“It’s gone,” Haroun said, and even though his voice was barely over a whisper, the echoes seemed to come from everywhere. He wore a stricken expression, and one hand was pressed to his heart as if he was feeling for something no longer there. “The prophesy. How...?”
“You taught me that the high magic is vulnerable to the low,” Raeca said, and staggered, completely worn out from the fear of the last few days, and the battle that still lay spread around them. “Magic likes to spin. Anything that likes to spin can be unspun.”
“You broke our prophesy...?” Brendis stared at her with wonder like the dawning sun in his eyes, and then he swept her into his arms, laughing breathlessly. “We… we’re free?”
“You’re free!” Raeca laughed with him and flung her arms around his shoulders as he spun her. “For better or worse, this will be your last life.”
“No!”
Calliope lunged off the floor, tattered, bloodstained white silk flying as she threw herself at them, her fallen blade bright in her hand. Brendis brought up his shield and the crystal-hilted dagger threw sparks as it glanced off spelled steel.
“Calliope, it’s over,” Brendis told her, one arm around Raeca’s waist as he protected them both from the mad queen. “The prophesy is done. We don’t have to do this anymore.”
“I chose,” Calliope screamed at him, and blasted them with a spell-bolt that was, again, caught on the hero’s battle-tried shield. “I chose to be queen! I chose to murder you over and over to keep my reign! I chose to build my temple and my castle, and you stole it from me!”
“We stole nothing!” Raeca shouted back and wondered if she had the power to put the woman to sleep. When she reached for her magic, there was nothing there but faint, weak glimmers. “I broke the chains that bound you to this poison fate. Your life is your own, and so are theirs!”
“I will kill you,” Calliope seethed, radiating icy sunlight as she gathered her power, far from defeated even yet now that she was back on her feet. “For all you stole from me, for defying me, you wretched country wench!”
“I think not,” Haroun snarled, and brought his magic up in a whirl of golden flames that solidified into shields around himself, and Raeca and Brendis. Just in time, as sun-white burst around Calliope in an expanding ring of destruction. “You’ve done enough harm!”
“You stole my immortality!” Calliope hissed like a cornered cat; insanity bright in her eyes. “If I cannot live forever, none of you will!”
With that, she reached for the white marble ceiling, fingers curled into claws.
The castle trembled and screams came from everywhere even as great cracks crawled through the polished stone, and chunks of rock began to fall like heavy rain.
“She’s trying to bring this place down on us!” Haroun yelled over the roar of collapsing stone. “We have to get out!”
But even as he spoke, a huge pillar trembled furiously and fell, blocking the entrance under tons of stone.
“Can you portal?” Brendis yelled back, his shield over their heads as he did his best to keep the worst of the stone off himself and Raeca. “We need a fast way to get clear!”
“I’m out,” the mage admitted, and joined their huddle, the last of his magic supporting Brendis and his shield. “I could take myself and one other, maybe, but not all of us.”
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“Take Raeca and go,” Brendis said without hesitation. “Get her out of here!”
“Don’t you dare,” Raeca ducked under Haroun’s hands and looked up at Brendis even as the walls shook harder, and great chunks of polished ceiling began to fall. “Brendis, we can go together! There must be a way!”
“I love you,” he told her, and bent for a slow, sweet kiss that belied the violence thundering down around them. Raeca tasted tears mixed with marble dust and clung to him desperately. “I wish we could have had a life together. Roun?”
“Goodbye, old friend. You will be remembered,” Haroun said, voice heavy with grief. Before Raeca could stop him, he wrenched her away from Brendis and backwards.
The walls blurred around them, ripples of water-shadows and rainbow as reality softened for three long heartbeats, and went solid again.
Cold air blew harsh against Raeca’s face.
They were outside, on a hilltop looking down at the castle.
“I’m sorry,” Haroun choked out, grey with exhaustion, and heedless of the tears cutting through the white dust on his cheeks. Raeca tried to run for the castle, but the ground bucked under her and she fell almost on top of the prone mage. “I’m sorry— I’m s-sorry.”
Below them, the castle shook one last time, and collapsed, plumes of white dust spraying high into the air as it caved in on itself until not a single tower stood one stone atop another.
A tomb for a queen, and a hero.
“No,” Raeca sobbed as her hand found Haroun’s and he fought to sit up. “No that can’t be! He can’t be dead. He— he can’t!”
“I’m sorry,” Haroun whispered brokenly as she turned to cry into his torn shirt. He wrapped his arms around her and held on. “It was you or him, and he made his choice.”
Raeca barely heard him, lost in torrent of tears and recriminations. Maybe, if only she had been faster, or more clever. Maybe if she had escaped before they walked into Calliope’s castle, ready to die to save her.
Maybe there could have been a happy ending.
Maybe there could have been a life in a small house, for a healer and a hero to learn what came after the adventure.
She could still feel his kiss on her lips and could hardly face a future where there would never be another.
Magic breezed through the air, so weak it was barely even there, and Raeca might have missed it if not for Haroun’s gasp.
“What?” he said, and stretched out a hand, as drained as she was, but still willing to fight if he had to. “How—”
“What is it?” Raeca asked through the haze of thick mourning that made her chest hurt and her eyes sting. “What could come for us now?”
“It can’t be,” Haroun muttered, and narrowed his eyes. Raeca felt the moment he started to burn his own life-force, attention fully on that barest tremble in the air. “Link with me!”
Baffled, but willing, Raeca fed him what little magic she had left and hoped it was enough.
A lesser master of magic couldn’t have done it, but Haroun had three thousand years of experience, and a will of honed steel.
He sent the remains of their joined magic into the shiver, and Raeca felt the bone-snap as their magic found whatever was reaching for them.
A portal tore through the air, a ragged, half-formed thing that blazed with instability.
Brendis tumbled out, as grey as Haroun, and too sick to even stand.
But his eyes were open, and he managed the faintest smile for them even as the portal imploded in on itself.
Raeca scrambled for him with Haroun on her heels. His arms felt like coming home, and she was crying again, this time with the raw sort of relief that didn’t feel real.
“She saved me,” Brendis told them as he lay back in the grass, too weak to stand. Raeca went with him, tucked into the curve of his side and unwilling to let go of him even for a moment. “At the last moment, a portal opened under my feet as the ceiling came down on her.”
“A fitting last act of a queen,” Haroun murmured, smiling, half-dead, but shoulder-to-shoulder with Brendis. The exhausted mage didn’t even try to sit up. “I’m glad you’re not dead, brother. Raising the dead is not one of my skills.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead too,” Brendis replied, and punched Haroun’s shoulder weakly. “I need someone to do the runes on Raeca’s new house, after all.”
“Our new house,” Raeca corrected him, and pressed a kiss to his throat, which was all she could reach without trying to move. “Now sleep. I refuse to make plans for our future until none of us are dying of magic shock.”
“Always bossy,” Haroun mumbles, smiling and already half asleep in the grass. “Must be a healer thing.”
“She’s your granddaughter,” Brendis snickered back, and kissed the top of Raeca’s head. “Do I have to ask your permission to marry her?”
“I don’t know. Ask her.”
“She says yes,” Raeca told them both, and wiggled until she was comfortable. “Go to sleep and dream of a future without prophesies.”