Chapter 31. Shattered

  “Phew! I’m beat,” Calypso exhaled, finally speaking up.

  He pushed the hair out of his face and lifted his head. Our eyes met, and I shuddered at his unsettling gaze — his eyes now flickered with occasional purple glints.

  Calypso looked utterly exhausted, with deep shadows under his eyes. But he seemed rather pleased with himself. He wore a crooked but satisfied smile.

  As Calypso got to his feet — slowly and heavily, as if it took great effort — I heard our colleagues and Inquisitors whispering behind me:

  “Did he… become a vessel for Effu?” someone asked in a frightened whisper behind me.

  But somehow Calypso heard from that distance and flinched, glaring angrily at the whispering Inquisitors.

  “Become a vessel? How dare you suggest I’d let some chaos spirit use me as a pathetic vessel?” he snapped, his eyes flashing an ominous purple.

  “Some chaos spirit? This is the primordial spirit of chaos,” the Inquisitor frowned.

  “There’s nothing more powerful than Effu in all existence!”

  “Well, there is now,” Calypso smirked with supreme confidence.

  I bit my lower lip.

  I didn’t like Calypso’s mood. Not one bit. And the energy radiating from him in all directions terrified me. Dark, sticky, wrong energy…

  “Then where did Effu go?” another Inquisitor called out from the crowd.

  “I trapped him in the bracelet,” Calypso waved his hand dismissively.

  “It needs to be destroyed,” a cold voice came from the crowd.

  Calypso froze, his head snapping up, meeting the eyes of his father, who had stepped forward.

  “Destroy what exactly?..”

  “The bracelet,” Ilforte nodded toward Calypso’s wrist with its glowing bracelet.

  “It needs to be destroyed.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?.. It’s an extremely dangerous object, Calypso.”

  “A dangerous object is now in safe hands. You don’t need to worry about it.”

  “Calypso, do you realize how dangerous Effu is?”

  “More than you know,” Calypso snorted, crossing his arms over his chest and lifting his chin.

  “Then you should realize that the fact Effu hasn’t left the bracelet yet is pure chance, a fortunate coincidence connected to…”

  “What makes you think it’s chance?” Calypso cut him off sharply.

  “I'd prepared for this. I planned to use my mental gift, my gift of persuasion on Effu if absolutely necessary.”

  “Planned?” Ilforte raised one eyebrow.

  “Yes. I’ve been searching for ways to defeat Effu all this time, and I found one. More precisely, I calculated that he can only be influenced through mental magic at a specific frequency one that allows contact and deep pressure on Effu’s consciousness. A frequency unavailable to ordinary mind mages, even supreme ones. I couldn’t have pulled this off before, but a shadow ritual I recently performed elevated my gift of persuasion to an absolute level. I’ve worked hard on this, Father, and honed the skill to perfection. I managed to strike a deal with Effu, as you can see. That’s what allowed us to quickly close the shadow rift and clear out all the creatures at once.”

  Ilforte closed his eyes for a moment, sighed heavily, ignoring the anxious whispers behind him. The Mentor’s back was perfectly straight, his hands clasped behind him. Outwardly calm and emotionless, but I sensed he was seething inside with a storm of emotions and cursing up a storm.

  Then he looked at his son again and continued in an even voice:

  “Fine… Fine. Let’s say you really did ‘strike a deal’ with Effu and trapped him in the bracelet. That’s wonderful. Truly remarkable! But please: take off the bracelet, regardless. We’ll go together and hide it somewhere, no one will ever find it. We can protect this world forever from the influence of the primordial spirit of chaos. He won’t be able to harm anyone ever again, and…”

  “Wait,” Calypso waved his hand, rubbing his temples and wincing as if in pain.

  “I can’t listen to both of you at once…”

  “Both of you?” Ilforte asked tensely.

  “Effu,” Calypso clarified, his gaze taking on that purple tint again.

  “I’m listening… He’s talking to me…”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Ilforte said sharply.

  “You absolutely shouldn’t be listening to Effu’s words. Calypso, take off the bracelet. Now. Or I’ll do it myself, and you won’t like that.”

  Calypso looked at his father with a very strange expression. Strange and… aggressive, perhaps… Distrustful.

  “But he says the bracelet can’t be hidden away right now…”

  “Of course he’d say that,” Ilforte interrupted, watching his son intently.

  “Why would he want to be hidden? It only benefits him that you’ve willingly exposed your mind to his influence.”

  “Wait, you don’t understand…”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Ilforte cut him off firmly.

  “Effu is the most powerful mind spirit in the entire Universe. He can manipulate anyone. Anyone, Calypso. Including you. Do you want to be one of those he’s entranced? Led around by Effu’s sweet words like a puppet on strings?”

