Lydia the Siren's Arc

Chapter 32 of 37

The crystal shoved Bastion back through the broken wall. But the blow had cost it. The crack up its chest widened, and a high sound rose from the great jewel at the grove's center. The whole crystal began to shake. The ringing note bent and split, no longer clean. Lydia pressed her hands to her ears as the sound climbed. The forest heart crystal was breaking its own frequency. It shuddered so hard that small stones jumped from the ground. Where the roots had held her, they loosened and drooped. The seal that fed her strength was failing. Lydia looked at the crystal guardian and knew it could not fight and hold the grove at once. Bastion did not stay beastly. As the sound tore through him, his wings folded and shrank. The feathers pulled back into skin. He dropped to his knees in dark robes, a man again, gasping. A deep black hood hid his face until he tore it back. His hands shook. "It's in my head," he said. "The note. It's ripping me apart." He was the man who had carried her from the road. The man who fed her by hand and painted stars on his ceiling. Now she knew he had stolen her beast and left her starving. She stood frozen between hate and the old pull toward him. "Lydia." His voice cracked. "Help me. Please. I'll give it back. I swear it." His fingers dug into the dirt. He was begging for his life, the way her prey once begged in the cavern. The crystal's note struck a single terrible pitch. Bastion threw back his head and screamed. The scream was hers. It was the siren cry she had lost, torn from his throat, raw and huge. It shook her ribs. It shook the crystal too. The great jewel caught the same sound and threw it back, and its own frequency shattered like ice. The grove went silent. The guardian sank to the ground, its cracked body gone still. The roots fell limp. Lydia crawled free of the dead seal, weak, empty of the strength it had lent her. Bastion staggered up. The scream had not killed him. It had freed him. His shape rippled, and the beast rose again, brown feathers streaked with black, talons and wide wings. He did not come for her now. He looked at her once with flat yellow eyes, then beat his wings and rose above the trees. The broken forest could not catch him. He flew off over the ridge and was gone. Lydia knelt in the ruined grove. The crystal that had fed her lay silent and would not wake. Her one shelter was dead. And the beast that carried her power, her song, her only way back to what she was, had flown out of reach. She was human, starving, and alone, with a thief to hunt.