Page 56 of Bright Blinding Ruin

I’ll never forget her or what she did for me. She helped me get where I am today. She is, by all accounts, the only reason I’m still standing here today. Her death will not be in vain. Invictis will never harm another innocent ever again.

That’s a fucking promise.

As the sun continues to rise, becoming more than a sliver on the distant horizon, I close my eyes and inhale deeply. I still wear my bloodied clothes; I’m going to need new ones after this,but changing before the big fight just didn’t seem right. These clothes have been washed in rivers and streams, went through hell and back with me; it’s only right that I wear them until the end.

Breathing in, I can taste it in the air. The aether. The magic. The life. Laconia is a land that has been under guard too long; it wants to be free of its golden shadow. It wants to begin anew, for real this time.

Falling into the aether helped me see so much. I can feel everything. The world around me is more real, the colors more vibrant and the shadows themselves more pure. The touch of the wind on my cheek is a caress from a lover. Everything is intensified because I am one with it.

I open my eyes. The sun is a tiny half-ball in the distance, and yet I’m surrounded by light. A false light, a light whose warmth is false, unlike the sun, yet it is still as blinding and searing as the real thing.

Or it used to be. I find out, when I turn around and face Invictis, he doesn’t blind me anymore, even when his eight-foot-tall, golden body glows with all it’s got.

“Fancy seeing you here,” I say, folding my arms over my chest.

Invictis hovers twenty or so feet above the ground, his six metallic wings stationary behind him. He is impressive, of course. He always was. Whatever he is, wherever he came from, he is a being like no other.

I guess it goes back to the laws of motion. What’s the one? For every action there must be a reaction? Invictis pushed against Laconia for so long, now it’s pushing back through me.

“Ah,” his deep, monstrous voice echoes through the air even though he has no face, only an outline of a head, where his light originates, a twisted halo if I ever saw one. “Is this the part where you make awful jokes?”

“Awful?” I repeat, dropping my hands to my waist. “Excuse me, sir? None of my jokes are awful. God, you’re kind of an asshole, you know that?”

Invictis tilts his golden head at me. “You stand there, believing you know it all. Regardless of what you think you know, Rey, I am beyond your comprehension. I am—”

“So much more than I could ever dream of, blah, blah, blah,” I interrupt him with a smirk. “Yeah, yeah, you said that already, like a thousand times. I fucking get it, dude. You think you’re hot shit, but guess what? All shit stinks.”

He lets out a growl of annoyance, and in the blink of an eye, he appears before me, his feet firmly planted on the ground. His metallic hand shoots out and grabs me by the throat, hoisting me off the ground without any resistance on my part. “I cannot wait for the day when your aggravation ceases!”

All I can do is laugh even though it’s not so easy to do with his large hand around my neck.

The laughing further annoys him, and he spins around and throws me back. I roll on the dirt once, then twice, and before I can roll a third time, fire erupts under my soles and my hands, and I use the magic to dig myself into the dirt and grind myself to a halt.

Invictis watches as I dust myself off. He stands before the sunrise, his wings outspread. With the growing sunlight dancing off his metallic, golden body, he is so beautiful it hurts. A being like him should not exist.

“Am I supposed to be impressed that you now have Krotas’s magic?” His shoulders rise and fall as he chuckles darkly. “Please. You can have all the magic in Laconia and it will never be enough.”

A great ball of blinding light forms over his head, a mini star, shining and glistening, so powerful it puts the sun itself to shame.

“Your fate was always to perish,” he goes on, his hubris knowing no bounds, even now. “I once told you you will kneel before me, beg me to end your miserable, wretched life. It is time I made good on that promise.”

Fifteen feet between us, the ball of magic launches itself at me, coming down at me like a star falling out of the sky, a meteor burning its way through the atmosphere. Blinding, practically invincible—and yet not quite.

The light from the sphere is all I can see as it hurls toward me. I can imagine Invictis thinks it’ll destroy me, that I’ll succumb to its immense power, but I’m not the same girl I used to be.

I throw up a translucent shield moments before impact, and that shield sizzles with colors of all kinds, reminiscent of the magic I inherited from each of the three empresses. Reds, blues, greens, and light grays. The shield absorbs the impact, and when the ball dissipates, I’m still standing, albeit a few inches back, my heels having dug down into the dirt.

“Oh,” I say as my shield disappears, “was that supposed to make me fall to my knees or something? Come on, buddy. You’re gonna have to try a lot harder than that to get me on my knees.”

He launches himself at me at full force, a sharp yellow blade of light forming in both his hands. At the same time, the world around us changes, morphing to the courtyard in my college, a place I’ll never see again. A trick meant to distract me like it had before.

But I’m ready for him, and I never take my eyes off him, even as the world changes and I’m surrounded by thick, luscious grass and trees that have been growing since the college’s formation.

And you know what? This bitch ain’t the only one who can summon swords of magic.

Two flaming blades appear in my hands, and I deflect his oncoming attack with expertise I can only attribute to beingconnected with him, with everything. It’s like, now that my eyes are open, I know what he’s going to do before he does it. I can anticipate his moves, know how to counter them. I am one with the ruin that has devastated all of Laconia and I will overcome.

I will overcome Invictis, defeat the undefeated. He will be the one to fall on his knees today.

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