Page 63 of A Soul’s Awakening

White light flashed at the edge of my vision. Stella’s magic met Alistair’s silver chains as they snapped up in answer. The impact shook the room, but it wasn’t sound or force that followed. It was growth.

Something spread across the chains, crawling over them too fast to track, like the magic itself had taken root.

Alistair staggered back, but it followed him. White blooms opened along his arms, his chains, anything his magic touched. They didn’t strike. They latched.

“You wouldn’t,” he snapped, silver clashing against white.

“Oh, I so would.” Stella’s magic blossomed. The chains shuddered, no longer holding their original shape. They didn’t break or dissolve, but they reformed into something else mid-function, as if they couldn’t decide what they were supposed to be anymore.

The array beneath me flared violently. My magic surged in response, trying to correct the imbalance. It didn’t take. The correction came back wrong, and I realized too late what was happening.

Stella’s curse wasn’t just spreading through Alistair’s chains, it was in the array. And the array was starting to echo it back.

“I … I can’t stabilize it.” My lungs couldn’t pull in air fast enough.

“Then let me help.” Alex’s voice cut through the chaos as he knelt beside me. Markus was already at the edge of the circle, Jordan covering him while he worked. I barely registered them before they dropped into position, hands moving in sync.

“We can do this, Theo. Focus on the veil.” Alex’s magic pressed against mine, not replacing it, but anchoring it, forcing the array into something coherent again.

“But … Caspian.” His presence was flickering now, no longer fully anchored. The soul I’d been holding was thinning at the edges, unable to decide where it should exist.

“Caspian comes later,” Ren said sharply. “Fix the veil.”

Another surge slammed through the room. Silver and white collided again, and the distortion didn’t just ripple through the array. It split it.

The stabilization Alex was holding stopped being singular. It became multiple different options. And none of them matched.

The veil wasn’t something I could see, but I could feel it unraveling under the pressure, like a frayed piece of string being pulled apart in many directions.

Alex felt it too. His grip on his magic tightened. “It’s not sealing.”

“I know,” I said, forcing another closure attempt anyway. It immediately opened again, not once, but multiple times.

Above us, everything fractured again. Silver, white, and something deeper folding into each other until the array could no longer agree on its own structure.

My stomach dropped. The veil wasn’t rejecting the repair, it was changing what the repair actually meant.

Alex’s voice went tight. “It’s not rejecting. It’s adapting.”

And then I understood. The anchor wasn’t a fixed structure. It adapted to the user, to the magic being wielded, to the emotions and intent placed in it. My inability to decide whether to save Caspian or repair the veil meant it was trying to accomplish both.

I had to let Caspian go. Again.

Tears spilled down my cheeks as his flickering form dissolved into thin air.

“We have to rewrite the magic,” I groaned out. “It’s … beyond repair.”

Alex looked at me, face pale with strain. “Theo—”

“I know,” I cut in. “I know what it costs.”

Stella and Alistair continued to battle, their magic blurring into pressure and light, silver and white collapsing into each other until even sound couldn’t decide how to travel. The array beneath it all began to stabilize—not into stillness, but into repetition. Every time I tried to close the repair, I wasn’t fixing it, I was teaching it how to repeat failure. It needed to be guided toward a resolution.

My hand stayed hovering over a sigil, trembling in the air, but I didn’t give it another attempt. Instead, I just held the magic there, waiting for it to adjust.

Alex felt the shift immediately. His head snapped toward me. “Theo?”

“Don’t finish it,” I said, voice tight. “Don’t let it complete.”