Chapter 96 Chapter 96
AMINA
The silver hook didn't just grab; it bit. It was a tether of liquid void-matter that wrapped around my waist, lifting me off the bed of phosphorescent moss and dragging me toward the gaping maw of the Goliath’s tractor beam.
"Amina!" Rian’s scream was the last thing I heard before the atmospheric pressure of the ship’s displacement slammed the air from my lungs.
I was suspended in mid-air, caught between the shattered ruins of my past and the horrific machinery of my future. Below me, the Glass Garden looked like a broken jewel. Rian was a frantic silhouette, his hands outstretched, his violet eyes wide with a helplessness that made my soul scream.
"Let her go, you bastard!" Rian roared, but as he tried to launch himself toward the beam, his body betrayed him.
The sky over Meridian shifted from a sickly grey to a terminal, neon green. Magnus hadn't just arrived to reclaim me; he had triggered the Long-Distance Siphon.
I felt it the moment the pulse hit the city’s Ley-lines. It was a cosmic inhalation. A horrific, hollow sound that seemed to come from the vacuum of space itself. On the ground below, the effect was instantaneous and grotesque.
I watched through the blur of my ascent. Wolves who had been standing guard on the ramparts suddenly collapsed. It wasn't death—it was unmaking. I saw a warrior of the North Pack, a man whose strength had been legendary, let out a piteous whimper as his thick fur began to fall out in grey, mangy clumps. His jaw cracked, his muzzle receding back into a human face, but the transition was jagged and pained. His fangs blunted into flat, useless human teeth, blood spurting from his gums.
They weren't shifting. They were being stripped.
Rian, I tried to project, but the hive-mind was filled with the static of ten thousand dying Lycan pulses.
Then I saw him. My Rian.
He had been resurrected by my power, a King held together by the Kinetic Echo and the First Alpha’s shadow. But that power was magic. And the Siphon was a famine.
Rian fell to his knees in the dust of the bookstore. I watched in horror as his dark hair turned a brittle, snowy white in seconds. The skin on his hands, once calloused and strong, began to wrinkle and sag. He looked up at me, his face aging decades in the span of a few heartbeats. His body was rejecting the pulse that kept him young, kept him alive, kept him him.
"Amina..." his voice reached me, no longer a King’s roar, but the thin, wheezing rasp of a dying old man.
"Magnus, stop it!" I screamed, clawing at the silver tether. "You're killing them! You're killing your own people!"
"People?" Magnus’s voice emerged from the Goliath’s external speakers, layered with the resonance of the Entity he hosted. "They are fuel, Amina. They are the tallow for the candle that will light my new world. And you... you are the wick."
I reached the deck of the Goliath. The silver hook retracted, dropping me onto the cold, obsidian plating of the prow. I scrambled to my feet, my robe torn, my violet light flickering like a dying bulb.
Magnus stood there. He wasn't the man I remembered. His skin was translucent, showing not veins, but flowing rivers of necrotic green light. His eyes were void-black, save for a pinprick of white light in the center of each. He looked like a god carved out of rot.
"Look at them," Magnus gestured toward the city below. "The 'Free Territory' of Meridian. See how quickly their pride turns to dust when the moon is stolen from their blood."
I looked down. The city was a graveyard of the living. Thousands of Lycans lay in the streets, shivering, their powers gone, their identities erased. The Sound-Cannons Ethan had used were now being repurposed by Magnus’s tech-priests, amplifying the Siphon’s reach.
I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my chest. The Siphon was reaching for me now. I felt the Earth Pulse in my veins start to vibrate, ready to be pulled out of my pores and into the green vortex above. I braced for the agony—for the feeling of my soul being hollowed out.
But the agony didn't come.
Instead, I felt a familiar, rhythmic thud against my spine.
The baby.
Inside me, the Null-Point didn't just kick; it inhaled.
The green energy of the Siphon, the lethal, soul-stripping frequency that was currently turning Rian into an old man and the Pack into husks, hit my skin and... vanished.
It didn't hurt. It felt like a cool breeze on a midsummer night.
I stood perfectly still, my eyes wide. I could feel the Siphon trying to grab my light, but the baby was faster. It was acting like a lightning rod, intercepting the attack before it could touch my nervous system. It was eating the Siphon. It was feasting on Magnus’s own weapon.
You want to eat the world? I thought, a cold, lethal calm settling over me. Try eating my son.
"Why aren't you falling?" Magnus demanded, his smile faltering. He took a step toward me, his hand glowing with enough power to level a mountain. "You should be a human wreck by now, Amina. Your blood should be turning to water."
I looked at my hands. They weren't dimming anymore. The violet light was returning, fueled by the very energy Magnus was pumping into the air. The baby was processing the necrotic rot and turning it into raw, filtered power for me to use.
"You made a mistake, Magnus," I said, my voice dropping an octave, vibrating with the dual-tone of the Sovereign. "You thought the Null-Point was a vacuum you could control."
I took a step forward, the obsidian deck cracking under my feet.
"But a vacuum doesn't just sit there," I continued, the violet light on my skin flaring with a brilliance that made Magnus flinch. "It pulls. And my child is very, very hungry."
I looked down at Rian one last time. He was barely moving now, a white-haired ghost in the ruins below. I felt his life-spark flickering, the last of his borrowed time running out.
Hold on, Rian, I projected, and this time, the thought cut through the static like a diamond. I’m coming for his heart.
Magnus roared, realized the Siphon was being diverted. He raised both hands, summoning a pillar of green fire to incinerate me where I stood.
But as the fire hit me, it didn't burn. It was sucked into my abdomen, disappearing into the void of my womb.
"My turn," I whispered.
I didn't strike Magnus. I reached out and grabbed the edge of the Siphon-vortex itself. Using the baby as a conduit, I reversed the flow. Magnus let out a horrific, inhuman shriek as his own power was yanked out of his body and channeled through me, down into the ground. I felt the energy rushing through my veins like liquid fire, but I didn't keep it.
I sent it straight into the Ley-lines, aiming for the man with the white hair.
"Rian!" I screamed.
The old man in the ruins was suddenly engulfed in a pillar of blinding violet light. I saw his skin tighten, his hair darken, his youth returning in a violent, agonizing surge. But the light didn't stop. It began to overflow. I realized with a jolt of terror that I wasn't just saving him, I was overcharging him.
The "Crown" I was supposed to break was now glowing with enough energy to explode the entire city.