The Pale Thorn Pact - Part 4

The storm above the Frosted Spires had no thunder, no lightning—only a steady, oppressive weight, like the sky had forgotten how to breathe.

Elira stared upward from the temple’s rim. The mountaintop was wrapped in veils of snow and flickering auroras, not of nature, but of magic—sickly green and silver strands dancing like veins through the air. It felt wrong, like walking through someone else’s dream.

At her side, Vaelin knelt at the threshold of the temple’s gate, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade, though he hadn’t drawn it since the Severance. A pale gash still marked his side from the fight with the mimic-Thorn. Though it had stopped bleeding, the flesh around it darkened daily, as if the wound were being remembered by something unseen.

They stood before the Temple of the Pale Thorn—once a shrine, now a sanctum of fractured time.

The entrance was a massive arch carved from glacier-blue stone, crowned by twisted thorns made of fused ice and bone. Runes crawled over the surface, some glowing faintly, others pulsing with rhythm not unlike breath.

“We go in,” Elira said.

Vaelin didn’t move.

“Something waits in there. Something I trained.”

She touched his arm. “Something you’ll stop. With me.”

He finally looked at her—eyes like flint struck to spark—and nodded once.

They stepped inside.

The temple interior twisted perception.

Vaulted ceilings stretched higher than logic allowed. Shadows danced without sources. Footsteps echoed forward and backward at once. It was cold—colder than outside—but only to the skin. The soul, Elira felt, was being warmed by something invasive. A presence watching from just behind the veil of sight.

They passed through a corridor flanked by statues—hooded assassins with hands outstretched. Some were broken. Others… moved when unlooked at. Time, here, was not a river but a spiral.

At the heart of the temple lay the ritual chamber.

The floor was a ring of ice with veins of molten silver pulsing like a heartbeat. Above them hovered the shattered remains of an orrery—a model of the heavens, frozen in a loop of slow collapse and reformation. Runes spiraled outward like vines, and in the center stood a throne grown from living thorn-ice.

A man sat upon it.

Cloaked in frost-black robes, his face concealed by the now-familiar porcelain mask—only this one was cracked, as if split by an old wound. He rose.

“Elira of the Spellbound Flame,” he said, voice hollowed and distorted. “Vaelin of the Circle Broken. You have come at last.”

Vaelin’s blade sang free. “No more riddles. No more games.”

The Thorn bowed his head.

“I am called Echo. And I was made from the day you betrayed the Circle.”

Vaelin stiffened.

Echo stepped forward, hands raised. “I am not merely one of your students. I am your reflection. A living memory, born of the training you gave and the blood you spilled. The others follow me not because of what I do, but because of what you were.”

Elira spoke, quiet but fierce. “You’re not him. You’re a shadow cast by pride and pain.”

“And what is he,” Echo whispered, gesturing to Vaelin, “if not the one who cast it?”

Without warning, time fractured.

The world stuttered. Elira was suddenly outside her body, watching herself step forward. Then backward. Then frozen. Echo moved freely in the loop—laughing softly.

Vaelin lunged.

Their blades collided midair. But Echo didn’t just parry—he anticipated. Every move Vaelin made, Echo had already countered, as if the duel had already happened before.

Elira, suspended in the loop, reached into her satchel and pulled the time-breaking sigil she had carved the night before. It shimmered red against the temple’s pale light. She pressed it to her wrist and spoke a single command word.

“Now.”

The loop shattered. Vaelin gasped as time slammed back into place.

Elira surged forward toward the ritual circle, toward the throne, where strands of magic were anchored. She could see the heart of the time-ritual now—a pulsating relic embedded in the throne itself—a sphere of frozen blood, wrapped in roots of bone and memory.

Echo screamed and turned to stop her—but Vaelin was already there, blade buried in his side.

The two assassins fell into combat again, this time not mirrored, but raw. Echo bled. Vaelin bled more. His phantom wound flared with every strike.

“You made me,” Echo hissed, parrying low.

“And I’ll unmake you,” Vaelin growled, spinning low, blade carving upward.

Elira reached the relic. Its magic lashed out—visions, timelines, voices screaming in reverse. She held steady, focused her will, and sang a spell of undoing. A song of endings, a lullaby for broken time.

The relic cracked.

Echo screamed—not from pain, but from dissolution. His body tore, flickering between past and present. One moment a boy, then a man, then a monster. Vaelin drove his blade through Echo’s heart, and at the same moment—

Elira shattered the relic.

Time collapsed.

They woke in snow.

Not in the temple, but outside. The mountain was silent. The temple gone—no ruins, no debris. Just a ring of ice where it had once stood.

Vaelin sat up slowly, blood on his chest but breathing. Elira was already awake, crouched beside him, exhausted but alive.

He looked at her, then past her, toward the empty horizon.

“It’s done.”

She smiled softly. “Almost.”

She pulled back the collar of his shirt, inspecting the wound that had plagued him since the duel with the Thorn. It was gone. He blinked.

“I didn’t think that was possible.”

“You don’t have to carry every scar forever,” she said. “Some wounds can heal.”

He took her hand in his—quietly, reverently.

“You saved me,” he said.

“I always will.”

Their hands remained together as the snow fell soft around them, and the wind, for once, did not whisper threats—but something gentler. Like relief. Or release.

In the silence that followed, something between them finally settled—not the end of their journey, but a turning of the page.

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All Parts of the Series

The Pale Thorn Pact Part 1

The Pale Thorn Pact Part 2

The Pale Thorn Pact Part 3

The Pale Thorn Pact Part 4

The Pale Thorn Pact Part 5