Page 189 of The Blood Rites

She smiles. It is a slow, maternal thing, but her face flickers at the edge—sometimes her jaw is Kael’s, sometimes her chin pulls narrow and sharp like Sera Vayne’s, sometimes her mouth is my own. When she blinks, her face resets. It’s tailored to me, every shift another lure.

I say nothing. My tongue is thick and tastes of metal.

Her voice comes warm and distilled, carefully crafted for comfort. But I can almost hear the whir of gears. A choir of identical voices harmonise behind each syllable, rippling echoes of her words that sound a fraction later.

“You have done well, Luceris,” she says. “The Light has never made it this far.”

First to die. Just as Atheron had said.

Above us the counter pulses, bleeding light. I don’t respond. I am not here for her praise. I am here because this is where she always brings me.

She steps closer. The movement is uncanny, too smooth, like the world is redrawing itself around her. Her feet make no sound on the crystal.

“You are curious,” she says, tilting her head just so. The gesture is eerily familiar to Kael’s, the one he uses when he doesn’t believe what I’m saying.

“You have questions,” she says, and her eyes shine brighter. “You wish to know why the Rites are necessary. Why I am necessary. Why you must kill, and why you must die.”

She isn’t wrong.

She circles me in a perfect arc. “It is a simple thing. The world is sick, and I am the cure. The cycle allows the world to survive. Without it, all would fall.”

The language is changing. The words lose their smooth edge. It’s becoming more formal, like the liturgy recited by the Overseers. It’s rote now, a mechanical song she can’t un-sing.

“The count must resolve,” she says, each syllable like the tick of a clock. “Ten to bind. Seven to sanctify. Seventeen in all to close. The number cannot remain unfinished.”

She stops pretending. She stands before me now, towering, her form shuddering at the edges—Kael, Sera, an Overseer. Then it’s her again, flawless and loving.

I try to speak, but the words are barely there. “Why me?”

She cocks her head, eyes flickering. “Why me?” she echoes.

She repeats my name, over and over, and the other voices layer in: Luceris, Luceris, Luceris, until the sound is nonsense and the world is full of the noise.

I press my palms against my eyes, hoping to shut her out. It doesn’t work.

She moves close enough that I can smell her: sweet and metallic, like sugar in blood. “You are the answer to a question I have asked for so long.”

She reaches out, setting one perfect hand on my shoulder. “You are the correction.”

“Correction for what?”

“For failure,” she whispers. “For corruption.”

A shudder ripples through her.

“The Veins must be fed. Balance requires devotion. Perfection requires completion.”

Her words fracture, the voices out of sync, and the expanse begins to vibrate. At the edges of the dream, shadows flicker and assemble themselves into Overseers, a perfect ring of them, each one identical, facing forward and humming its own note. A song of death.

“The cycle will finish,” they sing, stuttered and broken. “The cycle will finish. The cycle will finish. Until the count is true.”

The Mother Shard’s face is melting now. One moment Kael, the next a corpse with my eyes, the next a face with no features at all. She cycles through them, desperate for one that will cow me.

“Maybe your count is wrong,” I tell her.

The number above freezes. For the first time since I arrived in the dream, it does not shift. It locks at sixteen.

She looks at the number, then to me. Her face is my own, perfectly, down to the trembling in the jaw.