A Good Death for Someone Else

The Hall of Crowns had nine pillars.

I noticed them before the throne. Each held a different light within its stone: green, gold, blue, red, and shades I could not name. Their roots disappeared beneath the floor, while their capitals vanished into a ceiling painted with stars.

Courtiers sat between them at long tables.

No one stood when I entered.

Seraphine took my cloak. Her fingers brushed mine, then withdrew. I gave her no sign that I had noticed.

Aurelia remained beside me, her injured arm hidden beneath a formal mantle.

Alaric wore white and gold. The crown above his brow held a pearl larger than my fist, filled with moving script.

"Your arrival is an answer to prayer," he said.

"Whose?"

An adviser frowned. Alaric smiled more broadly.

"The realm's. You know the barrier weakens. Creatures beyond our world gather wherever its light fades. We require a pure soul to restore the register that sustains it."

"And you've chosen mine."

"Your blood has prepared you for a rare honor."

"Will I survive it?"

The smile did not change.

"You will endure in the protection you give others."

I looked around the tables. Some guests avoided my eyes. Others nodded approvingly, relieved that the required sacrifice had arrived with a name and face that were not theirs.

"So no," I said.

An elderly lord rose.

"There are moments when personal fear must yield to duty."

"Then yield. Offer your soul."

His face darkened.

"Mine lacks your particular purity."

"Convenient."

Aurelia stepped forward.

"The Tide Kingdom offers three ancestral currents toward the repair. Let the burden be shared."

Alaric's eyes cooled.

"You would delay the realm's salvation for a private attachment?"

"I would prefer salvation that doesn't require murdering a guest."

A stir moved through the hall.

The king raised one hand. White bands appeared around the doors. The servants froze where they stood.

Seraphine set my cloak carefully over an empty chair.

I saw the movement from the corner of my eye and understood that she had finished waiting.

"One more question," I told Alaric. "If I decline, may I leave?"

"A sovereign cannot permit one frightened man to doom entire peoples."

"Then don't call this an invitation."

The elderly lord reached for my shoulder.

Black blood spilled from his mouth before he touched me.

Two advisers at the nearest table collapsed with him. Their cups rolled across the floor.

Seraphine stepped around my chair.

"Don't drink the wine," she said to me.

Alaric rose.

Her attendant's coat tore apart in shadow. The crown returned above her head, and the black sword appeared in her hand.

She crossed the hall before the guards could close ranks.

Her first strike split the throne.

Alaric escaped in gold light. The seat fell in two pieces, revealing channels of pale fire beneath it.

The hall erupted.

Guards came through the side doors. Aurelia changed into dragon form, throwing herself between their spears and the central floor. Her scales flashed gold. Blood followed where the spears found gaps.

I sent foxfire toward the doors, burning through the white restraints.

"Leave," I shouted to the servants. "Now."

Most ran. A few courtiers followed them, abandoning titles they had considered more valuable than a stranger's life seconds earlier.

Others drew weapons.

The Wayfarer spoke inside me.

"The pillars are extraction channels. They do not repair the barrier. They divert the power required to sustain it."

I looked at the colors moving inside the stone.

Forests. Tides. Bloodlines. Generations of power drawn from the realms and held beneath the king's throne.

"Can they be broken?"

"Their anchors must be severed before their shells fall. Otherwise the stored power will return to the sovereign binding."

I knelt and pressed my hand against the floor.

Six awakened seals answered. I could feel the channels beneath the marble, each running toward the broken throne like a vein toward a diseased heart.

I cut the first with foxfire.

The nearest pillar dimmed.

"That one," I called to Seraphine.

She turned, understood, and struck it.

Green light burst from the stone. A guard's spear passed through her shoulder as she reached into the released power, burned the king's mark away, and sent the clean current toward me.

I caught it.

The seventh seal opened.

My soul widened, holding the power without tearing. Beneath my feet, the remaining channels became clear.

I moved from one to the next, cutting their roots while Aurelia held the guards back and Seraphine broke their towers.

Each return cost her another wound.

"You don't need to bring it by hand," I said when she stumbled beside me.

"His mark clings to it."

"I can burn it."

She nodded and let me take the next current myself.

That small surrender mattered more than the broken pillar.

The eighth seal opened as the last tower fell.

Something inside my mind cracked with it.

I saw a gutter beneath rain. A fox stealing bread. Seraphine smiling while I threaded a needle through leather. Her hand beneath a table, holding mine where the court could not see.

Then marble. Stakes. A lantern. Mara crying my name.

The memories returned without asking which I wanted.

I staggered.

Seraphine reached toward me and stopped herself.

"You remember."

I looked at her.

All of her was familiar now. The tilt of her mouth when frightened. The scar near her ear I had kissed after a battle. The hands that had healed me, held me, and pulled my soul apart.

"Yes."

She waited for something else.

I could not give it.

Alaric's crown rose from his head. The pearl split open, and the painted stars above us vanished into a vast white eye.

Its light held the same cold certainty I remembered from Lucien's prayers.

"Foreign soul," it said. "You were given an ending."

The king's body dissolved into gold script and flowed upward into the eye.

The Wayfarer's voice sharpened.

"The presence pursued from the lower realm. It has occupied the damaged register and consumed its sleeping guardian."

The oracle. The promise. The furnace.

The thing behind all of them had reached this world too.

"You escaped once," it told me. "There will be no second passage."

The floor stopped beneath my feet. My foxfire froze in the air. Even blood hung motionless above Seraphine's wounds.

Aurelia roared and tore herself free of the stillness, burning the gold from her own scales.

She rose between me and the eye.

White light struck her.

Her horns broke.

She fell through the ruined hall, shaking the floor beneath my knees.

The eye turned toward me again.

This time, Seraphine stepped into its path.