BRIONY THORBURN
Yesterday’s events at the Champions Pillar have shown the citizens of Ilvernath that this year’s tournament will not be fought safely beyond the Blood Veil.
The battle has come to us.
Ilvernath Eclipse, “Tournament Violence Strays into Ilvernath”
The Thorburn family had always played the heroes in their town’s ancient, bloodstained story, and no one resented that more than the Thorburn sisters.
The pair met at the door of the Tower, a historic structure of weathered brown stone twined with ivy and bramble, with a crooked peak like the point of a witch’s hat. All their lives the Landmark had been a pile of rubble, yet now it stood proudly amid the hills overlooking the city of Ilvernath, a monument to the Thorburns’ glorious triumphs.
Briony, the older of the two, had been raised certain that she belonged at the center of her family’s stories. She was tall and muscular from a life spent in motion, her hands adorned with an arsenal of crystal spellrings whose power few others could wield. There was no challenge she wouldn’t confront to meet her goals. No price she wouldn’t pay for victory.
She was the perfect hero. Or so she’d once believed.
“I don’t know what else to say,” Briony started warily, “other than I’m sorry.”
Innes crossed the threshold with a grimace. “I’m sorry isn’t good enough.”
“How about I’ve changed?”
Although the sisters shared the same fair, freckled skin and narrow features, they couldn’t have been more different. Where Briony was brash, Innes was cautious. Where Briony was impulsive, Innes was calculating. Normally Innes would relent at any of Briony’s apologies, but for the first time, she showed no signs of surrender.
Innes brushed past her and coolly examined the Tower’s ground floor, her expression flickering with recognition. The interior of every Landmark adjusted to suit the taste of the champion who’d claimed it, and so, from the moment Briony had set foot inside, the Tower had decked itself in pastoral tapestries, cozy woolen rugs, and elegantly carved mahogany furniture, like a setting plucked out of a storybook. Briony had thought she’d feel right at home here, but instead she felt stuck inside a bizarre time capsule of her childhood fantasies.
Innes paused before the coarse stone pillar at the foot of the stairs. The pillar was the heart of the Landmark’s magickal power, its front engraved with the names of hundreds of former champions, most of them crossed out. Three cracks cleaved through the rock, each pulsing with molten, scarlet light.
She touched one of the final names, etched in neat cursive.
Innes Thorburn
“I don’t believe you,” Innes said stiffly. “Nobody changes that fast.”
Then she raised her left hand, revealing the pinky. An ugly, jagged scar marked the place where knuckle met bone.
A scar Briony had given her.
“Well, I’m trying to.” Briony knew how pathetic that sounded.
“I don’t care about your conscience. I’m not here for an apology.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“Ilvernath has never had a tournament like this. Rules that have maintained the curse for centuries are breaking. Our family needs to know why.”
“So they sent you to get answers.” Briony tugged anxiously at a strand of chestnut brown hair that had slipped from her braid.
“I volunteered,” Innes corrected sharply.
While most of the nation of Kendalle had embraced magickal and technological advancements over the past decades, the sleepy city of Ilvernath had begrudgingly crawled into the modern era. Its streets were still mazes of mossy cobblestones with minimal parking. Trendy department stores and chains had yet to overtake its quaint, local spellshops and restaurants. It boasted a puny airport, an up-and-coming art scene, and a charming—if unremarkable—reputation.
All of that changed one year ago, when an anonymously authored book catapulted Ilvernath into the international spotlight.
Magick came in two varieties: common magick, which, as its name suggested, was a plentiful natural resource, and high magick—powerful, dangerous, and extinct.
Except for a single surviving vein, kept secret by the seven oldest families in Ilvernath. Last year, the bestselling tell-all, A Tradition of Tragedy: The True Story of the Town that Sends Its Children to Die, exposed the appalling truth to the world: that these families had hoarded and warred over their town’s hidden wellspring of high magick … until a brutal compromise was reached.
A curse that the families had cast upon themselves.
Every generation, each family sent a champion to compete in a tournament to the death. The victor won their family exclusive claim to Ilvernath’s high magick for twenty years, until the next Blood Moon rose red in the sky, signaling that the cycle had ended and the tournament would begin anew.
Two weeks ago, the curse had started to unfold once more.
A curse Briony had always seen as an honor. A curse Briony had dreamed about being part of for her entire life.
