A Harmony of Ages, page 16
They were guiding a family through a narrow alley when Sienna appeared, breathless and wide-eyed.
“Blair,” she gasped. “Cormac. He’s awake.”
Blair’s breath caught. “What?”
“He woke up. Edmund sent me to find you. He’s trying to speak but—“
“Stay here,” Blair told Aldrick. “Keep them moving. I’ll be back.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She ran.
The safehouse felt too far away, every street between her and Cormac stretching impossibly long. Her lungs burned by the time she reached the boarding house, taking the stairs two at a time.
Edmund stood outside the small room, raising his head as she thundered up the stairs.
“Where is he?” Blair asked.
“Inside. But Blair, he can’t speak yet. His vocal cords—“
Blair pushed past him.
Cormac lay on the narrow bed, his eyes open and tracking her movement as she entered. There was light in them now, an alertness she’d been praying to see again.
“Cormac.” Blair crossed the room and knelt beside the bed, taking his hand. His fingers twitched beneath hers, a small movement that sent relief flooding through her chest. “You’re awake.”
His mouth moved, lips forming words that produced no sound. His frustration was evident in the tension of his jaw, the way his hand tightened around hers.
“Don’t,” Blair said gently. “Edmund says your vocal cords need time to heal. You don’t have to speak yet.”
But Cormac kept trying, his eyes urgent. He was trying to tell her something. Something important.
Blair squeezed his hand. “I know. I know you want to help. But right now, you need to rest. Let Edmund take care of you.” She glanced at the healer standing in the doorway. “Can he recover? Fully?”
“With time,” Edmund said. “His body is healing, but the trauma to his mind was severe. It may be days before he can speak, and even then—“
“Days we don’t have,” Blair muttered. She looked back at Cormac. “We’re evacuating and moving people away from the Arcana. They’re on a rampage in the city, but they don’t seem to be headed this way yet, but you might have to leave in a hurry.”
Cormac’s eyes closed briefly, then opened again. He nodded. A small gesture, but it was acknowledgment. Understanding.
“We’re doing everything we can.” Blair stood. “Keep him safe.”
“Where are you going?” Edmund asked.
“Back out there.” Blair checked her sword, making sure the blade was secure in its sheath. “There are still people who need help.”
She left before Edmund could argue, taking the stairs down and emerging into the street. The sounds of destruction were louder now as larger buildings toppled. Every minute she wasted was another life lost.
Aldrick was waiting where she’d left him, surrounded by a group of survivors that had grown to nearly twenty people. He’d organised them efficiently, the strongest supporting the wounded, the children clustered in the middle for protection.
“Reed came back with agents Denny and Barnes,” Aldrick said. “They’re clearing the buildings to the west, making sure we’re not leaving anyone behind.”
“Good.” Blair’s artificial Resonance pulsed again, stronger this time. She closed her eyes, feeling the fractured ley lines beneath her feet. The disturbances rippled through the magical network, creating patterns she could almost read. “The Arcana are moving north. We need to go south.”
“How do you know?” one of the survivors asked, a young man with burn marks across his arms.
Blair opened her eyes. “I can feel it in the ley lines. They’re reacting to the Arcana’s power.” She glanced at Aldrick, who recognised her meaning, even if no one else did. “Must be the damage to them…”
It was the first time her artificial Resonance had been useful. The first time this cursed mark Tenebrae had left on her had done anything except remind her of what she’d lost. If she could figure out the pattern, then she could predict where the Arcana would strike next based on how the ley lines resonated.
“This way,” she said, leading them through a side street.
They moved quickly, staying in the shadows and keeping their voices low. Blair’s magic guided them, flaring whenever they got too close to a disturbance and settling when they found safer routes. She directed people around collapsed buildings and ruptured streets, steering them away from the worst of the damage.
More survivors joined them as they went. A witch carrying an unconscious man. A family with three children. An elderly couple who moved slowly but who she refused to leave behind. Blair sent them all in the same direction, toward the western edge of the quarter where Reed and the others were coordinating the evacuation to the city wall.
“Turn here,” she told the group, steering them down a narrow alley.
“That’s a dead end,” someone protested.
“No, it’s not.” Blair had walked these streets for years. She knew every shortcut, every hidden passage. “There’s a gap between the buildings on the left. We can get through.”
They squeezed through the gap one by one, emerging onto a broader street. Blair’s magic settled slightly, the disturbances in the ley lines fading as they put more distance between themselves and the Arcana.
Denny appeared at the end of the street, waving them forward. “This way! We’ve got the route clear!”
Blair watched the survivors hurry toward safety, their faces drawn with exhaustion and fear. She’d saved these people. Twenty, maybe thirty lives pulled from the wreckage of a city tearing itself apart.
It would never be enough, but it was something.
Her Resonance flared again, a sharp spike of sensation that made her breath catch. The Arcana were moving. Shifting their attention. Blair could feel it in the way the ley lines twisted, the magical current changing direction.
“Blair!” Reed jogged toward her, his face grim. “The Arcana. They’re heading west now.”
