The man easily held us in the air with thousands of whips, and I stared at him in horror, trying to understand who or what this was. Why had he broken through our spells so easily? Why had even our golden protective dome, reinforced by our merged auras, been shattered in seconds? Even Zael and Ilforte hadn’t been able to break through that golden dome yet. We'd tested it on the training ground! But this creature had… And so easily. So it could have hit us like this right away and was just toying with us, or what?

  “So young, so naive… and so foolish,” the man tutted, sighing theatrically.

  “Brave, very brave. That’s a commendable trait. But foolish… so incredibly foolish and ambitious… But that only works in my favor. So… which of you should I choose… I was only counting on one, but here is such a gift… And do I even need to choose? Hmm…”

  Only then did it hit me that there was no victim in the center of the nearly-finished pentagram to activate it. Not yet. But there was Calypso and me — still alive and both suitable for the role of the required sacrifice.

  I heard someone burst into the gym behind us, but the stranger in black casually tossed that ‘someone’ aside. Unfortunately, hanging upside down in these crimson whips, I couldn’t turn to see who had appeared or what the stranger had done to them.

  Where the hell was the Mentor or any of our people, damn it, what was taking so long?!

  “Don’t count on help, pretty girl,” the man said, as if reading my thoughts.

  “I’ve made sure no substantial help reaches you in time.”

  My throat went dry… What did he mean, made sure?!

  “Staging a few monster attacks as a distraction is easy for me,” the creature continued.

  “By the time they get to you, I’ll be done.”

  If tears or screaming could help, I’d be crying and howling at the same time right now…

  But all I could do was hang there and watch as the stranger left me suspended while bringing Calypso closer, positioning him in the air right at the center of the pentagram. The crimson whips wrapped around Calypso began to glow a toxic bright color, tightening further, and Calypso let out a muffled groan, as if he was in serious pain. Judging by how the crimson whips pulsed and how pearls of light ran along them toward the stranger, he was draining Calypso’s magical power. The accumulated energy was being poured directly into the pentagram, on whose energy node the man was now standing.

  He was going to drain him dry… literally, damn it.

  My throat went dry.

  “Leave him alone!” I shouted, my heart pounding.

  “I’ll do anything you ask, just leave him!”

  “Anything, you say?” the man asked mockingly, not moving an inch.

  “Yes, anything! If you swear to leave Calypso alone, not harm him now or ever, and release him immediately! What do you want?”

  The man paused his energy drain from Calypso and looked at me with interest. Well, ‘looked’… he didn’t have normal eyes, no face at all really, but judging by the shifting black smoke where his head should be, the stranger turned toward me.

  “I want all of you,” he said firmly.

  “Your magic, your body… It suits my purposes. Let me in, and we’ll become one.”

  Those words stirred something in my memory… And it finally hit me: this was the exact voice I’d heard recently in that disturbing dream, during my nighttime energy episode, when Calypso had pulled me out of the bath.

  This exact voice had called to me, asked me to let it in, promised to make me queen… So this horror-movie reject had been trying to get into my head? Who the hell was he?! I didn’t know. But for my loved ones, and especially for the man I loved, I was ready to do anything to protect them.

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  “I agree,” I said without hesitation.

  Calypso moaned and thrashed in silent protest, but I continued firmly:

  “On the condition that you release Calypso and leave him and our families alone. If you swear on your magic that you won’t touch any of my or his relatives, then I won’t resist and… I’ll let you in. Or whatever it is you need from me…”

  The man, of course, didn’t free me completely from the bonds, just loosened the whips enough for me to extend my hand for the magical oath. Instead of a hand, the man reached toward me with one of those crimson whips, which began wrapping around my palm.

  “Try to trick me or attack me and I’ll kill you,” the stranger promised flatly.

