They’d been waiting.

  Threnody felt Vesper’s presence strengthen within her, lending courage she hadn’t known she needed. The Resonant’s determination, her fierce love for the people who might still be saved, flowed through their shared consciousness.

  Threnos moved to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The bond between them thrummed with energy, ancient and unbreakable. After millennia of separation, they were no longer alone.

  For the first time since awakening, Threnody had a choice that wasn’t about annihilation. She could end this without triggering another cataclysm. She could remove the last of the corrupted Arcana and give the world back to humanity.

  Break the cycle instead of repeating it.

  Give them a choice to shape their own future.

  Threnody stepped forward into the smoke, Threnos at her side, moving towards the last of their corrupted kind.

  To whatever end.

  Chapter 21

  The streets didn’t end so much as collapse into each other. Blair guided a family of four around a section of road that had buckled, the cobblestones jutting up. Reed moved ahead, testing the ground before waving them forward.

  Blair’s magic pulsed beneath her skin, showing her the ley lines. The Arcana were moving again. North toward more residential districts.

  “We’ve got maybe ten minutes,” she told Aldrick.

  He nodded, already helping an elderly woman navigate the broken street. The woman clutched a bag to her chest, her knuckles white. It was everything she owned, probably. At least everything she’d managed to grab before her home collapsed.

  They’d found ten people this time. It wasn’t enough, but it was what they had.

  The evacuation route wound through what used to be residential streets made up of modern row houses and Georgian terraces patched together in a mish-mash of architecture, but now they were destroyed. Empty windows gaped at them. Doors hung from broken hinges. Someone’s life scattered across the cobblestones in fragments of pottery and torn fabric. A child’s toy, trampled into the mud. A painted portrait, the faces rendered unrecognisable by water damage and ash.

  “Keep moving,” Blair called. “Eyes forward.”

  A man stumbled. Reed caught his arm, steadied him, kept him walking. They’d developed a rhythm over the past hours. Find the survivors. Guide them to safety. Move before the Arcana noticed.

  Repeat until there was no one left to save…or until the world ended.

  Behind them, a building groaned. The sound echoed through the empty street, followed by the crash of stone hitting stone. Blair didn’t turn around.

  Then her magic flared. She stopped, holding up her hand.

  “What is it?” Reed moved beside her.

  “Fortis, I think. Shifting northwest.” She closed her eyes, following the disturbance through the ley lines. The patterns showed her where his power was concentrating, where reality was bending under the weight of an Arcana’s presence. “Heading toward the old merchant quarter.”

  “How long?”

  “We’re clear for now, but we need to move faster.”

  Reed nodded, already turning to hurry the group along. The civilians didn’t question it.

  The checkpoint appeared ahead, marked by two Praxis agents standing watch at an intersection. Finley, still sporting a bandage around his head from an earlier injury, and Sienna, her face drawn with exhaustion but her stance alert.

  “Any trouble?” Blair asked as they approached.

  “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Finley said. “Some structural instability two streets over. We redirected them around it.”

  Blair watched the survivors file past, their faces hollow with exhaustion and shock. A mother carrying a sleeping child. An old man leaning heavily on a younger woman’s arm. Two teenagers supporting each other, both limping. How many more were out there? How many trapped in collapsed buildings, hiding in basements, bleeding out in alleyways while the Arcana tore their city apart?

  “Blair!”

  She turned. Denny was running toward them. His coat was torn at the shoulder, and ash streaked his face.

  “What is it?”

  “Cormac,” he said, slightly breathless. “He’s asking for you.”

  Blair blinked. “What?”

  “His voice came back. Edmund’s with him now, but they didn’t get far before he made them stop. He says he needs to see you.” Denny paused, catching his breath. “It’s important.”

  Blair looked at Reed. He nodded before she could ask.

  “We’ll handle this,” he said. “Go.”

  Blair followed Denny back through the ruined streets. Her boots crunched over broken glass and worse things she tried not to identify. The smell of smoke hung heavy in the air, mixing with the acrid scent of corrupted magic. Her mind raced as they moved. What could possibly be so important that Cormac would demand they stop mid-evacuation? He would know the situation. How they needed to keep moving, to keep saving people before the Arcana killed them.

  They turned down a side street, then another. The devastation here was worse. Whole buildings had collapsed, their contents spilling into the road. Blair had to climb over a pile of rubble, using a broken doorframe for support.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “Just ahead. They found shelter in one of the townhouses.”

  Three streets over, tucked between two partially collapsed buildings, stood a narrow townhouse. The structure looked precarious, listing slightly to the left, but the walls still stood. Edmund appeared in the doorway as they approached, relief crossing his face when he saw Blair.

  “Thank goodness,” he said. “He’s been insistent. He wouldn’t let me move him until you arrived.”

  “Is it that bad?” she asked.

  “He seems to think so.”

  Blair stepped inside. The ground floor was mostly intact, though the ceiling had partially collapsed in one corner, exposing wooden beams and plaster. Cormac sat propped against the wall opposite the door, pale and gaunt but his eyes clear for the first time in weeks. The change was startling. He looked older, but he was awake. Truly awake.

