Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 308: Sunrise

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Toren Daen

I hurtled through the streets, my heart thundering in my chest. Fires burned everywhere I passed. The edges of my vision were tinged with red and orange. From rage? From fear? From the utter, terrible certainty of the devastation that would follow in the wake of this ritual?

Arthur and I had arrived as Agrona's ritual began tearing through the aether like sheets of paper. Using the last charge on the tempus warp Seris had given me, I'd brought us all here at the last possible moment. I had absorbed the lifeforce from Tessia's strange Elderwood Guardian spell, replenishing the reserves Seris had taken so desperately.

Seris. Seris was still aching and wounded, her life nearly spent from the inverted decay spreading across her physique. I'd felt something within her change, though, as I granted her healing over our souls.

Visions of laughter and burning white fire danced behind my eyelids. I didn't understand what Seris had done... What she'd used my heartfire for. It felt familiar somehow, but also entirely different. Her core had cracked, and shattered. I'd been able to sense it, with all the horror in my gut.

Integration. Seris Integrated somehow. In the process, she healed herself of that severed arm and the damage to her body. She's still alive. But she's alone, and in danger.

But it wasn't just Seris that needed me. The Hearth, too—that distant flock that I could almost call family—Epheotus was coming for them. Like a spear surging toward unprotected flesh, it would sink in deep.

So much. So, so much was happening, and I couldn't be sure of my actions even now. Should I have gone back to Seris using that last tempus warp charge? Or should I have tried to warn the Hearth? Should I have tried to send a message to Roa and Lithen and all the—

"Focus, Toren!" Aurora echoed in my skull, her emotions painted in the yellow of fear. But she stayed true to our course as she hovered beside me, her burning eyes hard. "Mordain will have a way to protect our clan. The future is his domain, and your nest-mate still lives. Keep your mind on the task ahead."

I ground my teeth as I zipped through the streets, resisting the urge to scream in agony. I'd vented so much of my bitter fury on Viessa, Bairon, and Lyra Dreide, but it still festered. Even when I left Viessa's body smoking and left to weep endless tears, I did not feel that fire dim. Even as Bairon's lifeforce slowly dwindled, the Lance abandoned to grimly accept his fate in some dark alley, that fire did not dim. Even as Lyra nursed the hole where her core used to be, unconscious and captured by Dicathian forces, that fire did not dim.

Bairon had betrayed Dicathen, succumbing to the same ruinous fate as Lucas Wykes. Though he was stronger than any Scythe save Cadell under the effects of that lifeforce-draining drug, that only meant he was still weaker than me. And the tragedy of what could have been a good man—what could have been one of Dicathen's staunchest defenders—turning against his own continent, no doubt because of some butterfly effect of my actions somewhere, made that bitter rage re-ignite deep within me.

Agrona was using it against me, all the good I'd taken from Circe's array, and turning it to butchery.

I screamed aloud, that white-hot stream of anger erupting from my lungs. I sensed Arthur resume his battle with Cadell in the skies, the demon no longer batting me around like a fly. The ambient mana was alight like a live wire, dark fires and raging void wind enveloping each other.

As Arthur's white-purple spellfire intersected the black storm, I let my ragged scream trickle away, instead leaving me...hollow.

He better win. I gritted my teeth through the exhaustion plaguing my bones as I approached my destination. I won't be able to save him again.