  “I’m not…”

  “Just. Take. Off. The bracelet,” Ilforte said, emphasizing each word.

  “Take it off and give it to me.”

  “Give it to you?” Calypso immediately bristled, his eyes narrowing with a strange flash of anger.

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  “Why?”

  Ilforte slowly inhaled and exhaled again. He spoke quietly and slowly, as if carefully choosing each word:

  “Take off the bracelet, put it on the ground in front of you, and step away from it. I don’t want the bracelet. I’m not going to put it on myself. I don’t need it. I just need you to take off that damn trinket. Come on!”

  Calypso slowly, as if in slow motion, reached for the bracelet. His expression was somehow lost, a strange look frozen on his face. Judging by his tightly pressed lips, Calypso was listening to something Effu was telling him. Listening, torn by conflicting emotions.

  I stayed silent, biting my lower lip until it hurt and clenching my fists. I was terrified right now. More terrified than a few minutes ago when I feared Calypso would simply be sucked into the shadow vortex to the flip side. Now I was far more scared, but I kept quiet, afraid of throwing Calypso off and watching along with everyone else, tensely tracking every millimeter as the bracelet came off his wrist.

  Come on… Take off that damn bracelet, for fuck’s sake…

  But Calypso was in no hurry to remove the ‘trinket.’ He froze in place, staring doubtfully at the bracelet, which had turned even blacker, the purple runes on it glowing brighter.

  “Calypso, please take off that bracelet,” I decided to urge him on, unable to bear the prolonged pause.

  “I’m begging you.”

  He either didn’t hear me or pretended not to, continuing to stare at one spot with a strange, clouded gaze.

  “I order you to take off that bracelet,” I said tensely, deciding to try another approach and putting my power as a Guardian into those words.

  No use — it wasn’t working now. Either I was too weak, or the distorted energy field was interfering, blocking my access to Calypso. Most likely the latter, because my head even started throbbing when I tried to influence Calypso through our bond — it felt like an invisible force had violently pushed me back. I groaned from the sharp pain in my head, rubbing my aching temples. I also thought I heard a distant, creepy whisper: ‘Don’t interfere.’

  I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but I suspected Effu himself had just shut me out, judging by the sensation of touching that disembodied voice.

  Meanwhile, my attention was drawn to Cloyne’s words — he was standing nearby with his daddy the general and other Inquisitors from the general’s inner circle.

  “He’s the one who poured his magic into the fifth pentagram!” Cloyne hissed, pointing at Calypso.

  “Him, I’m telling you, Father! I saw it myself. You can verify my words with truth serum or any other mental verification spell. You’ll see, I’m not lying! He set it all up! He just admitted he was planning to cooperate with Effu!”

  “You bastard,” I hissed through clenched teeth, unable to contain my outrage.

  “You know perfectly well that’s not true! Calypso didn’t deliberately feed his power to the pentagram! It was an accident!”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cloyne smirked skeptically, crossing his arms and staring at me mockingly.

  “You’re just covering for your precious lover boy, aren’t you? Silly girl, you’d better keep your mouth shut. The Inquisition will still need to deal with your complicity in this crime.”

  “There was no crime!..”

  “This is exactly what you feared, isn’t it, Mr. Brandt?” the general drawled lazily, stepping forward and addressing Ilforte.

  “You were afraid of exactly this outcome, weren’t you, Mr. Brandt? Afraid, but still let it happen. Outrageous unprofessionalism, wouldn’t you say? That’s why you’ve always so carefully protected your son from his obsession with dark magic, correct? But you’ve failed completely on that front, as we can see.”

  “What are you talking about?” Calypso asked quickly, tensing up.

  “Calypso, please take off the bracelet quickly,” Ilforte asked.

  “Take it off, and we’ll talk.”

  “Talk about what?” Calypso asked tensely, frozen in place, not hurrying to continue removing the bracelet.

  “What’s the general talking about?”

  “Oh, so you don’t know, my boy?” Mackelberry broke into a wide smile.

  “Your father doesn’t trust you enough to tell you the truth, does he?”

  “Shut up, General!..” I heard Elza’s indignant voice.

  “Don’t you tell me to shut up, missy!..”

  “What are you referring to, General Mackelberry?” Calypso asked grimly.

  “What truth was kept from me?”

  I noticed how suddenly my parents tensed up, along with Ilforte, Agatha, Moris, and several other Inquisitors and Fortemins. They all stared at the general as if silently begging him to shut up.

  “Calypso, listen,” Ilforte began.

