Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

I wasn’t a Keeper, or a Caster, or a Seer.

I wasn’t like Marian or my mother. It wasn’t for me to keep the lore and the history or protect the books and the secrets that made up so much of the Caster world. I wasn’t like Liv, charting the uncharted, measuring the immeasurable. I wasn’t Amma. It wasn’t for me to see what no one else could or to communicate with the Greats. More than anything, I was nothing like Lena. I couldn’t eclipse the moon, bring down the skies, or kick up the earth. I could never convince anyone to jump off a bridge, like Ridley could. And I was nothing like Macon.

In the back of my mind, I had been searching for how I fit into the story, my story with Lena. Hoping I could fit into it at all.

But my story had found its way to me through all of them. Now, at the end of what seemed like a lifetime in the darkness and confusion of the Tunnels, I knew what to do. I knew my part.

Marian was right. I was the Wayward. It was my job to find what was lost.

Who was lost.

I rolled the Arclight to my fingertips and released it. The stone hung in the air.

“What the—” Link staggered closer.

I pulled the folded yellowed page out of my back pocket. The one I had ripped from my mother’s journal and carried all this way, without a reason. Or so I thought.

The Arclight cast a silver light around the cave as it hovered. I stepped closer to it and held up the paper so I could speak the Cast from the page of my mother’s journal, even though it was in Latin. I pronounced the words carefully.

“In Luce Caecae Caligines sunt,

Et in Caliginibus, Lux.

In Arcu imperium est,

Et in imperio, Nox.”

“Of course,” Liv whispered, moving closer to the light. “The Cast. Ob Lucem Libertas. Freedom in Light.” Liv looked at me. “Finish it.”

I turned the paper over. There was nothing on the other side.

“That’s all there is.”

Liv’s eyes widened. “You can’t leave it undone. It’s incredibly dangerous. The power of an Arclight, let alone a Ravenwood Arclight, it could kill us. It could kill…”

“You have to do it.”

“I can’t, Ethan. You know I can’t.”

“Liv. Lena’s going to die—you, me, Link, Ridley—we all are. We’ve come as far as Mortals can go. We can’t do the rest alone.” I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Ethan.” She whispered my name, just my name, but I heard the words she couldn’t say almost as clearly as I heard Lena’s voice when we Kelted. Liv and I had a connection all our own. It wasn’t magic. It was something very human, and very real. Liv might not like what had unfolded between us, but she understood it. She understood me, and a part of me believed she always would. I wished things could have been different, that Liv could have everything she wanted at the end of all this. The things that had nothing to do with lost stars and Caster skies. But Liv wasn’t where my road was taking me. She was part of the path itself.

She looked past me to the Arclight, still glowing in front of us. Her silhouette was framed in light so bright it looked like she was standing in front of the sun. She reached for the Arclight, and I remembered my dream, the dream of Lena reaching out to me from the darkness.

Two girls who were as different as the sun and the moon. Without one, I could never have found my way back to the other.

In Light there is Dark, and in Dark there is Light.

Liv touched the Arclight with a single finger and began to speak.

“In Illo qui Vinctus est,

Libertas Patefacietur.

Spirate denuo, Caligines.

E Luce exi.”