“So there is still danger,” Elizabeta hissed. “The pathways should not be.”
Crispin held up a hand, and I was glad he was doing all the talking because Sebastian and Gabriel were looking increasingly annoyed. “Yes, in theory there is still danger now that the pathways are shining again, but we think we have an idea.”
Everyone fell silent as they waited for him to continue.
“Each realm will keep a piece of the darkness, contained within a vortex. The light of the pathways will continue to exist, just as the darkness will continue to exist. Only contained, neither will be harmful. Both will remain in balance.”
“We can’t just have vortices lying about,” Charla scoffed.
“No,” Crispin agreed. “And that’s where dear Eva comes in.”
All eyes turned to me. I straightened my shoulders, though my knees felt like they’d been replaced with wet paper.
“Here’s the thing,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “The darkness needs a home. A place that’s already unbalanced with too much light.” I held up my hand, and a wisp of shadow curled around my fingers like smoke from a candle. It didn’t hurt anymore. That was new. “In addition to the vortices, I can split off pieces of what I’ve absorbed. Small enough to manage, but big enough to matter.”
“You want todistributeit?” Elizabeta’s voice could have frozen the Bogs’ warm waters. “Like some kind of magical plague?”
“Like a vaccine,” I corrected. “A little bit of exposure keeps the whole system from going haywire. Each realm gets a fragment, contained in a vortex. The vortex acts like a dam—it holds the darkness in place, but it also lets the magic of each realm interact with it. The pathways provide the light, the fragments provide the dark, and together they create something stable.”
I glanced at Mistral, who gave me a small nod of encouragement. He’d helped me work through this part.
“The vortices won’t be randomly placed,” I continued. “They’ll be anchored to specific locations—places where the pathways already create strong magical signatures. The elven realm has its forests, the Bogs has its compressed wild magic, the fairy realm has its crystal formations. Each one has a natural buffer that can contain the darkness without letting it spread.”
“And if it does spread?” Lucas asked, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“It won’t,” I promised, having come to a better understanding of the darkness. “It won’t grow any larger than the light it’s anchored to. It’s only destructive when the natural balance is upset.
“The first vortex I’d absorbed was different,” I continued. “It was filled with celestial magic—my mother’s magic—stolen and compressed into something brutal and hungry. When I released it here, it fed on the wild magic like a parasite, creating lifeless patches of earth. But this time, I’m not putting light where there’s already too much of it. I’m putting dark.”
I turned to Charla and held out my hand for her vortex. “I’ll take that.”
She hesitated, her wings flaring slightly. The vortex in her grasp pulsed with a deep, shadowy energy—a fragment of the same darkness that lived inside me now, the same darkness that had been drawn to the pathways I’d reopened. It was a piece of the whole, and it recognized me.
“You’re sure about this?” Charla asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
“No,” I admitted. “But I’m the only one who can do it, and the math makes sense. The Bogs needs balance, not more light.”
She held the vortex out, and I took it.
The moment my fingers closed around it, I felt the darkness inside me surge forward. The vortex was cool and dense in my palm, heavier than it looked, and it hummed with a frequency I recognized—the same low, resonant vibration that had been building in my chest since I’d first absorbed the original vortex. This one was smaller, more contained, but no less potent.
I closed my eyes and let my awareness sink into the Bogs beneath my feet. The wild magic was there, as it always was—a vast, churning ocean of compressed energy that pulsed through the wetlands and the stone caverns and the glowing blue waters. It recognized me too. It always had. I was the bright thing it had been reaching for, the spark it wanted to consume.
But now I had something else to offer.
I knelt and pressed both hands flat against the spongy earth. The Bogs’ magic surged up through my palms, warm and eager, and I opened myself to it—not as a conduit this time, not as a source of light to feed its endless hunger, but as a bridge.
The vortex pulsed in my right hand, and I felt the darkness stir inside it like something waking from a long sleep. It was aware of the Bogs. It could sense the vastness of the wild magic, the depth of it, and something in the darknessshifted—a feeling I’d never associated with it before.
Joy.
I drew a breath and pushed the vortex into the ground.
It sank through my fingers and into the soil like water, and for a moment nothing happened. The Bogs held still beneath my hands, and I could feel it processing what I’d given it—tasting the darkness, testing its weight, measuring its shape against the contours of its own wild heart. Then the earth began to breathe.
It started as a vibration—the kind of hum that lives in the bones of things rather than the air. The spongy ground beneath my knees rippled like the surface of a pond, pulsing in time with something I couldn’t see but could feel—the Bogs’ magic wrapping itself around the vortex like a seed that had been planted.
The darkness didn’t fight it.
