Page 198 of The Blood Rites

The counter pulses: fifteen, fifteen, then—sixteen.

I stand on the beach, blood pooling at my feet, my hands shaking so hard I cannot hold them still.

Kael is at my side in a breath. He grabs me, hard, hands on my arms, the back of my neck, as if letting go would allow the world to take me.

I’m not going anywhere.

The world shakes and the sky above us splits. From the rift, dozens of Overseers pour down. They do not float; they drop, as if the strings holding them aloft have been cut. They stutter and twitch, their bodies bending at strange angles. Their glass faces refract the light, and for a moment, every mask is Atheron’s, then Marissa’s, then my own.

They chant, not in unison, but in overlapping, broken waves.

Until the count is true. Until the count is true. Until the count is true.

Each line is off by a fraction, the whole world echoing with dissonance.

Kael pulls me closer, and our foreheads touch. The world is ending around us, but he is steady, solid, a fixed point in the spiralling dark.

He kisses me, once, desperate, tasting of blood and salt.

“I won't let go,” he says.

I nod. I have no words left. My mouth is full of the last, secret words of the god at the bottom of the sea.

The Overseers close in. Their bodies fracture, segments splitting, then merging, as if they cannot hold their own shape. Their hands point at us, then away, then back again, like even they don’t know what to do.

The Mother Shard’s voice erupts from everywhere at once. But it is not the warm maternal voice from the Embrace. It is a scream, an animal shriek, cracking at every edge.

“My Light. My Shadow. Only one may survive.”

The world shakes again as the death counter pulses, gold and crackling.

Her voice is a thunderclap. “The Veins must be fed. Balance requires devotion. Perfection requires completion.”

Kael and I stand on the sand, hand in hand, facing the army of Overseers, and the broken voice of a god.

I look up at the counter, locked at sixteen, where it will stay.

I look back at Kael, and I see a broken boy, fighting for something.

A wound remembering itself, just as the Shardfather said.

I raise my voice, so loud it tears my throat.

“Your count is wrong.”

The world stops.

And the death counter blazes red.

Twenty Seven

For one breath—one impossible, stuttering instant—everything holds still. The beach, the sea, the sky, the Overseers, us: suspended as though the hand of a goddess has pinned the world in place. Above us, the counter bleeds red, the number sixteen carved into the sky like a wound that will not clot. Rain beads in the air, the droplets frozen mid-fall.

It all unfreezes at once, and the world doubles its pace to take back the lost second.

The counter shifts and turns, anchored in the heart of the crystal crown. Then the crown erupts. Crystal rips from it, growing impossibly fast down towards the island’s centre. It becomes a tower so high it eats the sky, shoving aside the clouds and warping the air. The red sixteen glows on its face.

The Mother Shard does not speak.