CH199

CH199
The second my fingers brushed the metal, the world shifted. It flashed bright, near blinding and the glow pulled me down violently, like falling through ice. A rush of air yanked the breath from my lungs. The floor vanished, darkness rushed around me, and fire took me.  Then, I stood in a grand hall lit by torchlight. The air was thick with incense and smoke; the walls carved with ancient runes. At the far end of the chamber, a circle was drawn on the floor in ash and gold.
Four figures stood within it: Reese, Celeste, Jean-Baptiste, and the unnamed woman, all cloaked in dark cloaks that shimmered like oil. Reese held the token aloft, its light pulsing like a heartbeat. I wasn’t myself, not exactly. I could feel the weight of a sword in my hand, the fabric of embroidered sleeves brushing my wrists. My heartbeat thundered. I felt older and grittier, like someone who’d seen blood and betrayal before.
“She’ll never let you keep it,” Celeste hissed in the vision, her voice colder than I’d ever heard it. “You’re wasting your breath.”
Reese turned toward her, smiling. “She has no choice, and how would she stop me now?"
The woman—me, in that life—stepped forward, eyes sharp as the blade in her hand, creeping closer.
“You should have killed her, then you wouldn't have to worry about it.”
“What a waste, that would be,” Reese said, holding up the token. “Immortality, power, time itself bending to my will? I'm a greedy man, you know that. She'll never notice."
"And if she does?"
"It's too late now!"
I lunged forward, ramming the sword through his chest. He choked and the fight broke out. Swords clashed, blood splashed across the ground. Sparks scattered across the stone. Celeste lunged at me with a blade, shrieking.
"I'll kill you!"
Jean-Baptiste came after me, too, and the woman kept on chanting, picking up her pace frantically. I parried, ducked, cut, every move both foreign and achingly familiar. The spell flared, and golden light surged from the token. I threw up my arm to shield my eyes and struck. The sword hit the token, slamming it to the ground. The two pieces burst apart. A scream tore through the air.
I waved my hand, taking the disk half. Reese scrambled through his own blood to grab the crystal.
He looked at me with fury and disbelief. “You broke it!”
“It's the least of your suffering to come,” I said, though my voice came out in a language I didn’t understand. The half I held glowed brighter, reshaping and reforging itself not into a charm but into a blade etched with runes.
The scene shattered again, reforming in quick succession into flashes of other lives, other versions of me. One standing on a snowy battlefield, holding the same rune blade against Jean-Baptiste as he wore the crystal like a necklace. Then another: me in a gown of ice-blue silk, facing Reese across a candlelit hall as the halves hummed like magnets reaching for each other. Another me, centuries later, dressed in 19th-century finery, arguing with Reese by a frozen river. His face was softer then, but his eyes still burned with the same hunger. Every time, it ended the same: a fight, a fracture, and me holding the blade.
I never saw it whole again. The realization hit like lightning. Every lifetime, I had fought for it, protected it, kept it from them, broken it over and over again. Was I also the only one who could put it back together, starting the cycle all over again?
The vision cracked like glass.
I gasped, stumbling back into myself, into the townhouse living room. My heart was hammering, sweat damp on my skin. The others were staring.
“Vandy?” Lukas said carefully. “What happened?”
I looked down at my hand. The token was glowing white-hot, the runes blazing like embers. I dropped it onto the ground. The light flickered once, then dimmed to nothing.
My breath came in ragged bursts. “I saw them again.”
“Who?” Isla asked, wide-eyed.
“Reese. Celeste. Jean-Baptiste. And the woman.” My voice trembled. “It wasn’t just a dream. It was… before. The first time they used it.”
Ben’s face had gone pale.
I swallowed hard, looking down. "They shouldn't be able to complete the ritual without it being whole."
So, what had that vortex been about?
The air around the token hummed with an invisible current, brushing over my skin like static before a storm.
I couldn’t stop staring at it.
The runes etched into the surface seemed to shift, rearranging themselves in subtle movements that made my eyes ache if I tried to follow them. Lukas stayed beside me, his hand hovering near my shoulder like he was afraid to touch me or afraid I might vanish if he did.
“Say something,” he said quietly.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I whispered. “But it’s… calling.”
The others had fallen silent. Even Matteo looked uneasy. Ben leaned forward, his sketchbook forgotten on his knee. “Calling?”
“Listen.”
At first, it was only a whisper under the hum of the refrigerator and the creak of the townhouse pipes. Then, slowly, words began to thread through the air. They rolled over me in waves.
It wasn’t English, but I knew it.
The language bloomed in my mind like a returning memory. It had to be Old Norse. The same tongue I’d heard echoing in the vision; the same one I’d spoken when I’d run Reese through centuries ago. My lips parted, and before I could stop myself, the words began to spill out. I didn't know what I was saying. I don't think it even mattered.
The token shuddered. A bright, white-gold light shot through the seams of its carvings, outlining every rune like fire tracing veins through stone. The sound that followed was a low, thrumming pulse, like a heartbeat. The air grew thick, heavy enough to hurt breathing. The lights flickered. Isla yelped. Matteo swore in Italian.
A golden wind rose from the token, swirling like a miniature storm, twisting, and expanding. From the heart of that light, something else shimmered into being: the crystal appeared. My breath caught. It hovered there before settling into the cradle of the token with a sound like thunder muffled underwater.