  Yeah, I had no doubts about that and had no intention of attacking him…

  I didn’t intend to. But I saw something black spread its wings behind the stranger, and…

  The next moment, the man cursed loudly, because a black raven had flown to my hand and sliced through the whip wrapping around my palm with its beak in a flash, and judging by the man’s furious hiss, it hurt him badly. Alohar had appeared out of nowhere and literally attacked the stranger in black, pecking at his hands with his beak, cutting through the whips holding Calypso and me.

  The stranger clearly hadn’t expected the raven and couldn’t shake him off: all spells aimed at the ilun were simply absorbed by the raven, causing him no harm at all. A pure concentrate of dark shadow magic, Alohar wasn’t an ordinary familiar that could be damaged. He was a part of his master, doing everything he could to help him now.

  Alohar couldn’t cast spells as such, but his beak made quick work of the crimson whips, unlike our spells. Apparently the high density of the raven’s shadow state mattered here — Calypso and I lacked that density to match such a serious opponent. So the raven did everything to interfere with the stranger, pecking at him, flapping wings in front of his smoky head and cawing loudly, distracting him, drawing his attention.

  The man was either snarling curses in some language I didn’t know, or trying to cast something to get Alohar out of the way, but amazingly, nothing worked. He was forced to loosen his grip on the whips cocooning me, and I literally crashed to the floor, finally managing to wriggle free with my freed hand. I jumped to my feet immediately and rushed to Calypso, trying to free him too, to somehow pull this shadow cocoon suspended in the air toward me.

  “We need to get out of here, now,” I muttered, trying to help Calypso escape the weakened bonds.

  I tried to act carefully, not crossing the pentagram’s outline, because it was glowing suspiciously bright and I didn’t like that at all. I wasn’t having much success, but I wasn’t giving up.

  At that moment, the stranger seemed to snap. He shouted something very loud and angry, made a lightning-fast movement, hurling Calypso right into the center of the pentagram, pulling his crimson whips away. The man himself vanished in the same instant, flickering in a crimson flash of magic. There one moment — gone the next. Not teleportation, but some magical movement method very similar to the ‘shadow pit’ Calypso and I had been using earlier. But I had no time to analyze how the thing got around; all my attention was on Calypso.

  He was groaning, holding his head — he’d hit it hard when he fell. He looked terrible; his arms and legs were slashed in places, blood seeping from one palm. Judging by the marks all over Calypso’s body, the crimson whips had literally ‘squeezed’ him — not just magically, but physically.

  “Hold on, hold on…” I murmured, dragging Calypso by his feet away from the pentagram and starting to heal the deepest cuts.

  “I’ll help, it’ll get better…”

  My hands were trembling, but I stubbornly kept at it. I felt sick myself after being in that cocoon of crimson whips, as if they’d been trying to drain not just my magic but all my strength, all my life force. But Calypso had gotten it much worse, of course. He was badly weakened, and I actively poured my magic into him to help him recover faster.

  I murmured words of comfort, but Calypso seemed to be only half-listening.

  “What have we done…” he murmured, staring at the brightly pulsing pentagram beside us.

  “What do you mean, what have we done?” I asked tensely, stopping my healing and gripping Calypso’s weakened hand.

  “I was wrong… It was a trap… A trap for us… For me,” Calypso’s voice was full of so many emotions.

  “A shadow pentagram for breaking the Seal of Creation… It doesn’t necessarily require a brutal bloody sacrifice. A very powerful infusion of energy and just a drop of blood is enough if the sacrifice is a powerful mage,” Calypso practically whispered the last words, staring at his slashed palm, still seeping blood.

  “And… what does that mean?” I swallowed nervously, dreading the answer.

  Calypso looked at me, biting his lower lip. So much could be read in that look. But perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw real fear in Calypso’s eyes.

  “The Seal of Creation… has been broken,” he whispered.

  “Because of us… because of me.”

  My blood was still pumping with adrenaline, so I didn’t notice that I was literally shaking from nerves, and my hands weren’t just trembling slightly but shaking uncontrollably. We stared at each other in silence. The same desperate question was written in both our eyes: “What have we done?!”

  Meanwhile, the ground beneath our feet began to shake…