Chapter 10 Aria pov
The library of the witch coven’s stronghold was a place of high ceilings, ancient dust, and a silence that usually felt like a sanctuary. Tonight, however, the silence was jagged, vibrating with the leftover energy of the magical confrontation at the foyer. Kael had been pulled away by his council to address the security breach and the restless vampires at the gates, leaving me under the watchful, suffocatingly nervous eyes of Lydia and Julian.
I ignored them both. I had to. My attention was fixed entirely on the mountain of ancient books I had pulled from the restricted shelves, the leather bindings cold and smelling of old earth under my fingertips. I was looking for something—anything—that could explain the vision the mirror had shown me. If my mother and the council were being manipulated into believing I had been kidnapped, I needed to find the source of that lie before the first drop of blood was shed.
“Aria,” Julian started, his voice a Carrying stage-whisper that echoed off the mahogany shelves. I was certainly meant to overhear it. “You know everyone is talking. They don’t believe for a second that you and the vampire king have been dating in secret, but they think you’ve done something incredibly selfless. They’re calling you a martyr.”
I didn’t look up. My eyes were stinging, the archaic text on the page going blurry with a furious, humiliating wetness I refused to wipe away. Never let them see the effect they have on you, I reminded myself. Julian and Lydia didn’t intend to be cruel; they were just curious. For years, I had been the "void," the freak with no magic whose mere touch caused enchantments to misfire and spells to twist into useless knots. Now, suddenly, I was their savior, and the weight of their newfound "respect" felt more like a cage than a promotion.
“I’m just trying to see if there’s anything that can be done about the curse,” I said tonelessly, finally closing a heavy tome on soul-binding.
“The mirror,” Lydia added, stepping closer, her dark curls bouncing with her agitation. “Is it… is it really working for you? I saw the way you were looking at it in your room. It’s supposed to be dead glass, Aria. No one has been able to wake it in centuries.”
“It works just fine for me,” I replied, my hand instinctively going to the small pouch at my side.
I needed to be alone. I could feel the obsidian disc humming against my hip, a low-frequency vibration that seemed to synchronize with my own racing pulse. After a few more minutes of pretending to read, I managed to slip away, murmuring something about a headache. I retreated not to the royal guest wing, but to my old bedroom—a small, drafty space at the edge of the stronghold that felt more like home than any velvet-lined palace ever could.
The moment I clicked the lock, I pulled the mirror out. The instant my skin touched the black glass, that familiar buzzing sensation—like a hive of bees trapped in stone—vibrated against my palms. The greenish inner light began to glow, casting sickly shadows against my bedroom walls.
“Ask your questions, Aria Marlowe,” the mirror’s flat, alien voice intoned. It sounded like grinding stones, indifferent to the lives it was about to dissect.
“Will any major acts of violence take place between the witches and vampires within the next month?” I asked. My voice was barely a whisper, but in the silence of the room, it sounded like a shout.
“Yes.”
The answer was a physical blow. I nearly dropped the mirror in disgust, my fingers curling into white-knuckled fists. “What do you mean, yes? I did the thing! I married him! I tied the two strongest factions in the city together in front of a hundred witnesses! How is it not enough?”
“It is not enough,” the mirror repeated. It was a cold, mechanical fact. Suddenly, the surface of the glass began to churn. Faces began to flood the surface—fast, blurry, and terrifying. I saw my mother with her eyes clouded over. I saw Lydia, her dark curls matted with something dark. I saw Julian, his silver magic being pulled out of him like thread from a spool. All of them had the same dead, vacant eyes, staring without seeing.
The vision shifted again, moving away from my friends and settling on a figure I didn't recognize. It was a vampire, but not like any I had seen in Kael’s court. He looked young, fragile, and utterly broken, his skin translucent and mapped with bulging veins. He was covered in layers of dark magic—thick, oily curses so old and foul they looked like physical rot.
“Who is he?” I whispered, leaning closer until my breath fogged the obsidian.
The mirror didn't answer with a name. Instead, it showed me a field of grey stone. In the center stood Kael. He wasn't fighting; he was standing still, his expression one of agonizing patience. But as I watched, his legs began to turn to rock. The grey climbed up his chest, sealing his heart, moving toward his throat. He was being turned into a statue in his own city.
“No,” I breathed.
I lurched to my feet, the cold fury I had been suppressing finally breaking through the surface. It wasn't just about a rogue killer anymore. This was a systematic draining of magic. Someone was killing the witches who lived among humans—the ones I had identified in the council room—and they weren't just killing them for sport. They were harvesting their power to fuel a curse that could petrify a King.
I realized then that my lack of magic—the "void" that had made me a pariah—wasn't a curse at all. It was my only armor. I was the only one who could hold this mirror without the oily rot of the visions jumping into my veins. I was the only one who could see the truth because I didn't have the magic for the killer to manipulate.
I needed to get back to Kael. I needed to tell him that the "distress signal" Julian claimed to have seen wasn't a signal at all. It was a lure, a magical resonance meant to trigger the coven’s protective instincts and force a confrontation.
Julian hadn't lied to the coven; he had been made to see a lie.
I shoved the mirror back into its pouch and headed for the door, my mind racing. If Kael was the target of a petrification curse, then every second he spent using his power to hold back the angry witches was a second that the curse climbed higher. He was feeding the very thing that was meant to destroy him.
I burst out of my room and ran down the corridor, ignoring Lydia’s surprised shout as I passed her. I didn't care about decorum or the truce anymore. I had to find the King before he turned to stone, and I had to find a way to stop a war that had been engineered by a shadow I was only just beginning to understand.
As I reached the foyer, I saw the shimmering blue veil of the stronghold’s main gate. Outside, the air was glowing with the orange sparks of vampire speed and the purple flares of witch fire.
The mirror had been right. It wasn't enough to get married. Now, I had to figure out how to stop a world that was already burning.