A Harmony of Ages, page 19
Threnody was finally coming.
She stood in what remained of a residential quarter, surrounded by ash and broken stone. Bodies lay scattered where they’d fallen, humans who’d had the misfortune of being in her path.
Fortis prowled through the debris to her left, kicking aside a fallen beam. It tumbled into what remained of someone’s home, and he watched with obvious satisfaction.
“She’s coming,” Fermata said.
Fortis stopped and turned to face her. “Finally. Is the pattern complete?”
“Nearly.” The corrupted ley lines spread beneath Fermata, each thread anchored to a point of death. She’d been weaving this pattern for hours as she and Fortis carved their way through the quarter, placing anchor points at every site of slaughter. The deaths had fuelled it, each extinguished life adding power to the binding until the trap had grown strong enough to hold what was coming. “Another few minutes.”
“We don’t have minutes.” Fortis moved closer. “You can feel her. She’s moving fast.”
“Then we work faster.” Fermata knelt, pressing her palm flat against the broken ground. Magic poured from her fingertips, sinking deep into the earth to connect with the pattern below. The trap pulsed in response, hungry and eager. “Keep watch. Tell me if anything changes.”
Now she laid the final anchor.
Fermata pushed deeper into the convergence beneath Nightreach, twisting the ley lines until the natural flow of magic pooled exactly where she needed it. The pattern responded, threads of power connecting across the quarter to form a cage that existed on multiple planes simultaneously.
When Threnody crossed the threshold, the binding would activate. Magic would surge upward in walls of light, forming a prison designed to fracture her consciousness. The trap would dig into Threnody’s power, splinter it, break it into pieces small enough to chain and control. She wouldn’t die, at least not immediately. Fermata needed her to understand what was happening as her abilities were stripped away and repurposed.
The final anchor snapped into place. The pattern flared bright in Fermata’s awareness, complete at last.
Perfect.
Beneath Fermata’s control, Ember stirred. The witch had been fighting since the destruction began, throwing herself against the walls of her own mind with pathetic desperation. She must have sensed something through the magical currents, some shift that signalled her doomed hope for salvation.
Fermata crushed the resistance with ease, grinding the human soul back down into darkness where it belonged. The witch’s defiance meant nothing. She had survived far worse than a mortal’s desperate clawing for freedom.
The witch thought she could reclaim her body through sheer will. Pathetic. Fermata knew what it took to cling to existence when everything else had been stripped away. She’d done it once before, after Threnody tore her apart.
“How close is she?” Fortis asked.
Fermata closed her eyes, tracking the approaching presence through the web of corrupted magic. “Still several blocks away.” She paused. “Threnos is with her.”
“Of course he is.” Fortis’s voice carried something between contempt and genuine anger. “Always following at her heels. Some things never change.”
“His presence complicates matters.” Fermata opened her eyes, studying the pattern beneath her feet. “The binding was designed for one consciousness, not two.”
“Can you adjust it?”
“I can try.” She poured more power into the working, felt the pattern shift and expand to accommodate the additional strain. The trap would be weaker this way, more vulnerable to disruption, but it should still hold. Should. “We’ll need to separate them.”
“I’ll handle Threnos,” Fortis snarled. “He and I have unfinished business.”
“We both have unfinished business.” Fermata stood, brushing dust from her clothes. “But revenge is secondary to the primary objective. We need Threnody conscious and bound. Everything else can wait.”
“You really think we can use her?” Doubt crept into Fortis’s tone. “She unmade an entire civilisation. She destroyed our people.”
“She destroyed what we once were,” she reminded him. “She called it corruption, but it was evolution. We were meant to rule, to dominate, to shape existence according to our will. That self-righteous fool burned it all away because she was too weak to embrace what we were becoming. Now, we have evolved again. Our rise is inevitable.”
“Is it?” Fortis turned to face her. “Look at what we’ve become. Parasites wearing stolen flesh. Hiding for millennia while the world forgot we ever existed. Is that really strength?”
The question struck deeper than Fermata wanted to acknowledge. She’d spent centuries telling herself the same lie, that their persistence meant something, that their eventual triumph would justify the long years of weakness and hiding. But standing here in the ruins of her own making, surrounded by evidence of their desperation, the certainty felt thinner than it once had.
“What we’ve become,” she said, her voice dropping to something lethal, “is what was necessary to survive her genocide. What we’ll become next is what matters. Once we have that bitch bound and broken, once we control her power, we’ll reshape this pathetic world into something worthy of the Arcana. Something that remembers what we are. What we’ve always been.”
“Conquerors.”
“Victors.” Fermata’s eyes blazed with silver light. “She murdered our people, Fortis. She thought her morality mattered more than our right to ascend. Well, she’s about to learn what happens when one is too righteous to finish what they started.”
The presence drew closer. Fermata could feel it now, not just through the ley lines but in the way reality seemed to bend. The air grew colder. Frost spread across the broken stones, delicate patterns that spoke of ancient magic.
