The world didn't go dark. It turned crimson.
The blade was cold, colder than the "Wasting," colder than the stone floors of the Academy. As Aiden twisted the steel, I felt the golden energy that had been building inside me like a sun-strike suddenly lurch. It didn't explode outward; it began to pour into the dagger. The weapon wasn't made of ordinary steel. It was "Void-Glass," a substance designed to drink the very essence of an Anomaly.
I stumbled back, my hands clutching Aiden's shoulders, not to push him away, but to keep from falling. My blood, glowing like liquid starlight, stained his white shirt. He didn't look away. His eyes were no longer full of the frantic boy I thought I knew. They were calm. Terrifyingly, surgically calm.
"Why?" I wheezed, the word tasting like copper and ozone.
"Because the Father is right about one thing," Aiden whispered, his breath warm against my ear as he held me steady in our macabre embrace. "The world can't handle the Source. But he's wrong about the solution. He wants to farm it. I'm here to bury it."
The City of the Hollowed began to tremble. The Father, standing on his balcony, let out a roar of fury. He realized too late that the energy wasn't flowing into his subjects; it was being siphoned away into the boy.
"Aiden, you fool!" the Father screamed. "You'll burn! You weren't built to hold that much!"
"I wasn't built to hold it," Aiden shouted back, his voice echoing with a power that wasn't his own. "I was built to be the filter!"
He pulled the dagger out. I collapsed to my knees, the hole in my chest feeling like a vacuum. But I wasn't dying—not yet. I watched in a daze as the gold thorns on my arm began to wither, the light flowing through the air and into the wounds on Aiden's own palm where the red shards had been.
"You said you were my anchor," I said, the realization hitting me with more pain than the blade. "But you were a sponge. Every time we touched, every time you 'stabilized' me... you were just taking a sample. You were learning my frequency."
Aiden stood over me, his body beginning to vibrate with a violent, white light. "The Arcanum didn't just make you, Rowen. They knew an Anomaly couldn't be controlled by walls or spells. They needed a living countermeasure. Someone who could love you enough to get close, and hate the chaos enough to end it."
He looked down at me, and for a split second, the mask of the soldier cracked. A single tear tracked through the ash on his cheek. "I didn't lie about the love. That was the only part of the mission they couldn't script. And that's why this has to happen. If I don't take this from you, the Archon will just use you to restart the cycle. You're the engine, Rowen. I'm the brake."
He turned toward the Father and the City of the Hollowed. He raised his hand—the hand that was now glowing with the stolen gold of the Sovereign—and slammed it into the obsidian floor of the palace.
The effect was instantaneous. A wave of white fire surged through the bridges of light, through the buildings of shadow, and into the very roots of the Father's feet. It wasn't an explosion of destruction, but of neutralization. The Hollowed didn't die; they simply stopped. The violet haze in their eyes vanished, replaced by a dull, human grey. The "Crave" was being overwritten by a blanket of silence.
But the price was Aiden.
I watched as his skin began to crack, the same way the Archon's had. The gold light was too pure, too heavy for a human frame, even one designed to filter it. He was becoming a statue of light, a permanent seal for the city beneath the earth.
"Aiden, stop!" I screamed, crawling toward him. "You'll be trapped here forever! You'll be the new Spire!"
"Better a silent grave than a screaming world," he choked out.
The Father tried to lung at him, but the white fire consumed him first. Subject Zero didn't vanish; he was integrated into the stone, his silver eyes becoming part of the palace's architecture, a warning for anyone who dared to look for the Source again.
Aiden looked at me one last time. The gold was reaching his throat now. "Run, Rowen. Go back to the surface. The magic is really gone now. No shards. No Sovereign. Just the girl."
"No!" I reached for his hand, but the moment our fingers touched, I felt a massive repulsion. The "filter" was working. It was pushing me away, protecting the world from the last traces of the Anomaly in my blood.
The palace began to groan, the obsidian pillars buckling under the weight of the new seal. The ceiling of the cavern started to rain dust and boulders. The City of the Hollowed was being buried.
"Go!" Aiden's voice was a chorus now, fading into the stone.
I scrambled toward the obsidian stairs as the bridge of light shattered behind me. I didn't look back until I reached the top of the staircase, gasping for the thin, cold air of the surface.
I stood at the edge of the crater. The sun was fully up now, casting long shadows across the salt flats. Behind me, the earth let out a final, deep rumble. The obsidian stairs subsided into the ground, and the crater filled with sand and ash until it was nothing more than a shallow depression in the earth.
The City was gone. The Father was gone. Aiden was gone.
I stood in the silence, my chest aching where the Void-Glass had pierced me. I looked at my arm. The thorns were gone. My skin was pale, scarred, but ordinary. I reached for the hunger, the old, familiar growl in my bones, but there was nothing. No static. No hum.
I was alone. Truly, finally, horribly alone.
I walked away from the crater, my boots heavy. I didn't head north toward the settlement Aiden had mentioned. I couldn't face a world of "just people" yet. I headed toward the ruins of the Great Wall.
As I walked, I saw something glinting in the ash. I knelt and picked it up.
It was a small, silver vial. The one Aiden had thrown at the Archon. It was empty, but as I held it to the light, I saw a single, tiny drop of gold liquid clinging to the bottom.
It wasn't magic. It wasn't the Blight.
I uncorked the vial and smelled it. It was the scent of the bluebells that grew in the South Garden of the Academy. It was a memory.
Aiden hadn't just been a filter. He had been a thief. He had saved a piece of the world that was beautiful, just for me.
I tucked the vial into my pocket and looked at the horizon. The Arcanum was dead, but the people who survived would still need a leader. Not a god, and not a monster.
I looked at my reflection in the silver glass of the vial. My eyes were grey. Just grey.
"I'm not the Anomaly anymore," I whispered to the wind. "I'm the witness."
But as I turned to leave, I felt a strange sensation in my pocket. The vial was getting warm. And from deep beneath the earth, from the place where Aiden was buried, I heard a single, rhythmic thud.
Thump.
The world was quiet, but it wasn't dead. The magic hadn't been buried. It had been planted.