Page 51 of Bright Blinding Ruin

How the hell am I supposed to accept any of this? I’m still stuck on the part where Invictis is inside me, some tiny sliver of him, and that’s why it feels like we’re connected even though he’s not a glowing tattoo on my wrist anymore.

“Laconia needs you, just as it needed me all that time ago. With you, Laconia will prosper once again, become a kingdom that rivals all. They may have feared you when you first came into their lives, but they will learn to celebrate you and everything you accomplish for them.”

The only thing I can say is something I’ve been saying this whole time. “I don’t want to be a hero.”

The first high empress smiles at me. “There is no such thing as heroes. Once you accept every part of yourself, you will learn that those who some call heroes are simply people willing to do what is right, even when it seems impossible. Laconia does not need a hero. It needs you.”

I turn away. Everything she told me bounces around in my head, so much information, so fast. How can I accept it all just like that and move on? I mean, shit, it isn’t every day a girllearns she has a piece of an ancient weapon nestled inside her somewhere, that she’s had that piece inside her since before she was born.

Fuck.

“But how—” My voice dies when I turn toward the high empress, because she’s gone. She’s gone and I am alone on this platform surrounded by a sea of glowing aether.

The aether.

I reach for the necklace and yank it off my neck. The three vials, each holding a glowing liquid, stare back at me. Fred said I need to combine them. I look at the white aether just beyond the platform and shuffle my way toward the nearest ledge.

Lowering to my knees, I unscrew the first aether, the bluish-gray one from Pylos. The vial unscrews from the necklace, its lid the only part still attached. I take the vial and hold it out above the aether around me. The high empress said nothing about combining the aethers, but I’m here, so I might as well.

I dump it in.

It’s only a few ounces, but it’s enough. The moment the aether from Pylos hits the sea of white aether, the whole thing glows a bluish-gray hue.

I do the same for Acadia’s aether, dumping it in and watching as the aether around me flashes with green. The last one in is the aether from Magnysia… the vial my mom gave Fred, already full. A sigh escapes me before I pour it in. A red flash greets me, and I start to think that’s that before everything around me turns white.

Like, blindingly white.

I fall back and shield my eyes, dropping the necklace with the now-empty vials in the process. It takes a few seconds for the light to die down, and when it does, I lower my arm and suck in a hard breath.

The aether is… it’s everywhere. I can see it everywhere. In the air around me, threads of colorful magic twisting and combining, floating and falling all at once. Tiny jolts of magic made of reds, blues, and greens. Where they combine, they make a bright white. It’s like someone took glitter and colored the air itself.

When my gaze lowers, I see the sea of aether around the platform is in much the same shape. Now, instead of a pure white, it’s made of a multitude of colors—not only reds and greens and blues, but every color in between. A rainbow of energy as far as the eyes can see.

It’s beautiful.

I crawl toward the ledge, thinking back to what the first empress told me. When she came upon the aether, she bathed in it. Don’t know what kind of radioactivity I might be diving into, but now’s not the time for hesitation. It’s time to just do it.

So I stand, turn around, and push off the edge of the stone platform, sending myself falling back into the colorful aether.

The aether is still as thick as ever, more like a mixture between a solid and a liquid, something that refuses to be categorized. And yet, even though that’s how it moves, it doesn’t feel like anything on me as it swallows me up. My legs, my torso, my arms, even my head; I hold my breath as I sink into the aether and let it accept me.

The aether is magic, and it’s connected to everything. It’s alive in its own right.

And now I’m a part of it.

Chapter Twenty

Something shifts around me, causing me to open my eyes. I’m not in the aether anymore, not in the great chasm. I’m in a world of white, where you can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. And I’m not alone.

Someone else stands twenty feet away with his back to me. Based on the regal clothes he wears, not to mention the blond hair, I can tell who it is. A body that’s not his, though perhaps the tallness and general wideness of that body’s frame does belong to him.

He must sense me, because he turns around with a deliberate slowness that makes something inside me tense up. His mouth pulls into a line, his jaw grinding, and his bright blue eyes narrow in my direction. He wears what he wore when I first saw him sitting on that throne in Acadia, minus the golden circlet around his head.

I didn’t know then who he was, but looking back, I felt drawn to him, just like I felt at ease with Rune. A part of him is inside me… as much as I don’t want to believe it, it would explain why I still feel the way I feel.

How I can hate him and at the same time not.

“What is this?” Invictis asks, his voice that same accented voice that nagged me constantly when he was nothing more than a glowing tattoo on my wrist. Not so unnatural like it is when he’s got six wings and no face.

---