Page 160 of The First Scar
“Needs a—”
I ripped the steel free in a brutal, sideways arc.
"—sacrifice."
The word ended in a wet gurgle. His eyes went wide—then empty. His body sagged against me, suddenly heavy. Just meat and bone.
I let him fall.
He hit the stone with a dense thud. The sound was too small for what it meant. And as I stood over him, the adrenaline receding enough for reality to bleed back in, I looked down.
We weren't on the ground.
We were on the dais. Standing directly over the central conduction glyphs Kaelen had carved into the basalt.
Brannick’s blood didn't pool. It hissed against the stone. The intricate runes drank it greedily, the dark liquid racing along the channels, connecting the dormant circuit. The basalt beneath my boots began to hum.
Oh gods.
The Codex didn't just activate. It erupted.
A soundless, psychic shriek that tore through the basin, bringing every swing of a sword to a halt. The book flew open on the altar, hovering, pages riffling violently. The ink didn't glow—it became a void, a profound absence of light that pulsed with a sick, bruised rhythm.
It grabbed the frayed ends of my power—and yanked.
It wasn't a flow this time. It was an extraction. A brutal, violating tear that ripped the remaining magic from my core. I collapsed to my knees. My hands hit the basalt, fingers splayed, shaking. Something behind my sternum unspooled and kept unspooling—a thread being pulled from a reel that was already empty. My teeth chattered. My nails scraped stone.
The world went silent.
The Rupture in the sky above us stilled. The veil didn’t pulse. The Nullatheon stopped reaching.
And then, the draining began, straight into the void that was the rupture.
It started at the horizon and rushed toward us—a wave of desaturation. The vibrant, deep green of the distant ancestral pines turned the flat, dead grey of ash. The blood on the ground lost its crimson shine, the sky, which had been a bruised, violent purple, bleached out into the color of static.
It was like looking at a painting left too long in the sun. The vibrancy of the world simply... evaporated.
And with the color went the hum.
That constant, low-level vibration of the Veil—the song I had heard in my blood since the day my marks appeared—cut out.
My Marks went silent—like two hands letting go of mine. I reached for the Light. I reached for the Shadow. I grabbed nothing but dead, empty air.
"My glamours," Maxx whispered. His voice sounded thin in emptiness. He flicked his wrist, nothing. Again, frantic. No glamour, no illusions.
Nothing happened, just a hand waving in the grey light.
"Gone," Serenya breathed. She was clutching her mirrored token, her knuckles white. She looked up at me, eyes wide and terrified. "Amaria... the leylines. They aren't just quiet. They’re dead."
Movement at the edge of the ridge.
The King.
He sat atop his destrier, his armor stripped of its golden luster by the grey light. His eyes snagged on Eryndor for just a moment before he wheeled his horse around, spurring the beast into a panic. His remaining guards followed, a grim, silent retreat into the colorless treeline.
"At least they're running," Maxx muttered, though he didn't sound relieved. He sounded shaken.
"Not all of them," Serenya whispered. She nodded towards Eryndor.
