scorched, but the lambent fire of the Sword hadn’t gone out despite its injuries.
It seemed to be lying in wait, reaching out to me with a faint voice. It wanted to be put together again.
I dropped it in my bag and picked up another piece as a rhyme from Old Earth echoed through my head; something about a broken egg and horses. It was on the tip of my tongue when I caught sight of what Tascius was doing, and all thoughts of it left my head.
“Don’t touch it!” I snapped, my muscles tightening in sudden fear as Tascius reached for a shard of the Sword.
For a moment everything went still, and every hair on my body stood straight up.
Then a sharp crack echoed through the Pit as a ribbon of pure light snapped out from the little fragment of metal, scorching Tascius’s fingertips and leaving them red.
He winced and shook out his hand. “Well, now we know.”
I was frozen in place. “You could’ve been incinerated, friend. This isn’t one of those things where you learn from the same mistake twice!”
He raised an eyebrow, a trace of a smile on his lips. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
My heart was pounding so fast I felt it against my rib cage, but honestly… who wouldn’t be curious? Just the fact that the Sword of Light could be shattered at all was almost unbelievable, so the possibility that it could be made to accept another person seemed plausible in itself.
“You’re still here,” I agreed, forcing out all my anxiety in a rush of breath. “But if you’d picked it up entirely…”
Tascius reached out and rubbed my shoulder reassuringly. “Live and learn, eh?” I scowled up at him and he laughed. “I’ll leave the rest of the dirty work to you, then.”
“Good. That’s exactly the way I like it.” I knelt back down and dropped several more shards into my bag, handling each piece carefully. The edges were still razor sharp.
There was no way of accounting for every single piece without laying them out down here, but at least I could rest assured that nobody else would be able to touch them. If I brought it all to Wayland and he told me one was missing, I could probably just follow the scorched bodies to the locations of the missing fragments.
Finally, only the hilt was left. I balked for a second, the memories of scars and pain still fresh in my mind, but I forced myself to pick it up.
But nothing happened; there was no agony, no searing heat across my palm. I had the faintest sense of regret and relief, almost like an echo of a feeling, as I wrapped my fingers around the comfortable leather-wrapped hilt.
It felt wrong for it to be so light, separated from its greater whole.
On a whim, I pressed a kiss to the pommel. “We’ll put you back together again. If anyone can work magic with metal, it's Wayland.” I settled it in the bag and pulled the drawstrings tightly shut. “I think that was all of them.”
We walked the Pit one last time, making sure none of the shards had fallen behind one of the dark towers and gotten lost in a shadowy crevice, but I was confident the hilt of the Sword would’ve told me somehow if I’d missed an essential part of it.
Even with it broken, I felt better just having it on me. At the very least, if an assassin came for me again, I would shove a fragment into their eye and watch them burn alive from the inside.
The thought was strangely satisfying.
I looped my arms around Tascius’s neck, and he launched us from the floor, beating the air to gain lift. As soon as we passed the pale fire, the sensation of dread and being watched faded like a bad dream.
He looked down at me as we rocketed upwards, his brow still furrowed, eyes a metallic shade that were so different, and yet the same as before. No matter what he became, he would always be my Nephilim.
“Melisande, I’ve been thinking…” he started to say, his words almost carried away in the wind.
We rose above the edge of the Pit and settled lightly on the edge. Grit crunched underfoot as I regained my balance, silently cursing my broken wing. “About what?”
He hesitated, giving me a sidelong glance I didn’t like. “About… other eventualities. If things don’t go according to plan.”
I knew I was just like a child, slapping my hands over my