The trap was set. If it worked, they would chain what remained and use Threnody’s power to rebuild the world under Arcana rule. They would force her to watch as they unmade everything she’d tried to preserve.
If it failed, they would die here. Without vessels, they were just exposed souls, unable to interact with the physical world or defend themselves. She would do to them what she’d done to that fool Tenebrae.
“Take your position,” Fermata ordered. “Now.”
Fortis moved to the opposite side of the trap, placing himself at one of the anchor points. It needed both of them to maintain it. Any weakness, any hesitation, and Threnody would tear through the binding like paper.
They’d only get one chance at this.
The temperature dropped further. The ley lines beneath Nightreach trembled, responding to the presence that had just entered the outer perimeter of their corrupted web. They were so close now. So close to getting everything they’d ever dreamed of.
A memory rose then, of the cataclysm.
Fermata remembered crystal spires shattering across dimensions she could no longer name. She remembered reality tearing as Threnody unmade their world. Power had been spreading through their people, transforming them into something glorious and absolute. Existence stripped of weakness and sentiment, evolution given freedom to expand beyond what they’d known. They could reach into higher dimensions, ascend to the stars…
And Threnody had looked at their ascension and called it sickness. Corruption. She had witnessed their transformation and named it rot. Then she had burned them all with the kind of self-righteous conviction that still made Fermata’s heart burn with rage.
She remembered her body coming apart. The dissolution she’d felt as her physical form unravelled, her soul ripped from flesh and bone and scattered across the void. The agony had been absolute and infinite. She’d felt herself fragmenting, her consciousness tearing into pieces that should have dispersed into nothing.
But she’d refused to die.
She’d clung to existence with rage as her only anchor. Fed on scraps of other dying Arcana, consuming what remained of her people to sustain the core of what she was. She’d drifted through dimensions as little more than hatred given form, searching desperately for anything that could serve as shelter.
Time had lost meaning in that formless state. Centuries? Millennia? She didn’t know how long she’d wandered before finding the convergence buried deep within the ley lines. The ley lines themselves were Threnody’s creation, rifts torn in the fabric of magic when she’d unleashed the cataclysm. And here, where the mages who would become the Limina had ordered those lines with their wards and architecture, power pooled and concentrated. She’d burrowed into that convergence like a parasite into living flesh, wrapping her fractured consciousness around the accumulated magic and holding on with everything she had left.
More time passed—unknowable, unmeasurable—until the first witches arrived.
They’d sensed the convergence and built Thornhallow Manor directly over it, thinking they’d discovered a natural source of power. Fermata had whispered through the stones as they laid the foundations. She shaped their fledgling institution into something that would eventually produce what she needed most.
A vessel.
Four centuries of watching witches parade through the manor wearing the title of High Witch whilst she remained trapped in the foundations. Four centuries of testing them, finding each one wanting, discarding them when they proved too weak to contain her essence. She’d manipulated them all with patient malice, created the Luminous Concordat as a breeding ground for potential hosts.
And Ember Vance had been perfect. Strong enough to contain Fermata’s power. Ambitious enough to reach for it, and weak enough to be taken when the moment finally came.
When Fermata had finally poured herself into the witch and seized control, it had felt like resurrection. Like vengeance deferred but never forgotten.
The body was hers now. Its power belonged to her and she would burn this world to ash before she surrendered it.
She’d survived Threnody once. Endured unknowable ages of formless agony and patient scheming.
She would not die here.
“Do you feel that?” Fortis’s voice carried a note she’d never heard from him before. Not quite fear, but recognition, perhaps. Memory of what Threnody had done to them once before.
His survival had been much like hers, his hunger for power and dominance driving him into the ley lines until Owen Hale had come along, finishing the work of those pathetic cultists, the Covenant of Anweled.
“I feel it.” Fermata kept her gaze fixed on the far end of the street, where shadows moved between the broken buildings. “She’s testing the perimeter. Sensing the trap.”
He glared, his power crackling underneath his skin. “Will she walk into it anyway?”
“She has to. We made sure of that when we started slaughtering humans. She’s infected with the Resonant’s sentiment now. She’ll come for us because that’s what weak, compromised fools do.”
The shadows shifted. Fermata caught a glimpse of movement, there and gone again. Fortis tensed beside her, preparing for violence, muscles coiling with anticipation of the battle to come.
“Remember the plan,” Fermata commanded. “We need her conscious for the binding. Don’t destroy her yet.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“The fun comes later.” Fermata’s smile was pure cruelty. “When we fracture her consciousness and chain what remains. When we use her power to unmake everything she tried to preserve. When we force her to watch as we rebuild this world and erase every trace of her pathetic sacrifice. That’s when you’ll find your entertainment. In her suffering.”
They stood in the ruins they’d created, surrounded by death and broken stone, waiting. An age of planning had led to this moment. Millennia of hatred had been compressed into a single trap.
This time would be different. This time Fermata would be the one who decided how the story ended.
The presence drew closer still. Fermata could feel the weight of it now, pressing down on reality. One more block. One more street. Just a little further.
The trap was ready. The binding would hold.