“I know.” Blair’s hand went to her heart, feeling its pounding beat through her sternum. “We need to move faster.”
“We’re running out of safe routes.”
“Then we make new ones.” Blair looked at the torn sky above the Spirefields, at the purple light bleeding through the rift. Somewhere beneath that wound in reality, Vesper was either fighting for her life or already lost to the Echo’s power. And Rafe was somewhere out there, searching too.
And she couldn’t reach either of them. She couldn’t do anything except save the people still breathing.
“Keep them moving,” Blair said. “I’ll find more survivors.”
She turned back toward the destruction, toward the ash and the flames and the terrible power of annihilation. Her artificial Resonance pulsed beneath her skin, guiding her through the fractured ley lines.
For the first time since Tenebrae had made her into this, Blair was grateful for the unwanted gift. She was no longer a vessel for his evil plan, but a human being and a mage that could strike back.
It wasn’t much, but in a city where humanity had become negligible, it was all she had.
Chapter 19
Threnos ran.
The Spirefields twisted around him, buildings leaning at angles that defied mortal physics. Reality itself had warped when Tenebrae’s prison collapsed, leaving the district fractured and strange. Threnos barely noticed.
Shadow mages fled past him in the opposite direction, their faces blank with terror. They didn’t even look at him.
The bag’s strap dug into his shoulder. The grimoire’s heat seared through leather and fabric, but Threnos welcomed the pain. It meant she was close. It meant she was real, awake, and whole enough to reach out through the pages he’d bound his soul into so long ago. It was a bridge to the Echo, but it was his soul that had created it. Their bond.
Ash’s body moved with a fluidity it hadn’t possessed before Threnos entered it. The form was well-suited to his needs, strong and capable, but it still felt wrong after existing as pure consciousness for so long. Physical form came with the constant drag of gravity and the need to move through space rather than simply existing where he willed.
But it also meant he could touch her again.
Threnos ran faster.
A large First Family estate emerged from the devastation ahead. The eastern wing had collapsed entirely, massive chunks of stone and twisted metal scattered across the grounds. Reality fractures shimmered in the air, marking where Tenebrae’s liminal space had anchored into the ley lines below.
Threnos felt Threnody’s presence clearly now, standing somewhere ahead in the rubble. His power strained against the confines of Ash’s human form, wanting to break free, wanting to manifest fully after hiding for so long. The urge to shed mortality and become what he truly was nearly overwhelmed him. He forced it down with an effort that made his hands shake. Not yet. Not until he saw her. Not until he knew whether she would recognise him, whether anything of what they’d been to each other had survived her imprisonment in the Echo.
He moved through the ruined courtyard, boots crunching over broken stone. The air tasted of magic and ash. Somewhere in the distance, screams echoed through the city, but Threnos ignored them. Fermata and Fortis could wait. The humans could wait. Everything could wait.
Then he saw her.
Threnody stood among the devastation, her back to him. She wore Vesper Ainsley’s body, small and human and so fragile compared to what she’d once been, but the way she held herself was unmistakable. She stood with the stillness that came from existing on timescales humans couldn’t comprehend. The weight of ages carried in her posture. Ancient. Eternal. Unchanged despite everything that had tried to break her.
The air around her shimmered with residual power, opalescent light catching in the dust that drifted through the ruined estate. She was depleted from breaking free of Tenebrae’s prison, Threnos could sense that much, but even weakened she radiated a presence that made reality seem to bend around her.
She turned.
Their eyes met.
The weight of their history crashed down on Threnos. Everything they were, everything they’d lost, everything they’d endured through millennia of separation collided in that single moment. His breath caught. His vessel’s heart beat hard enough to hurt. He wanted to speak, to say something that could possibly encompass what this moment meant, but words felt impossibly inadequate.
Threnody didn’t speak either. She simply looked at him, silver eyes studying his face with an intensity that felt like it might burn through his flesh. Did she recognise him? Could she sense his presence beneath this human disguise?
The silence stretched between them, holding everything unsaid. Everything that couldn’t be compressed into language after so much time apart, so much suffering, so many centuries of searching and hoping and refusing to believe the other was truly gone.
Memory flooded through Threnos unbidden, breaking over him in a wave he couldn’t resist.
Crystal spires reaching toward an impossible sky. Structures of pure light and geometric perfection that mortals couldn’t have built in a thousand lifetimes. He saw himself walking beside Threnody through halls that no longer existed, heard her laughter echoing in spaces that had been annihilated millennia ago. The way she’d looked at him before corruption spread through their people, before factions formed and magic became a weapon turned against itself.
They’d been something together. Not lovers in the mortal sense, but a connection that drove deeper. Two beings whose essences resonated in harmony, whose purposes aligned, whose very existence seemed to complement the other’s. The Arcana didn’t love the way humans did, but what he’d felt for Threnody had been as close to that concept as they could achieve.
He saw himself watching helplessly as she made her choice. He felt the cataclysm tearing through him again as she unleashed her power to stop the corrupted Arcana. Seven of their kind had turned on her, had tried to remake her into a weapon, and she’d chosen annihilation over subjugation. The devastation had been absolute.
