Chapter 38 I Am Now Blind
Brea's POV
I stood at the center of the burning circle and watched everything through the one sense they'd left me.
The world had been drained of everything that made it real.
"No," I said out loud. My voice sounded strange without texture around it like speaking inside a sealed container.
Just grey on grey on grey, the witches moving in ash tones, the blood hitting the pavement in dark formless stains, the lamplight reduced to pale smears against a bleached sky.
I pressed my hands together. Felt nothing. Looked down at them.
"I can't feel my hands." I said it like saying it would fix it. It didn't.
I had never understood what colorblind meant until that moment.. Like looking at a painting someone had washed out — the shapes still there, the meaning gone.
"Seraphine!" I screamed across the square as she took a blow that sent her into the bench. Nothing came back. She couldn't hear me either.
She got up. I exhaled and the witches moved toward Drake, bone-blades raised, and I watched the dark spray hit the pavement and felt nothing at all.
"Move," I told my legs. "Move....please" They didn't.
Above the square something was forming; a column of grey air pulling debris into a slow spiral. Dead leaves. Dust. A torn piece of paper circling lazily inward.
"What is that," I breathed. Then Elias Vorn stepped out of the spiral's edge.
Not the version of him I'd seen in the chair by the window that easy, slightly bored man picking lint off his sleeve.
This version had his jaw set and his eyes carrying a faint dangerous light.
He looked like someone who had been interrupted doing something important and had decided to be angry about it later.
He didn't speak to anyone. He just began.
His voice dropped low and he pressed both palms flat against the air in front of him as his fingers spread, and the chant came out,
"Vethara sol kanim....draeth un solu." Then the second line, was slower and heavier,
"Kael morthis vehn...sorath un drelu." The third came faster, like something building pressure,
"Nethara kos... vethara kos ...sol draeth un kanim moru."
He repeated the sequence without pause, each cycle tighter than the last, the syllables compressing into something that sounded less like words and more like a mechanism engaging gears finding their teeth, a lock recognizing its key.
"Vethara sol kanim ....draeth un solu."
"Kael morthis vehn..... sorath un drelu."
"Nethara kos... vethara kos ..sol draeth un kanim moru."
The air around the fountain warped and thickened. The lamplight bent away from him like something flinching.
From the ground chains erupted upward and wrapping around the seven witches with a speed that pulled a sound from them that I couldn't hear but felt in my sternum.
For one second it looked finished. The lead witch opened her mouth, but not one word came out.
The chains turned to ash between one breath and the next, drifting down across the stone like grey snow.
Elias stopped chanting. His eyes moved to Rayne — to the blood still spreading from his side, soaking into the circle's lines, feeding it.
"Shit." I read it on his mouth clearly enough. Then louder, to no one specifically "It's already bonded."
He stood still for exactly one second. Then he slammed his palms together.
The sound hit the square. I felt it in my teeth, in my collarbone.
The witches didn't die. They exploded outward into violent oily smoke.
Elias watched the smoke snake into the shadows until the last trail disappeared.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned and looked at his own hands, both palms open, like checking whether the chant had left a mark.
"Seven years," he said quietly, to no one. "Seven years since I've had to used this spell" A pause. "And it still wasn't enough."
He closed his hands slowly. He turned away from where the smoke had gone and looked at the square. The cracked fountain, the ash remnants of his chains, the lines of the circle still glowing faintly in the stone.
"Scattered," he said. Just the word. Like a verdict.
The pressure lifted the moment the last of the smoke vanished.
My legs remembered how to work all at once, like a switch thrown, and I was moving, crossing the square toward the fountain.
Rayne was slumped against the cracked basin. One hand pressed to his side where the dark stain spread across his shirt.
I reached him and went down beside him and pulled him into my lap.
His weight settled against me and I saw my hands against his face.
The sob came from somewhere I hadn't known was still open.
"Rayne." His name came out wrecked. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't... I didn't mean for this.."
His eyes opened slowly as his red eyes had faded back. He didn't speak.
"I was inside it the whole time," I said. My voice kept breaking on itself. "I could see everything and I couldn't stop any of it. I couldn't stop myself.." His hand came up.
Found my wrist. I saw his fingers close around it,but I felt nothing.
Elias stopped beside us. He looked down at the pair of us on the ground,
"Your apology," he said, "doesn't pay the debt." I looked up at him.
"Because you couldn't control the fusion," he continued, "they are loose. They are in the marrow of this city now. In the walls. In the people sleeping behind those windows." He glanced toward the buildings surrounding the square.
"Every shadow in this district has a passenger it didn't have an hour ago."
I pressed my lips together. "Then help me..."
"I did help you." His voice was flat. "I used a level-seven binding chant and still lost the targets because your blood anchor was already active and nobody told me that before I started."
"That is not a small error. That is an embarrassing error. And I don't make embarrassing errors."
He crouched to my level. His eyes, still carrying that faint dangerous light, met mine directly.
"You have some senses left that the witches didn't touch," he said.
"Sight...maybe that one a bit distorted, hearing and talking. Those are the two senses you need to track a displaced soul." A pause.
"You will learn to use them that way. Both of them. Actively." His voice dropped.
"Because if those souls finish anchoring to their hosts before you find them — this city becomes a problem that nobody walking on two legs can solve."
I held his gaze. "And if I can't learn fast enough."
He stood. Straightened his jacket.
"Then I finish what the witches started," he said simply. "By putting you down myself before the anchor completes and takes the city with it."
He said it the way he said everything, unhurried, factual, mildly inconvenienced by the necessity of it.
Then he walked into the fog and was gone.