The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 374

Chapter 374

TESSIA ERALITH

I stood lifelessly, unmoving as if paralyzed, my eyes unseeing as my thoughts turned inward.

Agrona was shouting, but through the blood rushing through my head, his words were muffled like thunder in the distant mountains.

This man who’d supposedly been my friend once—I ignored the nagging sense that almost every memory of him continued to elude me—had tried to kill me. Again. But more disturbing than that, I had lost control of my own body.

I had almost let him run me through. But no, that wasn’t entirely true—she had almost let him run me through.

Choppy and full of turmoil, my thoughts raced back along the short span of my new life, and I realized she’d always been there, hidden inside this body, tangled up within the elderwood guardian’s will. Rooted inside me.

And she’d taken over. Just for a second, but long enough to show me she was more than her memories.

But that was wrong. This body…Nico and Agrona said it had belonged to an enemy combatant, a princess, but she’d been wounded in the fighting, her body living on but her mind gone…

Lies, always lie—

Now that I could fully sense her, knew what she was, I recognized this thought as hers, not my own, and silenced it. I thought about how it had felt for Agrona to muffle the memories, which had constantly plagued me in the first days after my reincarnation. Reaching for this feeling again, I instinctively wrapped the beast will in mana, creating a dampening barrier between her mind and mine.

My thoughts are my own, no one else's, I thought angrily.

There was no reply.

I drew in a deep breath. The stadium smelled like tar and cold ash, overwhelming the subtle fragrances of ambient mana still in a disarray after the battle.

Agrona glanced in my direction, frowning slightly. Beyond him, I saw, in the stands, rows and rows of bystanders, still kneeling, some slumped over, clearly passed out from Agrona’s intent. Those faces I could see—the ones brave enough to raise their head in the presence of the High Sovereign—were tired masks of fear and wonder. _{fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com}

“What did you sense from him, Cecil?”

I shook my head and a loose strand of gunmetal gray hair tumbled into my vision. Maybe I should have it dyed? I thought to myself, before remembering that Agrona was waiting on me. “Nothing. I sensed no mana from him at all, even when he was clearly using magic.” I paused, searching Agrona’s blazing scarlet eyes. “Would you have let him kill me?”

His gaze went back to the sky, searching. “You were never in danger. I knew he would try, and I knew he would fail.”

Nodding, I turned away. My breath caught as I noticed Nico’s prone and battered form lying just within one of the many staging areas surrounding the combat field. I took a step toward him, but Agrona took hold of my elbow.

Without looking at me, he said, “Leave him. The boy is no longer of any value to either of us.”

Scowling, I shook free of Agrona’s hold. “He matters to me, Agrona, and so he should matter to you.”

Floating up from the ground, I flew over the field of spikes and charred earth, then drifted to a knee at Nico’s side. His breath was halting and ragged, and his dark hair stuck out wildly. Sweat beaded across his pale, dirty face

There was a blood-stained hole in his armor, just above his sternum. The wound was no longer bleeding, already healing around the edges, but whatever elixir he’d been given couldn’t save his core. The mana ignored him. A few particles of earth mana clung to his skin, some blue water mana trailed the flow of blood in his veins, but his core was empty. Broken and useless.

“I’m sorry, Nico,” I said, wiping a spot of grime from his cheek. “I should have protected you. You get so…angry…I should have realized you were going to do something like this.”

Nico’s chest was rising and falling. His eyelids fluttered. All around him, mana lay heavy in the ground, blew on the breeze, basked in little fires left burning from Cadell and Grey’s fight…

But none of it was drawn into his mana veins or fueled his body via his channels. The runes etched into his flesh sat empty and manaless as well, no different from the plain ink tattoos of my previous world.

That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right.

I felt Agrona’s oppressive power approaching from behind, could sense his curiosity even without looking at him. His gaze was like a spotlight, lighting up the world wherever it turned. “After all his work and pain to grow stronger, Nico will never use magic again.” Agrona didn’t sound sad, made no attempt to affect emotion at all, merely commenting on the fact.

His words rang hollow in my ears. A wound that didn’t even kill the body shouldn’t be able to steal a mage’s magic. To give someone this gift only to snatch it away from them? It was a fate worse than death.

Agrona was speaking again, but I couldn’t process his words through the spiraling of my thoughts. My vision tunneled on the motes of mana lingering around Nico. There was something here, some potential, something only I could do.

My body began to move as if in a trance, drawn by some deeper instinct. My hand drifted to Nico’s sternum, then my fingers pushed down into the still-healing wound. They moved down through his warm insides until they bumped against something hard: his core.

Blue, red, green, and yellow motes swirled around us, floating like glowing pollen in the air, then began flowing into his mana veins, winding their way through his body and back into his broken core. With the mana, I could feel the black scar marring his core and the roughness within it, filled with clotted and hardened blood.

The core itself—this strange organ found in this world but not in my last—didn’t react to the presence of the mana. It was as if the core were dead, despite Nico’s other organs continuing to function. Normally, a failed organ would cause a cascade of other failures, eventually resulting in death. But humans were capable of surviving without a mana core…

I had been reincarnated into a body with a fully formed, beautifully silver core, and so had never needed to form my own. The reincarnation process itself—or perhaps my status as the Legacy—had near-instantly purified the body’s silver core to white. But the lingering mana surrounding Nico’s core felt like a blueprint for what it used to be…for what it could still be.