Everything they were, everything they’d become, everything they’d sacrificed to reach this point depended on the next few moments.
And this time, Threnody would be the one who broke.
Chapter 23
Threnody walked beside Threnos, the bond between them thrumming with energy. The ley lines twisted around them, their resonance wrong in ways that made her stop mid-stride.
She sensed the trap immediately.
Fermata had woven something elegant through the destruction, each death channelled into anchor points that fed one another. She traced the invisible pattern with her awareness, seeing how the pieces fit together in a detailed lattice. The aim of it was simple enough. Cross the threshold and the matrix would activate, tearing her consciousness into fragments small enough to control.
The pattern was beautiful in how it accounted for nearly everything, built from centuries of study into how consciousness could be broken and bound. From personal experience, she surmised.
“What is it?” Threnos asked beside her.
“A trap.” Threnody pointed at spaces between the ruined buildings where the anchor points hung invisible to mortal sight. “It’s designed to fracture my soul when I cross. See there, and there?”
“I cannot, but I never could see the same resonance.” Threnos studied the ruins ahead where smoke rose dark against the sky. Screams still echoed from deeper in the quarter, growing fainter as Fermata and Fortis finished their work. “Then we find another way. We wait for them to exhaust themselves and force them to come to us instead.”
“No.” The word came out harder than Threnody intended. Every moment they waited meant more deaths, more fuel for the trap that waited ahead. “Every moment we delay, more humans die. This world has suffered enough at their hands.”
Save them, Vesper whispered. Please…
Threnody saw the vessels through Vesper’s memories. Ember Vance bringing her tea in Thornhallow Manor’s library, explaining the Concordat’s politics with patience Vesper hadn’t expected from someone so powerful. How she’d warned her about Marina Sinclair’s schemes, protected her during the trials, stood beside her when everything fell apart. Small kindnesses that had made Vesper feel less alone in a world she didn’t understand. A world she should have experienced with her best friend, Selene, at her side.
Another memory surfaced. Owen descending into the Fold at Vesper’s side, his precise calculations finding the seventh convergence point when they’d needed to stop D’Arco. His steadfast intelligence, his level head, his love for Ember. His genuine care for the city, for the people his structural wards protected, for doing work that mattered beyond personal glory.
They were innocent. They didn’t deserve to burn for what Fermata and Fortis had done.
“Threnody?” Threnos murmured.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, answering the concern she could feel radiating from him through their bond. “Fermata and Fortis don’t understand what I’ve become since awakening. They’re building their trap based on memories from before the cataclysm, but I’m not that anymore. The Echo changed me.” She looked at Threnos properly then, seeing the grey eyes of this vessel but sensing the soul she knew so well beneath. “Be careful. They will try to separate us.”
“I know.” Threnos touched her hand briefly, his fingers warm against hers.
They started walking again. The streets narrowed as they approached the trap, bodies littering the cobblestones in various states of destruction. Some had been reduced to ash whilst others were twisted into shapes that reality shouldn’t allow. Buildings had collapsed into themselves, walls buckled and torn where magic had ripped through them.
And ahead, they crossed into a ruined square where Fermata and Fortis waited.
Fermata stood at the centre of it all, silver eyes gleaming. The cold arrogance radiating from her was familiar in ways that made Threnody ache. This was what their people had become at the end, their belief in power at any cost.
Fortis lounged nearby. He grinned when he saw them approach, his power already rising in anticipation of a fight.
Threnody stopped at the edge of the square, the trap’s resonance intensifying around her. She could see exactly how it would activate, the sequence of bindings that would snap into place the moment she crossed the threshold.
“Release your vessels,” she commanded.
Fermata laughed, the sound sharp and bitter and stripped of anything resembling warmth. “That is the first thing you dare say to us, Threnody? After all this time?” She stepped forward and the ley lines pulsed in response to her movement. “For millennia I waited. Clinging to existence by feeding on the dying souls of our people. Do you understand what that means?” Her silver eyes blazed with rage that had been building for longer than most civilisations existed. “I watched our world burn because you decided we were all corrupt, all beyond saving. You made that choice for everyone, for thousands who never had a voice in their own destruction.”
Threnody said nothing. There was nothing to say. Fermata was right, but they did have a choice…and they’d chosen power.
“Do you know what it’s like to feel your body torn apart?” Fermata’s rage grew with each word. “To exist as formless consciousness, scattered across a darkness that rejects you? To feel yourself fragmenting, knowing that any moment could be the last, that you might finally disperse into nothing?”
Threnody faltered as she felt the agony of the cataclysm, her form shredding under forces that even the Arcana couldn’t withstand. The terror of existing without anchor, without body, without anything to hold consciousness together. The endless drift through spaces between spaces, reality itself rejecting her presence. She wanted to reach for Threnos, but she couldn’t.
“I spent centuries barely holding coherence,” Fermata continued. “Feeding on whatever scraps of soul I could find just to maintain enough awareness to think, to remember who I was. Do you know what it does to you, consuming the dying? Feeling their terror as you drain what’s left of them just to survive another day?”
