Page 54 of The Malevolent Eight

And with that, the Glorian Ardentor fled the citadel carrying with him the Auroral Banner to a little temple where he would, as promised, find a being he trusted instantly with this holiest of artefacts. After all, who wouldn’t trust a diabolic restauranteur transmogrified to look like an Angelic Emissary after being kidnapped and threatened with exsanguination by a blood mage?

I hope Shame makes the metamorphosis hurt, Tenebris. Not sure I’ll let her turn you back after, either.

‘So how exactly do we get out of here alive?’ Corrigan asked after our unwitting accomplice had skedaddled with the prize.

‘Simple,’ I replied, and stuck my head out of the vault to shout, ‘The banner has been stolen! The Auroral Banner has been stolen! Assemble every Glorian, every soldier, every recruit– itmustbe found!’

Andthat, friends, is how you secure a priceless relic being kept in an impenetrable fortress and render it to your client without ever touching it. I mean, sure, it helps if the people guarding said treasure are thick-witted zealots and those paying you to obtain it are only slightly less brainless, but I think you’ll find that there’s always plenty of stupid to go around during wartime.

‘Come on,’ I said to Corrigan, pointing to the passageway that would soon be crowded with panicked soldiers. ‘I could really use a decent meal.’

‘Paella?’ Corrigan asked hopefully, walking through the open door ahead of me.

I shook my head sadly. ‘There are some miracles even I can’t pull off, old friend.’

It was, as these things go, a nice moment, or it would have been had it happened that way. What actually transpired was that the moment Corrigan had stepped out of the vault, just as I was saying, ‘There are some miracles even I can’t pull off—’ the door shut behind him, locking me inside. You see, when I suggested that war makes suckers of the unwary, I forgot to include myself among them.

Chapter 30

Reunions

She stood at the centre of the Glorian Vault, every inch the self-assured, almost roguish Spellslinger who’d beaten the pants off me and my friends only a week ago. And yet, something was off about her. The curls of her dark mahogany hair still gleamed with that same lustre; they still kissed the bronze skin of her high cheekbones. She wasn’t quite my age; I knew that now. Perhaps twenty-four? Yet in those amber eyes I now recognised a lifetime of suffering whose tribulations began with. . . me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

The smirk didn’t change, not even a fraction. ‘For what?’

I knew already that we were in dangerous territory. During our strange encounter in the Auroral Archives, when she was still the frightened young woman only recently unlawfully incarcerated by my fellow Justiciars, she’d mentioned that in the destiny she’d tried to bring forward in time, I always arrived too late to save the child. That was the key to all of this, I was sure of it: the event that had transformed Eliva’ren from terrified captive to the most dangerous wonderist I’d ever met. That also meant that if I mentioned the child too soon, I might trigger a deadly response. I’d already seen how casually she could kill, bringing forth what she called one of her victims’ ‘three dooms’.

So think of something else, idiot. Something that will keep her intrigued about you without awakening dangerous memories.

At first, I hadn’t noticed the way the interior of the vault was changing. The alterations were subtle, like watching the world around you age ever so slowly. The gleaming walls were beginning to show stains of damp while hairline cracks were splitting the stone. Cobwebs appeared in the corners; faint odours of mould permeated the stale air. This newly erected Glorian fortress was meeting one of its dooms: abandonment and inexorable ruination. None of this was especially momentous as far as magic went, nor especially troubling. What did surprise me was that it appeared to be happening without the Spellslinger being aware of what she was doing.

Which explains why she chose this place to confront me.

‘I’m sorry you had to come back here,’ I said at last.

Again, her features remained unmoving, frozen in that flawless, enticing expression of mild amusement and absolute self-confidence. ‘A guess?’ she asked.

She’s worried she gave something away. It’s as important to her that she can out-think me as it is that she can out-fight me.

I began to pace around the vault, mesmerised as it slowly deteriorated before my eyes. ‘The Lords Celestine don’t do anything without a reason. Like the Lords Devilish, they have a particular obsession with symmetry and symbolism. This grand fortress, this testament not only to Auroral might but to its inherent righteousness, could have been built anywhere. But why waste a symbol merely elevating one’s impending victories, when you can also wipe away the stain of one of your worst failures?’ I reached out and brushed the now damp wall with my fingertips. ‘You can’t bring back the past, can you? You can’t return this vault to whatever cavern or dungeon it was when the Lords Celestine had you imprisoned here to experiment on you. You can only bring the future to the present?’

‘It doesn’t work like that. I’m not manipulating time; not time as we know it, anyway.’

‘Doom,’ I said, using her word from when she’d killed the angelic Valiant. ‘But what is a doom if it isn’t just a depressing way of referring to future events?’

‘Destiny is an ending, Cade. It’s the culmination of a set of choices, ours and those of others.’ She came closer, taking my hand in hers and intertwining our fingers. ‘You can’t take your hand away without affecting me in some way, and my reaction will affect you. It’s not theoretical, it’s. . .’

‘Inevitable,’ I finished for her– precisely as she intended, which is no doubt why she smiled approvingly. People always approve of me when I fall into their traps. ‘That doesn’t explain how you can make those results come to pass before any of those subsequent decisions have been made, never mind acted upon.’

She brought our hands closer to her face, smelling the back of mine with a disturbing familiarity, as if the scent were somehow comforting to her. Her voice deepened even as it quieted, lending intimacy to her words. ‘Each decision we make adds momentum to the sequence of events leading to our respective destinies.’ She looked up, blinking as our gazes met. ‘This choice I made just now? It puts us on a path to a kiss neither of us will ever forget.’ Even before I tried to pull away, she’d clenched tighter to my fingers, laughing. ‘Oh, I know, that’s not your way. Wouldn’t be– how shall we say?– gallant?’

‘I never was that,’ I reminded her. ‘Gallantry was just a name they gave me. It never suited me.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Ah, ah, ah. No lies between us, Cade. Whether or not you wanted to be gallant, once they gave you the name, you tried to live up to its meaning. That’s what brought you to me when I needed you most.’

I didn’t sense any alteration in the magic already at work around us slowly turning the Glorian vault to rubble, and yet, my vision filled with the memories of that cavern where my fellow Justiciars and I had found the frightened sixteen-year-old trapped in a realm far from her own. ‘Except that I failed you. I didn’t stand up to Fidelity. Had it been up to me, I would’ve executed you just to avoid her disdain.’

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