His soul came apart, consciousness splitting into fragments that pulled away from each other, the pain of it worse than any death. He remained aware through all of it, unable to let go, refusing to fade into nothing whilst she still existed somewhere.
Threnos’ consciousness had fractured, dispersing into the fabric of reality. Time became meaningless. He existed in a state between being and nothingness, aware but unable to act, screaming silently into a void that had no interest in his suffering.
In desperation, driven by the singular need to find Threnody again, he’d created the first grimoire.
The act had taken everything he had left. He sensed witches arriving, crossing into his reality from beyond, and felt an affinity for what they carried. He found one of their spell books, already steeped in elemental magic, and poured his broken soul into its pages. He anchored his fractured consciousness to ink and parchment through sheer refusal to die. The grimoire became his anchor, his prison, his salvation.
For millennia, his essence regenerated slowly. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, his soul knitted itself back together in the darkness between pages. It was agony of a different kind. The healing was gradual, stretching across centuries without end. He existed in a state of half-awareness, conscious enough to feel time passing but unable to truly act or think or be anything more than potential waiting to manifest.
The grimoire passed through countless hands over the centuries. Scholars who studied it without understanding what they held. Collectors who valued it for its age and craftsmanship. Merchants who sold it for coin without ever opening its pages. None of them knew what it truly contained. None of them could hear him calling out from within, desperate for someone who might understand, who might help him complete what he’d started.
Eventually, after so long that the wait itself became a kind of death, Ash de Brigue found it at an estate sale in Edinburgh. A dusty book amongst a dead mage’s collection, tucked between treatises on ley line theory and outdated magical taxonomies. Ash had been searching for rare texts, something to add to his shop’s inventory, and had almost passed over the grimoire entirely. Too old. Too damaged. Too plain.
But something had made him pause. Some instinct or intuition that made him reach for it despite the lack of obvious value.
When Ash opened the grimoire, Threnos’s consciousness had reached out as he always did. He’d shown Ash fragments of Threnody, glimpses of the lost world, crystal spires and impossible architecture and beings of radiant light. He’d shared the truth of what had been and what remained. That the Arcana weren’t a trove of ancient magical relics lost to myth. They were a people and the Echo was their monument. A beacon. A soul.
And beyond all hope, Ash had heard.
Mortals feared what they didn’t understand, and what the Arcana truly were, existed so far beyond human comprehension that terror was the natural response, but Ash hadn’t fled. He hadn’t closed the book and locked it away. Instead, the mage had asked questions. He had seen something in Threnos’s memories worth preserving. He understood.
Ash agreed to help him search for the Echo and to become his vessel. The process of merging had been delicate, requiring consent from both parties, a willingness to share space within a single body. Threnos had entered Ash carefully, two souls intertwining but remaining distinct, two purposes aligned towards a single goal.
For years they’d searched together. Following traces and whispers, tracking disturbances in ley lines, investigating reports of impossible phenomena. The bond between Threnos and Threnody acted as a compass, but she was lost, hidden away long before the witches had come and he had gathered himself in the grimoire.
It wasn’t until the Resonant had come that things had changed.
And now, finally, Threnody stood before him. Whole, awake, and real.
Threnos forced himself to speak. “I never stopped looking for you.”
The words felt inadequate the moment they left his mouth, but they were true. They were the only truth that had mattered for thousands of years.
Threnody’s response came quietly. Grief compressed into something dense and heavy, a burden she’d carried alone for so long that it had become part of her. “I never stopped remembering you.”
They stood in the ruins, separated by mere metres but still hesitant to close the distance. The gap between them felt both too small and impossibly vast. Threnos wanted to move towards her, to reach out, to confirm through touch that this moment was real and not another vision conjured by desperate hope, but something held him back. Fear, perhaps. Fear that moving would shatter whatever fragile reality they’d found themselves in.
“What did they do to you?” His question encompassed everything. Tenebrae’s torture. The imprisonment in the Echo. The millennia of isolation.
“What they always do.” Threnody’s voice carried a weariness that went beyond exhaustion. “They tried to break me. To remake me into what they needed.”
“Did they succeed?”
“No.” The word came with absolute certainty. “But I’m not what I was either.”
Threnos understood. He wasn’t what he’d been either. The cataclysm had changed them both in ways that couldn’t be undone. They were survivors, but survival came with a cost.
Inside Threnody, he sensed another presence. Vesper. The human soul added complexity to what should have been simple. Threnody wasn’t just herself anymore. She carried humanity within her now, human concerns and attachments bleeding into divine perspective.
“The Resonant,” Threnos said. “She’s still there.”
“Yes.” Threnody glanced down at her hands, Vesper’s hands. “She refuses to fade.”
“Will you let her?”
The question hung between them. Threnos knew what the answer should be from a purely practical standpoint. Vesper’s consciousness complicated everything. She made Threnody vulnerable in ways that could be exploited, but he also knew that Threnody had chosen to keep the human soul intact, when she could have simply consumed it entirely…even if she didn’t realise it.
