He snaps his head toward Theo, completely ignoring the shattered glass on the floor.
"What did you say?" His tone is sharper than anything he has used all evening. There is a tightness underneath it too.
Theo hears it. He simply points to the decoration mounted on the wall and says, "This. It says, ’Magnus, the Dark Archmage.’"
But even as the words leave his mouth, Theo feels the full weight of what he has just done. He goes still.
Damn it, Theo.
Within seconds, Linus is beside him. His face carries an expression Theo has never seen on him before. Pure, unguarded disbelief.
"What did you say, Thea? You — you can read this?" Linus asks, and he is stamring.
Theo closes his eyes.
Brilliant, Theo. Now let us see you get out of this one.
"I..." He starts. And then has nothing to follow it with. Theo the Archmage, the man who has never once been at a loss for words in a negotiation, has run completely dry.
He sighs.
"Yes." Flat. Simple. Nothing else.
And then his mind catches on sothing else entirely. But how does Linus have this here? How did he co to have these words?
Theo turns to face him. "Where did you get it?"
Both of them look at the decoration at the sa ti.
It is brass lettering, mounted inside a glass-fronted fra. Clearly decorative, chosen for the aesthetic weight it gives the room. The kind of thing soone puts on a wall because it looks significant, even if they do not know why.
What Linus had done, though no one else knew it, was copy the characters directly from the black book. He had commissioned soone to render them in brass and fra them. He had not entirely understood why he did it at the ti. It had simply felt right, and harmless enough.
It was looking, now, like it had paid off.
"How can you read these letters? What language is this?" Linus answers Theo’s question with questions of his own.
They look at each other. Neither of them wants to go first, but both of them need what the other has.
Theo takes a step back and crosses his arms.
"It appears we are at an impasse, Uncle Linus." He smiles faintly.
They hold each other’s gaze in silence.
After a mont, Theo turns around and starts walking toward the back patio door.
"It is very late, Uncle Linus. I am going to bed." He pauses at the door.
"Good night."
------------------------------
After Theo leaves, neither of them can sleep. Both lie awake with their own thoughts until Linus finally gives up pretending. He throws back his blanket, gets up, and goes to where the black book is kept.
His fingers trace the letters he has spent months trying and failing to translate. Even the one word he thought he had managed, he had gotten wrong.
"It reads Dark. Not Death." He whispers.
He swallows. He still cannot unseal the next page. What Theo gave him tonight was a translation, not the actual reading of it, and that distinction is apparently what the book requires.
Linus turns the book over in his hands. It is not thick. Not large. It looks like any ordinary small notebook, the kind people used to carry in a breast pocket for quick notes before phones made them obsolete. Unremarkable to anyone who did not know what they were looking at.
He puts it back. Returns to his bedroom. Frustrated.
His mind will not stop.
How can Thea read those letters? Did soone teach her? Her magic teacher, perhaps? But then why teach her and not Liam?
He is certain Liam cannot read them. Those brass letters have been on the kitchen wall for so ti now. If Liam could read them, he would have said sothing. Liam is not the kind of person who notices sothing significant and says nothing to his father.
He would have to be remarkably unobservant not to have seen them. And Liam is not unobservant.
Linus closes his eyes and forces himself toward sleep.
Theo is no better.
How did writing in Caelthorn letters end up here? Magnus, the Dark Archmage. Who was he? Why have I never heard that na?
He tries to work back through the earliest historical texts he read in Caelthorn. The foundational histories, the accounts of the first mages, the records of the elents. There was no ntion of Magnus. No ntion of a Dark Archmage. No ntion of Dark magic at all.
Every account of Caelthorn’s early history spoke of Light. Of the five elents. Of balance and nature and the relationship between mages and the world. But never Dark. Never its opposite.
Which was, now that he thought about it, deeply suspicious.
How can there be Light without Dark? Almost everything has a counterpart. Fire and Water. Wind and Earth. Wet and dry. Good and bad. How was Dark the one thing that simply did not exist?
Or perhaps the more troubling question entirely. How is Caelthorn connected to Arvion?
Theo groans, turns onto his side, and forces himself toward sleep.
------------------------------
The next day passes without incident or anything particularly dramatic. Rhaenas spends it practicing, working through the coordination thod Theo outlined, getting comfortable with it before the actual day arrives. Claudia has pulled Linus away to go and survey the available land options with her.
Theo, still turning over the brass letters and what they an, is distracted enough to give Rhaenas the wrong instructions twice before Maeve calls him out on it. He concedes the point and leaves them to practice without him.
Liam watches him go. He is still hurting from the car ride, from Theo’s refusal to explain, and he has not said much to Theo or the others since. And yet his eyes follow Theo’s retreating back, worried about the state he is clearly in.
When lunch cos, Liam leaves the patio and goes looking for him.
He finds Theo in the guesthouse study.
Theo is sitting at the desk, pen in hand, deeply focused on sothing. Liam frowns and is about to call out to him when he realizes how completely absorbed he is. He approaches quietly instead, out of habit, craning his neck to see what Theo is writing.
It is a language he has never seen before.
"What language is that?" Liam asks.
Theo startles so hard he nearly cos off the chair.
------------------------------
"The Rhaenas HQ collapsed overnight. No one seems to know what happened. The official statent from Rhaenas’s manager, Claudia Monfort, cites a gas leak, following which an inspection determined that relocation was safer than rebuilding."
The Baroness sets the newspaper down on the table with a sharp crack, startling Ethan and the other three Hunters.
"What nonsense! How does a building collapse overnight because of a gas leak? What kind of gas leak does that?" She scoffs.
Hawk is present but not participating in the training, kept out of it by his injuries. He is watching and taking notes. And finding, sowhat to his own surprise, that he has been running through the breathing techniques Theo showed him the other night.
During the fight with Arthur, Theo had walked him through how to breathe with the fire rather than against it, how to let it move through him instead of forcing it. He had never felt so powerful. And yet, at the sa ti, so lost.
Ever since that night, every ti he calls his fire forward, sothing feels different. Off, in a way he cannot na or explain.
Hawk is confused by his own fire. It is stronger than it has ever been, but sothing is missing from it. Sothing he cannot identify. And the not knowing is driving him quietly insane.
Now he is sitting here watching the Baroness berate his teammates like they are beneath her contempt, and the anger building in him has nowhere to go.
"You are no better than idiots! It has been days! You ca crawling back to and said you were ready. Ready for what, exactly? Your magic is not stronger. If anything, it is weaker! You are not progressing. You are regressing! How is that even possible?"
The Baroness’s patience finally gives out after Ethan and the others fail for what feels like the hundredth ti to reshape their fire into a different form. She has not explained why they need to be able to do it. She has only demanded that they do. It is becoming increasingly clear that her training thods and the Hunters are fundantally misaligned. She keeps pushing anyway.
Hawk’s jaw is locked. His body is trembling with contained anger. His ribs are screaming at him. He does not feel it.
The Baroness moves her fingers, murmurs an incantation under her breath, and the newspaper lifts off the table and folds itself into a paper flower, petals and all, floating in the air between them.
"Look at this! This is effortless! How can you not do the sa thing? IDIOTS!"
Every glass surface in the room shatters simultaneously.
"Enough!" Hawk’s voice fills the room.
His ribs are pulsing with pain. He does not care.
The Baroness whips around to face him, and her eyes are murderous. Before she can get a word out, a flower made entirely of fire appears in the air directly in front of her.
"That is what you want, is it not?" Hawk says. "There."
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