Chapter 179: Get Out

Theon’s eyes flicked open.

Not a whisper could be heard, yet somehow the whole corridor felt the shift. An eyelid that had never graced any living thing lifted slowly, and out spilled those impossible colors swirling within: red, blue, green, gold, white, violet, and a dreadful, bottomless black, all churning in twisting, glowing rings around the pupil, always moving, never still, never blending.

The weight of it doubled.

It bore down on the corridor like the lid of a coffin, cracking the floor open and sending black lines crawling up the walls from beneath Theon’s floating body. One of the pillars let out a groan and broke clean in two. The air in the chamber grew dense and heavy, so thick it could choke a man. All along the corridor the sconces winked out in tidy little puffs, and above, the great ceiling timbers started to splinter.

The Headmaster pushed his palms flat against the floor and braced himself, fighting to keep his trembling limbs steady. With great effort he lifted his head and looked upon the boy in the golden light, and saw, not a boy, but something built out of memory.

“Theon,” he croaked. “Boy. Can you hear me?”

The shining figure did not turn its head.

Something rattled behind them.

At the base of the shattered pillar, the man who had stabbed Theon was beginning to move. Voss, the killer, ought to have been a wreck of blood and shredded clothes, lying dead among the cracks in the floor. But he rose instead, in jerky motions, like a puppet whose strings had been cut loose, his head swaying, his fingers hanging limp. Then his chin came up, two narrow pale eyes fixed on the boy in the golden light, and a slow, thin smile spread across his face.

“I told you this would happen,”

The voice belonged to the same speaker that had resonated across the chamber, yet it carried a deeper, silkier tone, slipping out of Voss’s lips as if the man were nothing more than a channel for the speaker’s intent. “I warned you. Every last one of you. We have to kill him, before he breaks the world apart.”

The Flame Empress spun around.

Flickering flames danced along her arms. “What’s going on? Why is my Theon shifting, what is this pressure?”

“That isn’t your Theon anymore,”

It said softly. Far too softly.

“That is a calamity. A calamity in its own right, a herald that comes once an age and consumes everything in its path. There are only two options with something like that. We can either suppress it, or we can kill it. But we can’t suppress it. Not one of us alive has the power.” So basically, that means we have to kill him. This world is going to be wrecked by him. I’m telling you this as someone who already saw it go down once.”

The Flame Empress just stared. Her lips opened, but all that came out was her wonder. Somewhere behind her ribs, a tiny seed of doubt dug in and started to grow. She raised her eyes to that glowing boy hanging in the air over their heads, to the golden hair and the shifting eyes and the crushing weight in the air, and she hated how easily his words sounded true. She hated it from the bottom of her heart. She loved this boy, she had loved him for an age and a day, and she had no idea what it was that hovered above her.

Theon didn’t hear any of them.

Or maybe he did, from really far off, the way you hear rain drumming on a roof that shelters you. Inside him there was only smoothness a clarity, a cold, bright flatness. A line of text scrolled out in front of his eyes.

{Hostile entity detected. Source of soul interference confirmed.

Entity is occupying the body of the host Voss.

Threat level: negligible.

Recommended action: removal.}

His eyes followed the man’s movement by the pillar, and the many colored light in the man’s eyes fixed on the thing behind Voss’s head as surely as a hand finds a coin in a purse.

The smile on Voss’s face froze over.

Theon lifted his left hand and gave a lazy flick, the way you’d brush off some annoying bug.

BOOM!

Voss’s body jerked to the side like some invisible giant had kicked him, and it smashed into a huge boulder-sized chunk of the corridor’s stone wall, splitting it top to bottom and hurling it back into the dark depths of the corridor. A scream ripped out of Voss’s throat, way higher and more terrified than that calm voice he’d been using.

Theon lifted his hand once more.

Voss’s body hovered up near the ceiling, feet dangling, like he’d been hung from the rafters by his thumbs, a few paces from the floating boy’s head.