  “Now isn’t the time for…”

  But Calypso waved his hand to show he wouldn’t listen.

  “Let the general finish. I want to know what he means.”

  “We can talk about this later, and…”

  “I want to know now,” Calypso said coldly.

  His voice rang out extraordinarily loud, as if amplified by magic, and his eyes flashed dangerously purple again.

  “The twilight wanderers once prophesied to your daddy that if he ever had a child, it would be a witch or wizard with a fierce inclination toward dark magic. Have you ever studied your family history in detail, young Brandt? It’s quite fascinating. I recommend looking into it sometime. Your line has several generations of nothing but dark mages and all sorts of nasty creatures,” the general wrinkled his nose in distaste.

  “From dark elves to vampires and various necromancers. Quite the mix. Except your father turned out to be a glitch in the system and was born a white mage, for which he was literally thrown out on the street as an infant, a horrifying stain on his dark family. He would have rotted on the streets if he hadn’t turned out to be a Fortemin, quickly discovered and snatched up by the previous Mentor of Armarillis Academy… Anyway, the twilight wanderers made your father understand that if he ever had a child, there was a ninety-nine percent chance it would be a dark mage of such incredible power that they’d easily walk over others and throw the world’s balance into chaos to get what they want. They also showed him prophetic visions that if this child went down the wrong path and descended into dark magic, Ilforte would someday have to personally kill his own grown child to protect the world’s balance, for the sake of saving others. So your father spent many years not daring to have a child, because he feared the worst-case scenario… But he eventually compromised his principles, and you were born. And now we see he had good reason to worry, and…”

  The general kept talking, but Calypso was no longer listening. He turned to Ilforte and stared at him with an unblinking gaze from his pale gray eyes, which had begun to shimmer with purple light again.

  “That’s why you wouldn’t let me delve deeper into studying black magic and especially shadow magic,” Calypso stated rather than asked.

  “You were afraid the darkness would consume me, that I’d lose my mind, and you’d have to get rid of me so I wouldn’t… disrupt the world’s balance and hurt anyone. Is that it?”

  Ilforte stayed silent. His face was impossible to read right now. It seemed he was terrified of saying something wrong.

  I stayed silent too, shaking badly from nerves. I could see the fury Calypso had fallen into from what he’d heard, and his reaction frightened me. At the same time, I felt gripped by a strange terror… I’d say it felt like a mental attack. Either Calypso was losing control of his magic, or he was deliberately affecting everyone at once, forcing us to stay silent and keep our distance, or this was Effu’s doing.

  “And the others knew too, didn’t they?” he fixed Zael and Eric with a particularly heavy stare.

  “They knew and kept quiet. Knew and were constantly expecting me to slip up.”

  He was stating facts, not asking. And he wasn’t waiting for answers.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” Calypso ground out through clenched teeth, turning back to his father.

  “I suppose your daddy was afraid this truth would only push you further toward darkness,” the general spoke up again with an extremely smug smirk.

  “He probably saw exactly this scenario in one of the twilight wanderers’ prophetic visions and decided to avoid it by staying silent. Am I right, Mr. Brandt?”

  The Mentor continued his silence, watching Calypso tensely, whose eyes had narrowed to slits.

  “Wonderful. Your lack of trust in me is truly touching,” Calypso said in a haughty tone.

  “So you really could have killed me if I’d decided to become some kind of ‘dark lord’ villain? Seriously? You could have done it without hesitation? And what about now would you still do it, since you, like everyone else, think Effu has taken control of me and is just lying low for now?”

  “Calypso, calm down and listen to me carefully,” Ilforte said in an even voice, not taking his tense gaze off his son.

  “What the general is saying doesn’t matter right now, nor do my past fears. The general doesn’t know all the nuances and changed circumstances. I never told him any of the real reasons myself, but apparently the Inquisition intelligence from the general’s inner circle has been busy… However, he doesn’t know everything, so don’t believe every word he says. I’m not going to hurt you, Calypso. You’re my only son, a wanted and long-awaited son, and you mean the world to me. We’ve talked about dangerous shadow magic, you know my concerns aren’t unfounded. And you know I eventually agreed that your further development in shadow magic is necessary. Focus on that right now. Life doesn’t stand still, circumstances change, and we change our opinions with them. Let’s dial down the emotional intensity right now and talk in private, okay? Completely in private excluding Effu in your bracelet. He’s going to destabilize you emotionally, which could make you perceive my words unfairly. It benefits him for you not to remove the bracelet he’ll deliberately pressure your psyche, mentally influencing and quietly enslaving you. Please, take off that bracelet. You can keep it with you for now, just take it off. And we’ll talk privately, I’ll explain everything. I…”