  Reed and Aldrick followed her in, closing the door behind them. Cormac’s gaze found Blair, and something in his expression made her throat tighten.

  “You look like hell,” she said, crouching beside him.

  “How many?” His voice came out hoarse, rough from weeks of disuse.

  “Survivors?” Blair settled onto the floor, ignoring the dust that coated everything. “Maybe a hundred that we’ve evacuated to the western districts. There are more scattered throughout the city, but Fermata and Fortis…” She didn’t need to finish. They all knew what the Arcana were doing.

  Cormac’s jaw tightened, his hands clenching into fists where they rested on his knees. “Tell me what happened,” he said. “Everything.”

  So Blair did. She told him everything that’d happened after the massacre at Saint Aldwin’s. The titan. How they’d retrieved the Echo fragments and the truth about her own magic. The Nightweaver’s betrayal and the ritual that led to Theo and Faith crystallising, then shattering into nothing. Vesper merging with all four Echo fragments to stop Tenebrae and save her from becoming an unwilling vessel. Tenebrae dragging the Echo into some liminal prison while the other Arcana walked free in the physical world. Fermata and Fortis destroying the city, killing anyone who stood in their way. How she believed Tenebrae was dead and the Echo was now free, wandering…

  Cormac listened without interruption, his expression growing more grave with each revelation. Edmund stood by the door, arms crossed. Reed leaned against the wall beside him. Aldrick had arrived during her report and moved to the broken window, watching the street outside.

  When Blair finished, silence filled the room. Dust drifted through a beam of light filtering in from outside. Somewhere distant, another building collapsed with a boom that echoed on and on for a long time.

  Cormac’s gaze held hers. She watched something shift behind his eyes. A decision being made. A secret held for too long, finally ready to be released. “The seven knew,” he said. “The truth about everything. They knew and passed it down through the generations. When Praxis was born, the truth followed.”

  Blair’s pulse quickened. “What?”

  “The seven mages who founded Nightreach knew the Echo housed a living soul.” His voice grew stronger as he spoke, as if the act of confession was giving him back his strength. “They didn’t mistake her for a relic or a source of power. They knew exactly what they were caging.”

  The room contracted around her. Beside the door, Reed had gone very still. Edmund’s arms dropped to his sides. Even Aldrick turned from the window.

  Cormac shifted against the wall, wincing. “The founders discovered the monolithic stone with a divine consciousness already inside it.” He paused, his gaze finding Blair’s again. “But what they discovered, was that the soul had placed itself there willingly.”

  “What?” she said. “She chose to become that stone? How did they figure it out?”

  “Yes, she chose it.” Cormac’s voice was steady now, certain. “She built her own monument from grief and love, and her truth was written in the stone.”

  The symbols, Blair realised. When she’d seen the Echo in the Fold that day, when Vesper had shattered it rather than let D’Arco become its vessel, she’d seen markings writhing across it. Living images, sigils, runes, markings that must have told a truth she couldn’t possibly have read at the time. Maybe now she was a Resonant of sorts, she might, but it didn’t matter now.

  “One of the seven was a Resonant,” she murmured. “That’s how they knew.” But not the right Resonant at the right time. The Echo was only here now because the others had found a way to reemerge into the world.

  “It seems so.” Cormac cleared his throat and went on, “The seven mages built Nightreach and the surrounding Fold, knowing they were containing an ancient entity who had chosen this penance. Over centuries, this knowledge was deliberately buried. It was forgotten by everyone except the highest levels of Praxis.”

  Two thousand years of captivity in the heart of Nightreach—and who knew how many more before—being treated as a thing rather than a person, of having her consciousness split and scattered and studied and weaponised. And she’d chosen it.

  Why?

  “How do you imprison yourself?” Reed asked, voicing the question before Blair could.

  “They are entities made of magic. They aren’t human.” Cormac looked up at him. “She wove her consciousness into the stone itself and created an anchor that would hold for millennia. The sigils carved into the monolith were her song of mourning made permanent.” His gaze grew distant, as if he was seeing something beyond the ruined townhouse, and beyond the destroyed city. “The prison wasn’t meant to hold her in. It was meant to give her a way to hold herself apart from the world.”

  “Why?” Blair heard herself ask. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “The founders never knew.” Cormac’s attention returned to her. “But they understood it was punishment, perhaps, for something she’d done or couldn’t stop. The details were lost even then.”

  “The Resonants,” Blair said, her mind racing through connections. “Why do they exist then? Did she create them so she’d have a way back?”

  “Remnants, perhaps.” Aldrick spoke before Cormac could answer, his tone thoughtful. “Fragments of her magic from before she became the Echo. Pieces that scattered during whatever event drove her into that stone. But there’s no way to know for sure. Only that they’re linked.”

  Blair stood, moving to the broken window where Aldrick had been standing. Outside, smoke rose in columns from burning districts. The sky churned and twisted, reality fracturing at the edges…and somewhere out there, the Echo walked free in Vesper’s body.

  “She has the power to end this,” Blair said, not turning from the window. “She could stop the Arcana and return to the Echo. She killed Tenebrae. That’s the only way his liminal space could have been destroyed. She could do it.”

