streets. She saw it as it was now, destroyed by the Arcana, bodies scattered amongst the rubble. She saw it as it would be when her power finished, reduced to nothing but empty space where reality had been completely erased. A new world would form and grow, life would return…and it would be pure.
Part of her knew this was wrong. Some fragment of consciousness still fought against what was happening, and tried to pull her back from the edge. But she was drowning and gasping for air. For peace.
The ground trembled violently, fissures spreading outward, cutting through stone and earth right to the foundations of reality. The destruction was spreading beyond the residential quarter now, moving into the rest of Nightreach. Buildings blocks away began to shake, their structures destabilising as her power reached them.
And Threnos still stood before her, his hands on her shoulders.
He didn’t try to speak to her anymore, nor did he attempt to stop what was happening. He didn’t fight against her or try to convince her she was wrong. He simply stepped forward, closing the remaining distance between them, and threw himself into her arms.
He wrapped himself around her whilst she destroyed everything.
His arms circled her waist, pulling her close, holding her whilst reality fractured around them. His chest pressed against hers, his heartbeat steady. His breath was warm against her neck, and his presence was utterly, devastatingly real in a way nothing else had been.
He was choosing to die with her this time. He was willing to burn rather than leave her alone at the end of everything.
The bond between them flared to life, connecting her to him. Threnos was choosing her over survival, over self-preservation, over everything. The way she hadn’t been able to choose him millennia ago when the corruption had forced her hand.
This was what she had built her prison to mourn.
Not just the loss of her people or her world or her civilisation. Not just the guilt over what she’d done or the grief over those she’d killed. But this. This moment of being held whilst everything burned. The choice to stay with someone even when the world ended, to be present rather than succumbing to fear.
Threnos had spent millennia searching for her. He had survived the cataclysm only to endure centuries existing as fragments barely clinging to coherence, had bore the void by pouring his shattered consciousness into a grimoire, and had finally found a vessel willing to share space with him. He’d come looking for her through a dying city, had fought beside her against Fermata and Fortis, had stood with her when anyone else would have fled.
And now that he’d found her, now that they were reunited after all that impossible time, he was choosing to die with her rather than leave her alone.
And it was then, after all she had experienced and endured, that she realised the true reason she had built the Echo.
Love.
Threnody had chosen to become a monument, a repository of memory, a song of mourning that would echo through millennia. She had chosen all of it because she couldn’t bear what she’d done. She couldn’t live with having destroyed him along with everything else she’d known and loved.
And he was here now, still choosing her. That was what love was.
Then Threnody stopped, breaking the cycle.
She pulled her power back with devastating force, reversing the unmaking, redirecting everything she’d gathered. She sent out a pulse of magic to stabilise what was breaking, to knit reality back together where it had started coming apart.
The pulse was violent because there was no gentle way to stop what she’d started. It tore through the fractured reality around them, pushing into the places where past and present had bled into each other, forcing them back into their proper places.
The force of the pulse ripped Threnos’ arms from around her waist and threw him through the air. His body hurtled twenty feet before hitting the broken cobblestones. He rolled across the ground, tumbling over rubble and debris, before slamming into a section of collapsed wall.
He lay crumpled against the stone, one arm bent at a wrong angle beneath him. Blood ran from a gash across his forehead, pooling on the cobblestones beside his face.
The opalescent light around Threnody flickered once, then died completely.
She stood alone in the silent square, surrounded by bodies and rubble and the man who had chosen to stay with her whilst everything burned.
She took a step toward him, then another, her legs barely holding her weight. The distance between them felt infinite.
What had she done?
Chapter 29
Rafe sagged against a chunk of rubble, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The silence was worse than the chaos had been. Wind howled through the broken streets and fires burned in the rubble blocks away, but the destruction itself had finally stopped.
He forced his head up, searching the devastation for some sign the Arcana had survived, but the Echo and Threnos had vanished. One moment they’d been there and now there was just wreckage and dust and the taste of ash and blood in his mouth.
