Alastair Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 13 of 13

Alastair carried Wisteria through the broken passage, his boots crushing loose stone. The walls leaned in, half caved, scattered with rubble where old timbers had failed. The wet prints kept ahead of him, fainter now, drying on packed dirt. Then the tunnel widened, and he saw the end of it, and he stopped. A tall heap of shattered stone rose at the chamber's center, piled like the bones of some fallen pillar. His brother stood before it. Alive. Whole. Thin and pale, but standing on his own feet, the family resemblance plain even in the gloom. Alastair took one step forward. His brother lifted his hand, and a shell of pale blue light bloomed around him, turning the air to shimmering glass. "Don't," his brother said. The word stopped Alastair colder than the barrier. "If you touch me, the binding finishes. They wanted you down here. They wanted your blood on mine. I won't be the knife they put in your hand." Alastair stood still. Wisteria stirred against his chest, breathing soft and even. He looked at his brother through the shining wall and understood. The weakness his enemies had whispered about was never one secret. It was every love he had refused to name. His brother. His wife. The pieces of himself he had kept at careful distance, each one a door they had hoped to walk through. "Then we leave together," Alastair said. He held out the silver ring on his smallest finger. His brother's eyes filled, and the barrier thinned, and after two hundred years the hand that reached through it was warm. Alastair closed his fingers around his brother's, Wisteria safe in his other arm, and turned back toward the long climb home. The secret was his at last, and it had a shape he could carry. He walked out of the dark with all of them.