The Gravedancer’s Waltz - Part 4

The ballroom burned with moonlight.

Not firelight, not candlelight, moonlight, bright and cold and wrong. It poured in through the fractured windowpanes like liquid memory, and wherever it touched, time unraveled. The chandeliers melted upward. Tables elongated. Violin strings snapped themselves back into tune, and the waltz played with aching clarity, notes like blades.

Vaelin stood at the center of it, motionless, watching the floor warp beneath his boots. The reflection looking up from the polished marble wasn’t his. Not anymore.

It wore his face, yes. The same gaunt cheekbones, the same frost-ringed scar under one eye, the same jaw shadowed with war and regret. But the smile was alien, thin, curved like a slit throat, and full of murderous calm.

“Do you remember it now?” the echo asked, stepping from reflection to reality. It didn’t make a sound. Not a footfall. “The night I bled him beneath the chandelier? The way the violinists kept playing, because they’d been bribed to ignore screams?”

Vaelin’s hands curled into fists. “That wasn’t me.”

“No,” the other said. “It was the version of you who never walked away from the Circle. The you who said yes to power without pause. The Gravedancer crowned in knives.”

Elira’s voice cut through the haze.

“He’s not you now.”

She stood beside Tovik, the two of them framed by a crackling arch of red fire and collapsing reality. Her eyes blazed gold. The Flamecourt Sigil shimmered beneath her skin, rippling with emotion. Behind her, the ghost of the murdered nobleman sobbed in reverse, grief dragging backward into rage, reliving his death again and again.

“He’s the one who walked away,” she said, louder. “You’re the echo, not him.”

The other Vaelin tilted his head. “Then let’s find out who dances last.”

The floor split.

Black marble shattered like glass, revealing not stone beneath, but memory. A shifting plane of frozen moments: assassinations, embraces, betrayals, promises whispered under shadowed arches. The echo Vaelin dropped into it like ink into water, vanishing.

Vaelin followed without hesitation

They fought in fractured time.

Each step he took landed in a different year. He kicked off one ledge of memory and landed in a dusty alley where a boy, Vaelin, whispered a vow to a dying woman. Then he ducked as a blade carved through the air, and the ballroom snapped back into place for an instant, chandeliers swinging wildly above.

The echo moved faster than thought, flickering between timelines like flame. Every strike came with a whisper:

“You loved killing.”

“You loved being feared.”

“You miss it.”

Vaelin didn’t answer. He met the strikes with shadowsteel drawn from his side, not summoned, not conjured, but remembered. A knife he hadn’t carried in years. A weight he knew all too well.

The clash of blades rang across the shifting ballroom.

Then everything stopped.

Time stalled.

The waltz reached its final verse and hung there, suspended, a single trembling note on an endless breath.

Elira had stepped into the song.

She stood in the center of the ballroom, her palm raised. Around her, the musicians flickered like candle flames, caught between real and remembered. Her voice was low, barely more than a whisper, but the sigils that unraveled from her tongue burned across the air.

Vaelin’s breath caught. It wasn’t just fire. It was music made spell.

She wasn’t fighting with flames. She was rewriting the waltz.

“You don’t get to define him,” she said as she wrote. “Not you. Not the Remnant. Not his past.”

Behind her, Tovik danced.

Literally.

He spun into the spotlight in full masquerade, wearing a mask identical to the noble ghost's. He threw a rose, struck a dramatic pose, and shouted, “I forgive you, dear cousin! Now unchain your heart so I may claim your velvet fortune!”

The ghost blinked.

Then wept.

The glamour binding him fractured, and the ghost began to fade. It had needed justice, but what it’d truly longed for was closure. A story’s end.

The final waltz began to unravel.

But the echo wasn’t finished.

He lunged from the collapsing dream, blade in hand, straight toward Elira.

Vaelin didn’t think.

He moved.

His Remnant flared, not forward, but inward. The shadows turned red at the edges. Time warped tighter than a heartbeat, freezing just enough for him to do what had to be done.

He grabbed the echo’s wrist.

And let go.

Of the ability. Of the power. Of the echo within him.

He severed it.

A burst of bloodburn lit the floor beneath his boots as the fragment of the Remnant, that piece, the violent shadow self, dissolved. With it went the ability to call those fractured selves again. The memory still lived in him. But not the power.

He fell to one knee, chest heaving.

The waltz stopped.

Light returned, pale and calm.

The ballroom held steady.

And outside, dawn cracked the sky open.

Later, as they walked the now-still halls of the estate, Elira reached for his hand.

“You gave it up,” she said quietly. “The echo.”

Vaelin nodded.

“You didn’t have to.”

He met her gaze, and for once, there was no guard in his voice. “I wanted to.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder.

Tovik ran past in full noble regalia, trailing rose petals and shouting something about being “a very wealthy ghost fiancé.”

The future still waited.

But for now, the past had been danced to silence.

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All Parts of the Series

The Gravedancer's Waltz Part 1

The Gravedancer's Waltz Part 2

The Gravedancer's Waltz Part 3

The Gravedancer's Waltz Part 4

The Gravedancer's Waltz Part 5