Theon’s hand clenched.

CRASH!

The body shot down and hit the floor in a burst of dust and shattered stone, and the ground itself cracked apart in a circle around the man. Voss lay in a crater with his hands spread out, a thin line of blood trickling from his lips, but he was still breathing.

“Get out,”

Theon said. He said the word in a quiet, steady tone, the kind you’d use to ask for a glass of water. But there was something else buried in the sound of that word, something so huge and overwhelming that the Headmaster felt his heart freeze solid. It was the voice of a king talking to a servant, and the servant was the world itself.

The effect hit instantly.

Voss’s body arched up with a gasp, and a thick, swirling violet mist poured out of his nostrils, his eyes, his mouth, until all that was left of him was the outline of a tall man in a long, spiky crown, his porcelain features a cracked mask. The rage in his eyes burned a fierce purple.

Behind him, Voss’s body went limp, his eyes turning white and rolling back before finally closing.

He had vanished.

The creature hung in the air, its hands clenched into fists, and every last shred of patience had drained from its face.

“You beast,” it snarled. “You walking disaster. You foul relic of the old world. I’m going to destroy you.”

It ripped Voss’s broken sword up off the floor and hurled itself at the boy, a crackling purple trail of fire streaming behind it. The blade came down in a sweeping arc, cutting toward the glowing figure’s throat.

Theon just looked at it.

That was it. He didn’t lift a hand or move a single step. He fixed his many-eyed stare on the spirit and studied it the way you’d study a tiny bug crawling across your sleeve.

Then the pressure shifted.

It crashed over the spirit like waves against a rock, and the sword’s edge froze a hand’s width from Theon’s neck — then the blade bent, and the metal shrieked and curled up like paper thrown into a fire. The spirit shrieked. It was flung backwards through the air as if a mountain had landed on its back, and it slammed into the floor so hard the stone cracked open, exposing the dark rich dirt beneath the corridor. The pressure drove it down into the ground, pressing harder, and harder still. The purple fire flickered out and died. the porcelain face cracked right down the center. The spirit’s mouth gaped open in a scream that made no sound, like it had no air to fill it with.

Stuck there in the dirt, it gazed up at the boy, and the fire burning in its eyes wasn’t hate anymore.

It was fear.

“Shatter,”

Theon said.

Crack.

The spirit shattered, into a thousand little shards of violet light, and scattered across the crater and through the air and up and up, melting away like sparks in water. The final speck of light blinked out, and all that was left was scorched stone and the broken, curling leftovers of a blade.

Silence took over the corridor.

The Headmaster didn’t move. Couldn’t, his breath stuck in his throat. He had watched the thing that had haunted the academy’s halls since before it was even founded get turned to ash in a single heartbeat. It hadn’t really been a fight, not since that first breath. Just a judgment.

The Flame Empress stood right where she was, her flames gone out, her hands open.

“What exactly are you?” she breathed out, the word barely making it past her lips in a hush so soft it almost vanished into the air around them.

Her voice cracked apart as it left her, splintering into something thin and unsteady that she could not pull back together again.

Theon rotated his head toward her with a slowness that felt almost deliberate, almost cruel, and as he did, those golden strands of hair slid across his shoulder and drifted past it, catching whatever light was left, while the thing lodged inside his body, fixed itself on hers and simply stared, and looking deep behind those eyes she found not even the smallest spark of recognition, not one single whit of warmth, not the faintest hint of anything at all that could possibly be tied to hands, or arms, or any of the other limbs that ought to carry the power of animation inside the body of this boy standing before her. He regarded her the way a person might regard a rock lying forgotten on the road, with the same flat, empty indifference and nothing more behind it.

Her name never once escaped his lips, never slipped out as some useless offering that might somehow pass for an answer, and instead there was only the turn of his right hand, a small flick of his fingers that gathered the air between them and pushed it toward her, palm held outward.

“Every being within the parameter,” he said, “must die.”