Using the mana like steel wool, I scoured the dried blood from the inside while burning away the residue with careful ignition of fire-attribute mana.

Nico let out a low moan and twitched, but remained unconscious, which I was glad for. This process wasn’t quick. My ability to master new techniques, however, was, and within a couple of minutes I had cleansed the inside of the core.

The core itself was harder. Like one that had just been newly formed, the hard walls of the organ were contaminated with blood.

Taking hold just of the water mana, I pulled them through the core walls. Each individual particle leeched out some of the trapped blood, and the more I repeated the process, the cleaner and clearer Nico’s core grew.

This was a slower process, and so I stopped when his core was still a murky yellow color. For now, I just needed to know it would work.

But the presence of the cleaned core and mana alone did not seem to spark anything within him. He rested uneasily, his brows pinched and mouth curved downward in an uncomfortable frown.

Alacryans, unlike the humans in Dicathen, were born with their mana cores in place: One of the many mutations caused by Agrona’s experimentation and crossbreeding. The bestowals did the work of activating the natural core, harnessing mana for the mage so they could tap into the runes’ powers. In Dicathen, however, I knew that young mages meditated to collect and purify mana until they “awakened,” using the mana itself to manifest the core.

Reaching outward, I called to the mana filling the stadium, drawing it to me in swirling streams. I again siphoned it through Nico’s mana veins, into his core, and then out again through his channels and into his runes until his body was glowing with it, his dark features alight from the inside.

I heard the Scythes returning, but Agrona waved off their excuses and conjectures. He was focused entirely on me, his mind probing mine curiously.

I ignored it.

The shields—those that had survived the battle—dimmed as I stole the mana from them. Mana powered lighting artifacts flickered and went out. Imbued artifacts failed. I stopped only at drawing mana directly from the cores of the shivering, frightened people in the stands, otherwise taking every particle of mana I could reach and pouring it into Nico.

His eyes flickered open. “Cecilia?”

He began to cough. I released his core and slowly pulled my hand from his chest, carelessly wiping his blood off on my battlerobes. “I’ve done my part, Nico. I need your help now. Draw in mana, take control of it. Can…can you do that?”

Nico took a deep breath, choked, and coughed some more. “I can’t feel it.”

Taking his hand, I squeezed hard enough for it to hurt. “Children on the other continent can manipulate the mana in their bodies before they form a core. Surely, you can too.” Seeing the confidence leave his gaze, I spat the last words, trying to spark a fire in Nico. “Grey accomplished it in the body of a three-year-old, didn’t he?”

By the way he tensed, I was sure it had worked. Nico glared at me, then closed his eyes. A heartbeat passed, then two, then…the mana I had condensed into his body rippled. A small movement at first, like a light breeze over the surface of a pond, but it was enough to bring a smile to my face.

“What exactly did you do?” Agrona asked as he leaned down next to me and rested his hand between my shoulder blades.

I explained the process as best I could, keeping my voice low so Nico could focus. “But I’m not exactly sure if it’s working yet.”

“Once again, your reign over mana surprises even me,” Agrona said, his rumbling baritone warm with praise. “I truly believe there is no limit to your ability, Cecil. And I apologize for what I said earlier. I was too quick to give up on Nico.”

“It’s fine,” I answered coolly. “Because I won’t ever give up on him. And I won’t let you forget your promise, either.”

The mana particles within Nico’s core began to change, growing brighter and more pure. His channels woke up, too, pulling the newly purified mana out into his body to help him recover. His runes activated in brief flashes, one by one, like muscles being stretched.

Nico’s eyes fluttered open. The smile he gave me was full of softness and wonder and the tentative kindness I saw in my memories of him from the orphanage.

“How?”

I squeezed his hand again and realized the vertigo and nausea I’d previously felt at his touch—some abstract remnant of the feelings Tessia Eralith had for him—was gone. I considered leaning down to kiss him, but then remembered Agrona’s promise.

Someday, Nico and I could have our lives back. Our real lives—including our relationship with each other. But for now, in this body…intimacy felt like a desecration. I nearly laughed at the childishness of this thought. What a silly line to draw, I told myself. Was it ethical to fight a war in the body of another, but not to share a kiss?

But the truth was something else. Something more complex, and much stranger.

This would not be like a life at all, I decided. More like…purgatory. Though I wasn’t going to be merely a weapon in Agrona’s arsenal, neither could I be myself, not really, not as long as I wore this skin. Nico couldn’t either. But we would work together, changing the face of this world to Agrona’s design, and when the war was won, we could leave. Together. Be ourselves again.

Together.

Standing, I pulled Nico up with me. He grimaced, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. His eyes flicked to Agrona before jumping away again, focusing into the distance. “What happened to…”

“Grey?” Agrona said, raising an eyebrow over an otherwise impassive face. “After your spectacular failure, he vanished again.”