Page 79 of Magical Mission
We weren’t casting a tether.
We were unmaking one.
And the difference wasn’t just semantics.
This shadow-thread tether had been buried inside Krina by someone who claimed to love her, and it wasn’t going to go away quietly.
I could feel the tension and see the way the light recoiled as Nova and Ardetia investigated.
Nova raised her arms again with her voice low, syllables careful and old. Ardetia echoed her in a second tongue that was one I didn’t recognize, but the room did. The magic responded instantly.
Krina flinched.
“Manjalusha, kadorumtether,” Ardetia murmured.
Sparks darted off the walls, and I shuddered.
“It’s okay,” Stella whispered, her voice calm, her hands steady. “You’re safe. He can’t reach you here.”
For a moment, I believed it.
Then the light over Krina’s chest flickered from light to dark.
A shadow’s thread slithered from her collarbone and stretched into the circle. It pulsed… once, twice… then tried to retreat like a root sensing danger.
The tether was real.
And it knew we’d found it.
He knew we’d found it.
Ardetia’s voice didn’t waver, but she moved faster now, drawing fresh sigils midair, anchoring them with thin lines of flame that sparked and shimmered as they landed.
“Tetherlien snulajashka,” Ardetia’s voice rose.
The shadow resisted.
It fought.
But so did we.
That’s when the door opened.
The magic didn’t flare, so whoever entered belonged here. My head turned sharply, with heart in my throat, and there he was.
Keegan and Twobble.
They stepped inside like they’d come from a storm. Keegan’s coat was dusted with raindrops and something darker.
A wrapped charm-warded cloth rested in his hand. He unwrapped it to reveal a glass vial sealed, but faintly glowing, and unmistakablywrong.
He crossed the room without a word and handed it to me.
“It’s a part of him,” he whispered. “I caught the piece of shadow just outside the inn. It came through a mural.”
I stared at the black haze swirling inside the vial, almost fluid, like smoke with a memory.
The vial throbbed once in my hand like a heart that didn’t belong in a body.
