T he magic was too fast, too much, to control by myself. The realization that this would kill me didn’t come in a single moment, but in a slow
solidification of truth.
When I saw Max, I wanted to weep, wanted to tell him, What are you doing here, you fool, you’re supposed to be free and safe somewhere far away from here?
And yet, my traitorous heart was happy.
When Max took my hands, he didn’t need to say a word. I knew exactly what we were doing. I opened my mind and my body to his magic, and he yielded to mine. I almost gasped when he let me into his mind. It was so different from before—walls replaced with claw-gouged passages, as if he had ripped them out with sheer force. They were tender and bleeding, like wounds.
Well… they were wounds, weren’t they?
Only one wall remained. It was the thickest, the most imposing. His fingers squeezed mine. His fear shivered through me as if it was my own.
We would dismantle this one together.
 |
I STAND BEFORE THE DOOR. Max is beside me. He takes my hand. It trembles slightly.
He cannot bring himself to open this door. He has torn out all the rest.
But this one he cannot face alone.
I open it for him.
We step through it together. I stand beside him as the memory floods through it. We watch as a younger version of himself falls victim to terrible power he cannot control. We watch him, one by one, slaughter his family.
We end in the cottage in the woods, over the burning body of a twelve- year-old girl.
We end with Max on his hands and knees, weeping. Max clutches my hand and does not let go.
|
I OPENED my eyes to meet his. They were looking at me the way they always had—it was the gaze of someone who knew every word of our story.
Tears streaked his cheeks. I wiped them away with my thumb.
“I love you,” I whispered—because what else could I offer him? I could not erase his past. I could not take away his grief. But I could love him, no matter what, always. Was that enough?
Everything was dissolving into streaks of color and light. I now held onto this power by only a single fraying thread of control. My power was a single wing, one half of a scale. I needed him.
“I love you,” Max murmured, and opened his second eyelids.
I had forgotten how powerful he was. With the barriers between him and his magic removed, it now met mine with equal strength. The boundaries between us erased, my Valtain magic and his Solarie magic combining into a single symphony.
Together, we reached down, down, down, into the lowest levels of magic—reached for this power that called to us and repelled us in equal measure.
And it was only with our combined powers, the passage between us opened, that it was distilled into balanced, raw force. Time and place and space disappeared. We were a river stretching out in all directions. We were the bodies and breaths of the soldiers above. We were the sky and the ruins and the city of Niraja in the past and the present. We were ourselves as we were ten years ago, lost, alone, and as we were now—found, together.
We Wielded the core of power like snatching a burning star from the sky.