A curse Briony was now doing everything in her power to break.
“I know why things are changing,” Briony told Innes, who still stood at the foot of the spiral staircase. It wrapped around the pillar like a vise before curling up into the rest of the Landmark.
“Good.” Innes stepped onto the first stair.
“We can talk about this down here.” Briony hadn’t been prepared to give her sister a grand tour. “Why—”
“Because I want to see what should’ve been mine.”
With that, her sister began to climb. Wrought iron lanterns winked at Briony from the stone walls as she followed, as did the Tower’s powerful warding spellstones lodged within the mortar. According to the Thorburns’ many fairy tales, their first champion had embedded the crystals herself to defend against her enemies.
Briony and Innes had once cherished those stories. They’d been a source of comfort as they grew up shuffled from cousin to cousin after being abandoned as toddlers by their grieving mother. In those tales, Briony wasn’t a lonely little girl whose only real home was her sister. Instead, she cast herself as the perfect Thorburn. The perfect champion. Someone who had proven that she belonged.
As Innes reached the landing at the top of the stairs, she turned to face Briony a few steps below. Her choppy brown fringe fell across her forehead, masking her eyes.
“It’s just like we always dreamed,” she said flatly. “You must be thrilled.”
Briony winced. “I’m not.”
Innes snorted. “Why? You care about winning this tournament more than anything. Or anyone.”
It was true that Briony had believed the tournament was her destiny. She’d believed it so strongly that she’d cut off Innes’s finger so she could steal her champion’s ring and claim her spot in the tournament. Yes, she’d genuinely thought Innes would die if she participated. But Briony has also envisioned herself as a legend, a breaker of an impossible curse.
Maiming her sister had seemed a worthwhile price for such a noble cause.
“You’re right. That’s how I used to feel,” said Briony. “But I don’t want to win the tournament anymore—I want to end it.”
“Are you really still pretending you can do that?” Innes asked coldly.
“I’m serious. Cast a truth spell on me if you want.”
Innes huffed. “Don’t be so dramatic. Just … explain yourself.”
By now, Briony could recite her plan flawlessly. She’d certainly had to explain it to enough people over the past day. But out of everyone she’d tried to convince, Innes felt the most important.
Like all curses, the tournament had been built within a septogram—a seven-sided star typically drawn on a spellboard, with an ingredient placed at each point and a crystal filled with an enchantment at its center.
Except the spellboard had been Ilvernath itself. The seven Landmarks, which came to life during the tournament, each contained a pillar that acted as a point of the septogram. And the Relics—seven items that fell intermittently throughout the three months of the tournament—were the ingredients.
“It’s a curse that casts itself over and over again,” Briony explained. “The Champions Pillar is the spellstone at the septogram’s center. And the dead champions fill it with power, cycle after cycle.”
Curses required sacrifice. And six lives taken countless times was a tremendous one.
As she recounted all of this, Briony watched Innes’s expression, hoping for respect, or at least understanding. But her face didn’t change at all.
“An interesting theory,” Innes said noncommittally. “How do you actually plan to break it?”
“Each of the tournament families has a story about a specific Relic and Landmark,” Briony offered. “You know ours. I—I tried to tell you, before…” Before she’d attacked her.
Innes touched one of the warding spellstones. The action reminded Briony of the two of them pretending to press crystals into the walls of the Thorburn manor home, mimicking the fairy tale.
“As though I needed another reminder of our story,” Innes murmured. “But plenty of Thorburns have used the Mirror and claimed the Tower, and nothing’s happened.”
“It’s not about claiming both. You have to pair the right Relic with its Landmark’s pillar, and it activates a trial—a final defense to stop you from breaking a piece of the tournament. I know because we’ve already beaten one.” By “we,” Briony meant her and Finley Blair, a fellow champion. He was in the Tower, too, although he’d agreed to make himself scarce to give the sisters their privacy. “All this stuff our family’s noticing? The cracks in the pillar, the Blood Veil between the Landmarks and Ilvernath disappearing? It’s because part of the curse is broken.”
When the tournament began, a magickal phenomenon called the Blood Veil descended over Ilvernath in a crimson shroud, separating the city from the tournament grounds and isolating them both from the rest of Kendalle. But after Briony and Finley had paired the Sword and the Cave, they’d unintentionally destroyed the internal Blood Veil. Although there was still no escape into the outside world, now champions could cross into Ilvernath, and anyone in Ilvernath could pass freely onto the tournament grounds—just like Innes had.
