Chapter 9
*Garrick!* her mind screamed into his skull. *Listen to me! Shut it out! Don't look at the paper! Look at me!*
Within the churning darkness of his psyche, she felt the catastrophic collapse.
The silver cage she had built was no longer just fraying; it was exploding. The memories Malakor’s words had summoned—the cold, hard, historical facts of who he was—were battering against her silver threads like battering rams against a wooden gate.
She saw the images flooding his mind: *His hands, covered in the blood of an elderly weaver who had pleaded for mercy.* *The torch in his grip, hurling fire into the ancient library of her order.* *The cold satisfaction of checking names off an imperial ledger.* *And then... the sudden, paralyzing shock of her terrified eyes looking up at him from the mud, the psychic hook sinking into the soft meat of his guilt, the world turning white, and waking up with an unquenchable, burning need to die for the girl he had been paid to slaughter.*
"Aveline..." Garrick gasped, dropping to one knee upon the flagstones. Both broadswords clattered against the stone. He clamped his hands over his ears, his nails digging into his flesh until blood welled between his fingers. "What... what did I do? Who am I?! *WHO AM I?!*"
"You're Garrick!" she cried out, crawling toward him, throwing her arms around his massive, trembling shoulders. She pressed her tear-streaked face against his neck, inhaling the familiar scent of iron, woodsmoke, and fever. "You're my protector! You loved me! You promised we would go to the river! You promised me a garden!"
"A garden?" Malakor’s voice cut through the air, mocking and cold. "How touching. A butcher and his witch playing house in the weeds."
Malakor turned to the four null-priests behind him.
"Enough of this puppet show," the Inquisitor Commander commanded, his voice turning to pure, unyielding granite. "Unveil the Mirror."
The four priests moved with synchronized, eerie precision.
From beneath a heavy velvet shroud resting upon an obsidian tripod, they revealed an artifact that made the very air in the courtyard turn brittle as spun glass.
It was a convex disc of polished, black obsidian, three feet in diameter, framed in tarnished brass that had been inscribed with hundreds of screaming faces. The surface did not reflect the gray sky or the stone walls; it reflected an empty, swirling vortex of blinding, bone-white light.
*The Mirror of Unmaking.*
An ancient relic of the Purge, forged specifically to break mind-weavers, soul-binders, and illusionists. It did not merely dispel magic; it forcibly extracted the original truth from any entity caught in its beam, burning away all mental constructs, enchantments, and psychic overwrites with ruthless, agonizing finality.
"No!" Aveline screamed, throwing herself across Garrick’s back, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face into his hair to shield him with her own flesh. "Malakor, please! It will destroy his mind! He won't survive the severance!"
"He survived the sacking of seventeen fortresses, little bird," Malakor sneered. "He will survive the truth. And if his brain turns to soup... well, four hundred crowns is four hundred crowns, dead or alive."
Malakor raised his gilded rod.
"Cleanse the hound."
The four null-priests plunged their silver daggers into the braziers flanking the mirror.
A low, vibrating hum resonated through the courtyard, so deep it rattled the teeth in Aveline’s jaw and made the flagstones beneath her knees tremble. The black glass of the mirror began to glow—not with flame, but with a pure, searing, ultraviolet brilliance that smelled of ozone and scorching meat.
*Garrick!* Aveline screamed into the link, pouring every remaining drop of her life-force, every thread of her soul, into a desperate, frantic barrier around his subconscious. *Hold onto me! Don't let them take it! Hold onto the garden! Hold onto me!*
Garrick shuddered beneath her.
For one fleeting, heartbreaking heartbeat, his large, calloused hand came up. His trembling fingers touched the side of her face, his thumb brushing away the tears on her cheek with that same, impossibly tender reverence he had shown her in the kiln.
"Aveline..." he whispered, his voice cracking with an agony that transcended physical flesh. "I... I remember your touch. But I remember... I remember lighting the fire..."
"Look at me!" she sobbed, forcing his face toward hers. "Look at my eyes, Garrick! The fire doesn't matter! We're here! We're at the bridge!"
"The fire was me," he whispered, a tear of pure crimson leaking from the corner of his eye. "I was the wolf."
"NOW!" Malakor commanded.
The Mirror of Unmaking discharged.
A concentrated lance of blinding, scything white radiance erupted from the obsidian disc. It did not strike like light; it struck like an iron battering ram, tearing through the air with a sound like tearing canvas.
The beam bypassed Aveline entirely—passing through her physical flesh like a ghost—and struck Garrick directly between the temples.
"AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHH!"
A sound tore from Garrick’s throat that stopped the breath of every soldier in the courtyard.
It was not a scream of pain. It was the sound of a soul being ripped in half along its original grain.
The silver construct Aveline had built inside his mind didn't just unravel—it *vaporized*.
Beneath the scouring heat of the Mirror, the fragile threads of her devotion, the imported memories of his sister, the synthetic tenderness, the protective instinct that had driven him to take crossbow bolts to the chest—all of it burned away like spiderwebs caught in a blacksmith’s forge.
Aveline was violently ejected from his mind.
The psychic recoil struck her like an iron hammer to the sternum. Blood burst from her nose and lips; she was hurled backward across the flagstones, her body skidding across the rough granite until she slammed hard against the base of a shattered sundial.
She lay there, gasping for air, her vision swimming with gray static, her mouth filled with the bitter, coppery taste of her own blood.
In the center of the courtyard, the blinding light of the Mirror faded into drifting curls of white smoke.
Silence fell over the Sunstone Citadel.
The mountain wind howled through the ruined colonnades, carrying the distant roar of the gorge below. The drakes ceased their hissing. The inquisitors stood motionless, their halberds leveled, watching the smoke clear.
Garrick remained on his knees.
His head was bowed, his broad chin resting against his chest. The heavy leather duster hung from his shoulders like a burial shroud. Thick, dark blood dripped steadily from his nose, his lips, and his earlobes, spattering onto the gray stones between his knees.
*Drip.* *Drip.* *Drip.*
Then, his aura shifted.
Aveline felt it through the shattered remnants of her weaver’s senses. The warm, desperate, bleeding crimson that had enveloped him for three months—the burning, protective hearth-fire of his devotion—was gone.
In its place rushed a terrifying, suffocating void.
Cold iron. Hardened shale. The dead, arctic frost of a professional executioner who had killed so many men that blood was no longer a sin, but a currency.
His breathing changed.
It was no longer the ragged, feverish panting of a sick protector. It smoothed out into the slow, rhythmic, terrifyingly calm respiration of an apex predator.
