Page 204 of The Blood Rites

When I can finally move, the first thing I do is look for Kael.

He is nowhere.

He must have run, as I asked.

Or he is dead.

I pray it’s the first.

Then I hear it—not a sound from the sky or the sea, but from everywhere at once. From inside the crystal tower, from inside my own skull, from beneath my feet.

The Mother Shard is weeping.

Not a god’s scream, not the thunderclap of retribution, but a slow, deep, unstoppable sobbing. The sadness is so immense, so old, it feels like the sky itself could collapse from the weight.

I want to curse her. But I can’t.

“Kael?”

Nothing.

Just rain. Just the sea. Just the sound of the Mother Shard crying.

My chest caves in around the grief. I sit there, knees in the sand, head tipped up towards the sky, listening to the sound of something immortal breaking.

I force myself to look at the Shard. It still stands, but now there is a crack—one clean line, splitting the crystal from top to bottom. A wound that cannot be healed.

The sixteen turns to gold, still burning at the centre, alive and incomplete.

But a god is bleeding because of me.

I stay there in the rain, waiting for Kael. I know he will come.

When his hand finally finds my shoulder, I almost break apart.

“Luceris,” he says softly.

I turn toward him.

The storm still rages overhead. The Shard still weeps. The count still burns sixteen.

But Kael is alive.

And for the first time since entering the Blood Rites, I don’t know what happens next.

Twenty Eight

Rain falls sideways, needling every exposed patch of skin, but I barely feel it. My face is pressed into Kael’s shirt, the cloth soaked and filthy but warm enough that I can’t make myself care. His arm is clamped across my ribs, not gentle, just there, and I let myself lean into the pressure. It’s the only thing keeping me upright.

Sixteen.

The death counter is still burning in the sky, brighter than ever through the storm. The number doesn’t move, and I’ve stared at it so long my eyelids are burning.

Kael is shaking, but not from the cold or from fear. He laughs, short and breathless, like he doesn’t know how to stop. Every time I shift in his hold, he pulls me closer, as though he expects me to vanish if he doesn’t.

The beach feels empty—no bodies, no evidence, just the pitted sand where the Overseers’ feet never touched. In the distance the Shard seems to lean a little to one side. I must be imagining it. The crack throbs with the pulse of the Mother Shard. She still weeps. I can hear it under the thunder, a broken whimpering that doesn’t belong to any human.

Kael wipes blood from his jaw with the back of his hand. His fingers come away slick, the rain doing nothing to clean them. He catches me watching and tries to hide it, but his hands won’t stop trembling. He stares at the tower, as if he can see through the layers of crystal and rain, all the way to the Embrace.