Chapter 19 Chapter 19

Chapter 19 Chapter 19
Vivian
A clear silence of the void followed, and I listened. It wasn’t just silence. It was the ringing of a thousand bells in my ear.
My ears still throbbed with the ghost of the explosion, a sound so violent that I thought the air around me was ripped like silk.

I was lying on the cold, damp stone of the crypt, my lungs burning with the sharp intake of a fine, shimmering dust that tasted of a fine dust that tasted like ancient glass and lightning.

“Vivian!”

It wasn’t the voice I expected to hear. A jagged rasp of terror, but undeniably human shook me.

Large hands grabbed my shoulders and set me upright, and I smelt him. That familiar lavender that reminded me of Adrian.

Adrian was still here. Did he make it with me to the future?

“I… I lunged,” I whispered, my voice low and hollow. “I made it. I went across. But… but where is the mirror?”

I turned my head this way and that way, squinting through the settling haze.

As everywhere cleared, it revealed a haunting void where the mirror was once standing before the tomb of the first Duke, inside the crypt.

No way! My thought screamed. No way in hell!

I didn’t believe. Leaning forward, I reached out a hand, hoping to be surprised and huff out a shocking laugh. But none of that happened.

My fingers didn’t meet glass. They met the unforgiving surface of the marble wall.

I blinked, then my eyes noticed it. The trail of a sugary grain of glass on the floor. I followed it and my chest tightened.

Millions of tiny, crystalline grains of glass were scattered over the ancient dust of the Northbrook crypt.

The mirror didn’t break into shards that could be glued together, it was reduced to sand.

“It is gone, Vivian,” Adrian’s voice cut through the dangerous silence with a profound, tragic finalty.

He was kneeling beside me, his shirt torn, eyes searching mine with a mixture of relief that I was alive and an unspoken grief for what I’ve lost.

It was obvious that he wasn’t lying that I had to wait for the blood moon. But then, I could have been trapped within the void and I wasn’t.

That didn’t really bother me much. What bothered me was the absence of the mirror. It was gone, but I refused to believe it.

“No,” I breathed, crawling towards the pile of sparkling dust.

With pain in my chest, I scooped up a handful of the crystalline dust. My hands shook as the grains slipped through my fingers like the sands of an hourglass that had finally run out.

“No! There has to be a way. I’m a historian, Adrian. I know how things are built. I’m sure I can… I can find a way to mend it.”

Adrian pulled me up as he stood, his face a mask of Regency stoicism, eyes still flecked with the silver of the beast within him, wide with a dark certainty attached to his words.

“You speak of impossibilities,” he echoed.

“This was not common looking glass forged in a London workshop. This was a relic of the Fey, a portal bound by blood and the lunar cycle, for which your impatience has ruined. To mend it would require a sorcery that has not walked this earth since the age of the Druids.”

Adrian took a step closer, and I finally saw the figure on the stairs. It was a guard on patrol who had walked in, perhaps because he noticed that the crypt was open, and it wasn’t supposed to be so.

“The way you desire, Vivian, is shut,” he said. “The future you crave is now a ghost, and the present is the only house you have left.”

I looked at the dust on my palm, before my eyes went up to the Duke standing before me. The stake of my reality had just changed because of my impatience.

I wasn’t just a guest anymore. I was now a permanent resident of a century that didn’t want me, surrounded by people who were beginning to look like monsters.

And if that was the reality, I won’t be able to live long enough to see the future. My sister will die, never to see me again, and my ambitions of history will forever be shattered.

I refused to believe it. There had to be some way to escape.

I’m not abandoning my sister in the future. Too much was at stake, and I can’t stand by and watch everything grin to ruins.

No way in hell.

Adrian watched me with a deep, sorry look, but his eyes still bore the glint of the puzzle of my thoughts. The belief that in someway, the glass could be mended, and I’ll find my way home.

Then it hit me.

The old woman I met on the day of the hunt said something about multiple ways to leave this age.
I wasn’t prepared to look into it then. The mirror had been my sole hope of leaving this place, but now isn’t. I won’t die in this century.

As Adrian led me out with the guard lighting the way up the staris with his torch, I knew the battle was far from over. I won’t go down swinging. I’d fight and I’ll win.

“I’d leave this place at the end of the day. I won’t be stuck here for life. There was a bright future ahead of me, and a precious Elena waiting for me beyond the void of time.

I wasn’t going to risk that for anything in the world.

Not now.

Not tomorrow.

Not ever.

The next day was a blur of velvet and social chess, as news of my fainting spell; something that Adrian cooked up through the guard that saw us the other night, traveled far and wide.