  “Could she?” Edmund asked. “If the stone was her own creation, destroyed when Vesper shattered the Echo, could she rebuild it? She made it when she was a full Arcana. Now she’s in a human vessel.”

  “She’s a god,” Blair said. “Or close enough. If she built it once, she can build it again.”

  “But would she?” Reed’s question hung in the air, heavy with implications. “If you soul was stuck in a rock for thousands of years, would you want to go back? The Echo was allegedly a repository, remember? Even if she chose it, all those memories might’ve driven her mad.”

  “Reed’s right,” Cormac murmured. “The Echo saw every memory made from magic. That’s our civilisation and all the ones that came before, even her own.”

  Blair pressed her palm against the window frame, feeling the rough wood beneath her fingers. Splinters bit into her skin as she realised what she had been planning might’ve been foolish from the beginning. Bargaining for a world with a divine mind gone mad.

  The silence stretched. Outside, the wind picked up, carrying ash and the smell of burning stone.

  “So, the question isn’t whether she can save us,” Blair finally said. “It’s whether she will.”

  She turned back to face the room. Cormac watched her with glassy eyes. Reed and Edmund exchanged glances. Aldrick had moved away from the wall, his attention fully focused on her now.

  “I’m going to do what I planned to do all along,” Blair said. “I’m going to find her and plead our case. I’m not too proud that I’d get on my knees and beg for it.”

  “Blair.” Reed stepped forward. “You can’t negotiate with a broken mind. The power she has…”

  “I won’t negotiate. I have nothing she wants.” She held his gaze…and her tears. “It’s desperate, reckless, and probably a suicide mission, but it’s all we have left. Weapons won’t work. Plans won’t work. All we have is the truth. The hope that somewhere inside her, there’s something that remembers what it means to care.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “No.”

  “Blair—”

  “Someone needs to continue the evacuations,” she told him. “Someone needs to lead Praxis if I don’t come back. That’s you, Reed. You know it is.”

  He looked like he wanted to argue, but Cormac’s quiet voice cut through the tension before he could speak.

  “She’s right.”

  Reed’s jaw worked. He stared at Blair for a long moment, then nodded, stepping back. The acceptance in his eyes was worse than any argument would have been.

  Blair moved to where her sword rested against the wall beside the door. She picked it up, the familiar weight settling into her hand. The blade was notched in three places from recent fighting. The leather wrapping on the hilt was worn smooth. It felt inadequate for what she was about to do, laughably insufficient actually, but it was something. A tether to who she’d been before Tenebrae had turned her into this artificial thing. Before Theo had died. Before the world had ended. Her life as a detective in the otherworld, as a human woman, seemed so far away now.

  She buckled the sword belt around her waist, checking the buckle. Cormac gave a slight nod from where he sat against the wall.

  Blair looked at each of them in turn. Reed, whose loyalty had never wavered even when she’d made terrible choices. Aldrick, who’d appeared from nowhere and offered his help when they needed it most. Edmund, who’d kept Cormac alive through weeks of silence, who’d never given up hope that he might return.

  And Cormac himself, finally awake but still carrying everything in every line of his face. All the deaths at Saint Aldwin’s. All the choices that had led them here.

  “If I don’t come back,” Blair said, “tell them I tried.” She hesitated, then scoffed. “If you get the chance.”

  Reed’s expression twisted. “Blair⁠—”

  But she was already moving. Heading for the door before he could say whatever he’d been planning to say. Before any of them could offer words that might change her mind or make this harder than it already was.

  She stepped out into the ruined city, sword at her hip…and followed the pull of her artificial magic toward the Spirefields.

  She thought of Theo as she walked. How he’d believed in strategy and planning, in gathering information and making informed decisions. He’d spent his life studying magic, trying to understand its rules and limitations. He’d developed the ritual that had made her a mage and had wanted to delve into the most dangerous realms of magic to save their friends.

  He would have told her this plan was madness…then joined her on her reckless journey.

  But Theo was gone and Blair was what remained. An artificial Resonant. A failed vessel. A woman with a sword and desperate hope.

  The Spirefields rose ahead, the magical disturbance so intense it made her bones ache. Buildings from different eras had merged together, their architecture bleeding into distorted combinations. A Victorian townhouse fused with a Georgian manor. Roman stones supporting Tudor beams. Time itself had fractured here, leaving behind monuments to chaos. The fate of a Forgotten Quarter.

  Blair kept walking.

  Her Resonant senses flared suddenly, catching something in the pattern of the ley lines. Two presences approaching through the devastated streets ahead. One shimmered with opalescent power that bent reality around it, vast and ancient and terrible. The Echo.

  The other felt older somehow. Quieter but no less immense. Threnos. The one hiding within Ash, it had to be.

  Blair stopped, watching as two figures appeared in the distance. This was her moment.

  She better not mess it up.

  Chapter 22

  Fermata felt the shift in the ley lines before anything else changed.

  The magical currents beneath Nightreach had been trembling for hours, reeling from the destruction she and Fortis had wrought, but this was different. This was a presence that made the foundations of reality recoil. Divine power, unmistakable and immense, moving toward them through the ruined city.