The world beyond the lighthouse was a ghost. Colors were muted, landscapes flat and distant, as if she were watching everything through a pane of thick, smoked glass. But beneath this visual dullness, a new world thrummed to life. The stolen jeep Colton had provided was a roaring beast of vibration, its engine a constant, grinding tremor in her spine and the seat of her pants. The wind against the windshield was a high-pressure shiver she felt in her teeth. She drove by the feel of the road, the subtle changes in the tire's hum telling her more about the asphalt than her eyes ever could.
The black lodestone rested on the passenger seat, a cold, dark star. Its pull was a physical thing, a taut, invisible string tied to her sternum, tugging her inexorably northeast, back toward the mountains. Back toward him. She didn't need a map. The stone was her only compass.
Colton had stayed behind. "Two of us make a bigger vibration," he'd said, his silent words final. "You're a void. I'm a beacon. I'll be your distraction if you need one." He'd given her a final, uncharacteristically solemn look. "Don't try to be a hero. Be a ghost. Get in, do what you have to do, and get out."
As she drew closer to the epicenter, the vibrational landscape began to change. The natural frequencies of the earth—the deep, steady pulse of tectonic plates, the whisper of groundwater—were being drowned out by a new, oppressive signal. It was the Schism. Not a sound, but a pressure, a dissonant hum that made her bones ache and her mind feel scraped raw. It was chaos given frequency, a scream so vast it was felt as a constant, sickening weight.
And within that chaos, she began to feel the pockets of order Colton had described. Sharp, geometric silences. Wards. They were like sonic fences, barriers of structured nothingness designed to repel, to disorient, to shred the minds of any sensitive enough to perceive them. To anyone else, they would have been invisible. To her new sense, they were walls of pure, screaming nullity.
She abandoned the jeep miles from the stone's indicated destination, the vibrations becoming too intense, too dangerous to navigate with a roaring engine. She continued on foot, moving through the silent, blighted forest like a phantom. The trees were skeletal, their leaves gone, their bark peeling away as if the life had been sucked out of them. The very air was thin, starved of resonance.
She approached the first ward—a shimmering wall of absence she felt as a cold dread ahead. A normal person would have walked right into it and been driven instantly, violently insane. An acolyte, attuned to the Schism's energy, would have been repelled. Delaney simply… stepped through.
It was like passing through a curtain of ice water. A shocking, breathless cold that lasted a moment, and then she was on the other side. The ward hadn't registered her because she was, in a way, made of the same stuff. Lane's severance had turned her into a walking void. She was the ultimate infiltrator.
She passed through ring after ring of these defenses, each one more complex and vicious than the last. Some were labyrinths of silent frequency, designed to trap and confuse. Others were sharp, aggressive pulses of anti-sound. To her, they were just corridors of cold. She was the one thing they couldn't account for: a victim of their own ultimate weapon.
Finally, she crested a rise and saw it. The mountain was gone. In its place was a terrifying amalgamation of ancient stone and sleek, black Oriax architecture. Spires of obsidian-like material thrust up from the ruins of the monastery, pulsing with a slow, malevolent light. At the summit, where the heart of the Schism throbbed like a diseased star, a fortress had been built. It wasn't a structure to keep people out; it was a structure to channel and contain the impossible power within. This was the Anchor Point. The pull from the lodestone was so strong now it was a physical ache.
Getting inside was alarmingly simple. The main gates, vast things of engraved black metal, were unguarded. Why post sentries when your defenses could unravel a human mind at a thousand paces? She slipped through a service entrance, a smaller, darker void in the wall of silent energy.
The interior was a cathedral to dissonance. The air throbbed with power, a pressure that made her vision swim. There were no conventional lights; the walls themselves glowed with the same sickly purple-black energy as the Schism. Acolytes moved through the halls, their faces serene, their steps silent. They were perfectly attuned to the environment, swimming in the chaotic energy like fish in water. They passed within feet of her, their eyes sliding over her without seeing. She was a hole in the world, a non-entity.
The lodestone led her down, deep into the bowels of the fortress. The vibrations changed. The chaotic scream of the Schism began to coalesce, to focus. It was being shaped, honed, conducted. And at the center of it all was a single, terrifyingly familiar frequency.
Lane.
It wasn't the warm, complex resonance she remembered from the bond. This was something cold, immense, and monolithic. A glacier of power. A dead star. It was the vibration of the severance itself, amplified a thousand-fold. It was the anchor.
She found him in a circular chamber at the very heart of the complex. The room was vast, its ceiling open to the raging vortex of the Schism above. In the center of the room, on a dais of black stone, sat Lane. He wasn't bound. He was perfectly still, his eyes open but seeing nothing in the physical world. Tendrils of dark energy swirled around him, flowing into him and out of him in a constant, rhythmic cycle. He was the conduit. The Keymaster.
He was horrifically beautiful. The anguish that had once lined his face was gone, replaced by an awful, serene emptiness. Power had etched new lines into his features, making him look both older and ageless. He was no longer a man; he was a function. A vital, terrible part of the machine.
Delaney stood in the shadowed arch of the entrance, her heart a frantic, silent drum against her ribs. This was it. The moment she had dreaded and longed for. What was the language of power? How did you scream loud enough to be heard by a god?
She took a step into the chamber. The air crackled around her, the focused energy of the Schism reacting to the foreign presence of her null-field. It was like stepping into a furnace with a shell of absolute zero.
Lane's head turned. Slowly, deliberately. His eyes, which had been fixed on the vortex above, focused on her. There was no recognition in them. No surprise. No anger. They were the color of a winter sky after the snow has fallen, flat and infinitely cold.
He didn't speak. His voice, when it came, was not a sound. It was a vibration that shook the very stone beneath her feet, a wave of pure force that slammed directly into her mind.
YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE.
The words were not English. They were concepts forged from power and nullity, a language of dominance and dismissal. They carried the full weight of the severance, the absolute finality of his choice. They were meant to crush her, to annihilate the audacity of her presence.
The force of it drove her to her knees. Agony lanced through her skull, a white-hot spike of pure negation. This was his power now. Not to create, but to unmake.
But as the wave of force receded, something unexpected happened. The void inside her, the emptiness he had created, did not shatter. It absorbed. It drank the devastating vibration, swallowing the immense pressure. The silence he had given her was the one defense against the power he now wielded.
Gasping, she lifted her head. She met his cold, dead gaze. She had no weapon. No bond. No grand speech. She had only the truth, and the terrible, silent instrument he had made of her.
She opened her mouth. She pushed air through her vocal cords, shaping words she could not hear, sending out a vibration so small, so insignificant against the roaring power in the room, it was like a single snowflake in a blizzard. But it was her vibration. The first true sound she had chosen to make since he had severed them.
The shape of the words formed on her lips. The vibration, weak but perfectly clear, traveled through the charged air.
You… left… me… alone.
It was not an accusation. It was a statement. A fact. A vibration of profound, human loss.
For a fraction of a second, a flicker of something—not recognition, but a disturbance, a ripple in the perfect, frozen surface of his being—crossed Lane's face. The monolithic frequency of his power wavered.
It was the smallest of cracks. But in the heart of a glacier, even the smallest crack can be the beginning of an avalanche.