Relief should have flooded through him. Reality had held and the city still stood, or what remained of it. He was still alive, but Vesper might not be. The Echo might have taken her somewhere unreachable, might have consumed her entirely, might have done any of a thousand things he couldn’t begin to comprehend. He had no idea where to look or where they’d gone or how to find them. He couldn’t tell if there was still a them to find. Maybe they’d left for another world entirely, leaving him to die in the rubble alone.
At least their world would be finally free of the Arcana. Those that endured wouldn’t have to contend with them ever again.
Owen and Ember lay unconscious a few metres away where they’d collapsed. Owen’s chest rose and fell steadily, and Ember’s face was pale but her breathing looked okay. They needed help. They needed him to pull himself together and figure out what came next.
Rafe dragged himself forward, trying to push onto his knees, but every attempt was agony. He’d barely covered half the distance when he saw something moving behind him. Then someone appeared at his side.
His hand went for the dagger still tucked in his belt, ready to roll on his back and strike upward, but then he saw who it was and the tension drained out of him so fast he nearly collapsed.
“Blair?”
She looked as broken as he felt. Her face was drawn with exhaustion, streaked with dirt, and what might have been dried blood. Her clothes were torn and scorched, but it was her eyes that hit him hardest, the hollowed out shock that matched the grinding emptiness in his own chest. She’d been through her own version of hell.
“Rafe.” Her voice cracked on his name and she caught his arm, helping him sit up. “You’re alive.”
“Barely,” he rasped. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I had to come.” Something raw moved across her expression, grief and desperation tangled together. “I thought if I could just reach her, if I could talk to the Echo, maybe I could convince her to stop. Maybe she’d listen to me and I could save everyone.” Her voice broke. “I was so sure I could do something. What an idiot, huh?”
Rafe stared at her. Blair had come here to face down an Arcana who was unmaking reality. She’d walked straight into the apocalypse because she thought she might be able to stop it. The sheer courage it must have taken…or maybe it was desperation. Maybe there wasn’t much difference between the two when the world was ending.
“Blair.” He forced the word out past the tightness in his throat. “I’m sorry. About Theo. I should have said it before, but everything happened so fast and then you were gone and I—”
“Don’t.” She cut him off, her fingers pressing hard against his arm. “Don’t apologise for surviving. Don’t apologise for any of it.” She looked away for a moment, blinking hard. When she met his gaze again her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “We were all blindsided by Tenebrae. It’s no one’s fault. He manipulated Praxis long before we came along. This whole business…”
The grief in her voice was palpable. Rafe wanted to say something that would help, to offer her some comfort, but there was nothing. Theo was gone and no words would bring him back. So many more were gone with him. All they had was this moment and they were both alive when so many others weren’t.
“I watched you,” Blair said quietly. “When I got here. I saw you with Threnos and the Echo. I saw what you did.”
Rafe’s chest constricted. “I didn’t do anything. I tried to reach Vesper but I couldn’t—”
“You reached her.” Blair’s voice was firm. “Maybe not the way you wanted to, but you did. I saw it, Rafe. I saw the way the Echo looked at you when she pulled the Arcana out of you.” She paused, seeming to gather herself. “I came here thinking I was the one who could convince her, to reach to whatever humanity might still exist in an Arcana who destroyed her own world, but I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong to try.”
“No, but I was wrong about who she’d listen to.” Blair’s grip on his arm shifted, became almost urgent. “I watched Threnos with her. I saw how he was willing to sacrifice himself, to be with her as she tore everything apart. He loved her that much. He’s loved her for thousands of years and he was ready to let her destroy the world if it meant they could be together at the end.”
Rafe’s throat closed. He remembered the way Threnos had looked at the Echo, the raw devotion in every line of his body. The absolute certainty that he would follow her into oblivion.
“But she stopped,” Blair continued. “Reality held, and I think it’s because of you.”
“Me?” The word came out hoarse. “Blair, I couldn’t even get one word out. I—”
“Love.” Blair’s expression softened. “That’s what reached her. Love. She saw it and she pulled back.” Her hand slid down to his wrist, her fingers cold against his skin. “She’ll listen to you, Rafe. Not because of what you can offer her or what you can threaten, but because of what you feel for Vesper.”
