Chapter 20: The Whiteout
910 Words
Chapter 20: The Whiteout
The catacombs didn't just brighten; they ceased to be dark.
My skin felt like it was being stitched together with lightning. The violet moonstones in the walls hummed, then shrieked, as my Trinity energy—a cocktail of life, shadow, and divine command—poured into their artificial structures.
"You fool!" Melania screamed, her golden radiance flickering as she tried to stabilize the flow. "You're feeding the heart! You're giving the Eclipse exactly what he needs to wake up!"
"I'm giving him more than he can swallow!" I shouted back.
Beside me, Lucian hauled himself up. His silver-white fur was scorched, but his eyes were fixed on the machine tethering Kaelen. He didn't wait for my signal. He knew the plan. As I blinded the room with a surge of raw, white-hot power, Lucian lunged—not at Melania, but at the grounding cables connecting the altar to the floor.
With a bone-shattering roar, he tore the silver-lined conduits out of the stone.
The circuit broke.
The energy I was pouring into the room had nowhere to go. It rebounded. A massive shockwave of silver and violet light exploded outward, hitting the stone ceiling and sending a rain of dust and debris down upon us.
"NO!" Melania’s voice was lost in the roar of the magical backdraft.
I felt the connection to Lyra snap. The cage of violet energy shattered like glass, and the small girl began to fall. I lunged, my shadows catching her mid-air, pulling her small, limp body toward me.
But the Eclipse’s heart wasn't finished.
Without Kaelen as a conduit or Lyra as a vessel, the shriveled organ began to pulse with a desperate, violent rhythm. It wasn't looking for a body anymore. It was looking for a way out.
The heart lunged toward the broken machine, the silver needles sparking as it fused with the Shadow-Web technology. The stone altar where Kaelen lay began to vibrate, the Void-Stone absorbing the excess energy until it glowed a terrifying, bruised purple.
"Seraphina, we have to get out of here!" Lucian yelled, shifting back into his human form and grabbing Kaelen by the throat, dragging him off the collapsing altar. "The whole sector is going to blow!"
I looked at the heart. It was growing—tendrils of black smoke and silver wire weaving together into a grotesque, pulsating mass. It was no longer an organ; it was a bomb.
"Take Lyra!" I commanded, shoving the unconscious girl into Lucian’s arms.
"Not without you!"
"I'll be right behind you! I have to ground this, Lucian! If this explosion reaches the surface, the whole city becomes a graveyard!"
I didn't wait for his protest. I slammed my hands onto the glowing mass of the heart. I didn't push power in this time. I used the Shadows to create a containment field—a black, suffocating sphere meant to swallow the blast.
“Little blueprint...” the voice of the Eclipse hissed, feeling my touch. “If I cannot have a home, I will have a pyre.”
The world turned white.
The sound was beyond hearing—a frequency that vibrated the soul. I felt the ground vanish beneath me as the containment field held, but the force of the internal explosion threw me upward, through the stone, through the pipes, and into the dark, cold air of the city night.
I hit the pavement of an alleyway two blocks away from the warehouse, my vision swimming. My armor of shadows was gone. My silver markings were dim.
I looked up. A pillar of white light was shooting into the sky from the warehouse district, piercing the clouds and illuminating the city of Aethelgard like a new sun.
The Shadow-Web’s hive was gone.
I coughed, the taste of copper in my mouth. I tried to stand, but my legs gave out. Through the haze, I saw a pair of polished gold heels clicking toward me on the wet asphalt.
Melania.
She looked ruined. Her gold dress was scorched, her face smeared with soot, but her eyes were burning with a madness I’d never seen before. She held a single, glowing sliver of the Eclipse’s heart in her hand.
"You think you won?" she whispered, her voice a jagged blade. "You just gave him a thousand new pieces. Every person who saw that light... every shifter who breathed in that ash... they are now part of him."
She raised the sliver, ready to strike, when a silver-white blur intercepted her.
Lucian.
He didn't kill her. He threw her against the brick wall with such force the stone cracked. He stood over me, his shirt gone, his chest heaving, his eyes glowing a lethal, protective crimson.
"Stay away from my wife," he breathed.
Melania laughed—a high, chilling sound—and dissolved into a cloud of gold dust before Lucian could land a second blow.
"She’s right, Lucian," I whispered, reaching for his hand. I looked up at the pillar of light, which was now raining fine, silver ash over the sleeping city. "The war didn't end tonight."
I looked at the silver ash falling on my palm. It didn't melt. It began to glow.
"It just went viral."
- Writer