However, Briony left out a crucial detail: There was more than one way to break the tournament. She and Finley had begun to dismantle it piece by piece, which guaranteed the survival of the remaining champions after the curse fell. But the tournament could also collapse, taking down all five of them with it. And it was this possible outcome that terrified her.
Unlike the safer option, its collapse felt far beyond her control. The tournament was a story, a pattern that had reinforced itself over and over throughout its eight centuries of existence, and each time the champions deviated strongly from that pattern, the pillars cracked. Three deadly fissures already split through the side with the champions’ names, compared to Briony and Finley’s single victorious crack on its opposite surface, whose circle of seven stars represented the Relics. Their survival didn’t hinge on a simple war—it was a race, one they were already losing.
“I guess that could be why all this is happening.” Innes’s voice was soft. “Do you really think you can end this forever?”
Briony took one hesitant step upward, then another, until they stood side by side. “I hope so,” she answered. “I’ll always regret what I did to you, but I’m trying to do the right thing now. I promise.”
Innes sniffled, swiping at her eyes, and Briony’s chest clenched. They’d spent a lifetime clinging to each other. It was impossible to ignore the instinct to comfort her—to reach for her, like she had hundreds of times before.
The moment her hand touched Innes’s shoulder, she knew she’d made a mistake.
Her sister flinched away, and one of her rings shone white. A silver spark jolted through the air, then sizzled against Briony’s hand. Briony yelped in pain and tripped down several stairs. She caught herself, barely, and pressed her back against the wall.
“What are you doing?” Briony croaked.
“Don’t touch me.” Furious tears glistened in Innes’s eyes. “You don’t get to try to fix things just to make yourself feel better. Maybe what you’re saying about all of this is true, but I know you. You’re still obsessed with playing the hero.” She gestured angrily at the Tower walls, her voice rising with every word. “But you’re the last person who deserves to. And even if you do end the tournament, none of that changes what you did to me. So don’t try and use that to cover up your guilt.”
Another of Innes’s rings glowed, and spindly spectral hands scuttled along the walls before launching themselves at Briony. Briony threw up a Prismatic Protector spell before they could reach her. A diamond-shaped shield materialized in front of her, made of dozens of glimmering, kaleidoscopic pieces of light. The hands collided with it, then burst into wisps of smoke.
“I know what I did to you was awful,” Briony choked out. “But we don’t have to do this. Please.”
“No, we don’t,” Innes agreed. “But I want to.”
Innes had trapped her without even using magick. The stairs behind Briony were treacherously steep—and turning to run down them would give Innes an easy shot. If Briony had a Here to There spell, she could’ve teleported away, but she hadn’t thought to wear one inside her own Landmark. Briony frantically tried to think of a way out of this that didn’t end with one of them sprawled at the bottom of the steps with a broken neck.
Thankfully, Briony was at her best under pressure.
She cast a Signal Beam, then shaded her eyes. The spell, meant to act as a flare, sent a bright flash through the Tower’s gloom. While Innes cried out in shock, Briony bolted up the stairs, shouldered past her disoriented sister, and burst through the door to the Tower’s topmost room.
She barely had time to turn before another round of cursefire shot at her. Innes stumbled forward, blearily blinking away the effects of the spell. Briony hastily flung up her shield again.
“I thought you didn’t like running away from a fight,” Innes said.
“And I thought you hated starting them.”
Innes’s face contorted with rage. “You started this fight. When you left me unconscious in front of the Champions Pillar. When you cut my fucking finger off.”
The words echoed off the stone walls. The ruby light streaming in through the three massive windows, tinted by the Blood Veil overhead, cast Innes in an eerie radiance.
“I’ve already told you how sorry I am.” Briony’s voice trembled. “I-I don’t know what else to say.”
Another of Innes’s rings shone, and a wind began to whir around their ankles. It quickened and rose until it swirled around the room. Papers rustled on the giant table in the room’s center, and a crimson miniature, meant to symbolize one of the champions, fell over with a clatter.
“You’ll never know how humiliating it was,” Innes growled. “What it felt like to wake up and admit you’d taken the champion’s ring from me. No Thorburn’s ever been that weak before.”
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