Chapter Eighteen: Beginning of the End

I dug my heels into Prince’s sides, driving him harder toward the looming fortress in the distance—an obsidian castle clawing at the sky, wrapped in spiraling clouds of black and blood-red. Every thunderous stride he took hammered against the ground and against my chest, my heartbeat barely able to keep up. Excalibur’s hooves pounded beside us, Snow leaning low over his mane, her braid whipping behind her like a silver flag in a storm. Every second we wasted was a second stolen from Carter. And a second closer to the world ending.

“We’re almost there!” Snow shouted over the roar of the thunder and the distant, bone-deep rumble of the earth beginning to split beneath the bleeding sky.

I didn’t waste breath answering. I only urged Prince faster. His breaths came harsh and ragged, his muscles quivering with effort—but he pushed on, for me. For Carter. For all of us.

I pressed a hand against his neck, felt his trembling steady beneath my touch. “Almost there, boy,” I whispered.

We hit the gates hard.

I sprang off Prince before he had even stopped fully, sprinting toward the massive doors without hesitation.

“CHARLIE, WAIT!” Snow cried.

But I didn’t slow. I couldn’t. My mind was a single, burning truth: I had to save my brother before the Wicked devoured what was left of him. I shoved the castle doors open with a crash that echoed through the hollow, cavernous entry hall.

I didn’t even have to search. He was already there. At the top of the grand staircase, his back turned to me, a shadow crowned in darkness. Black robes draped from his shoulders like spilled ink, threaded with crimson veins that pulsed as though alive.

“You came,” he said. His voice… it scraped the air like broken metal. Deeper. Rougher. Wrong.

“Carter…” The word barely made it out—half breath, half disbelief.

He turned his head just a fraction. And my world shattered.

His hair was pitch black, ending in scarlet tips. His skin was pale enough to look carved from bone. His jaw sharpened unnaturally, his teeth longer—fangs glinting when his lips parted.

But worst were his eyes.

One pitch black. The other a blazing, unnatural red. And slashing down one side of his face was a jagged, pulsing scar—glowing faintly like burning coal beneath cracked earth. Dark runic tattoos crawled up his throat like serpents, and beneath them, veins pulsed orange and red, like magma beneath skin.

My stomach dropped.

“I’m not Carter anymore, Charlie,” he murmured.

“You are to me,” I said, stepping forward. My hand hovered over my blade, my voice steady despite the shaking in my chest. “Let’s go home.”

He laughed, hollow and humorless, and the sound echoed like something dying.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is my home now. I belong here. You don’t.”

“Carter, you’re not making sense—”

“Charlie.” His voice deepened, a storm rolling through it. “I don’t want to fight you. But if you don’t leave…”

My breath hitched. “Carter, don’t do this.”

“Get out, Charlie.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“GET. OUT.” His voice cracked the air like lightning.

A shockwave exploded outward and slammed into my chest, hurling me across the floor. I skidded along the stone, gasping for breath, but forced myself to get up—my blade drawn before my hands even stopped shaking.

“Carter, please—don’t make me fight you…”

He stepped off the top step—

—then dropped.

He hit the ground with such force that the floor cracked beneath him. When he rose, flames—black and crimson—coiled around his hands, burning hotter than anything I had ever felt. He looked at me with eyes that weren’t his. Eyes full of pain. Eyes begging me to run.

“I’m not telling you again,” he said, each word trembling with darkness he couldn’t hold back.

I let my blade fall.

Light erupted in my palms, gold and white, crackling with heat.

“I’m not fighting you,” I said softly. “But I’m not leaving without you.”

His expression broke for half a heartbeat—fear, grief, despair—

Then it hardened.

“Then you leave me no choice.”

A blast of blistering heat tore from his hands. It collided with my chest like a flaming fist and launched me out the doors. I smashed into the courtyard ground, stones shattering beneath me.

I forced myself upright, every breath a stab of pain.

Carter stepped through the smoke and rubble after me, flames curling around him like living serpents.

This was no longer just my best friend. This was the Wicked.

Carter stepped out of the ruined doorway, black flames licking at his heels like hungry beasts. The courtyard itself seemed to recoil from him—the ground warping, air trembling, shadows bending toward his form as if he were their source. He didn’t pause. He didn’t blink. He didn’t show a single trace of the brother I used to know.

“You should have stayed away.” His voice was steady now. Cold. Certain.

A sentence delivered like a verdict.

I forced myself to my feet, my lungs burning, body shaking. “I’m not leaving you. You hear me? I’m not—”

I couldn’t finish.

Carter thrust out his hand, and a wave of black fire erupted toward me without warning. I dove aside as the flames collided with the stone, turning it molten. Not charred—melted.

The heat hit me like a hammer. My skin blistered just from being near it.

“Carter, STOP!” I shouted.

But he didn’t even flinch. Didn’t even look like he heard me.

He raised both palms, fingers twitching like a puppeteer tugging invisible strings.

The ground beneath me exploded.

Shards of stone shot upward—sharp as razors, faster than arrows. I shielded myself with a burst of light, the impact slamming into my barrier so hard it jarred my teeth.

Carter didn’t let me recover. He appeared in front of me in a black streak, his fist engulfed in flame. I barely had time to yank up my arm before he struck. The hit sent me skidding across the courtyard, scraping against rock until my vision blurred.

By the time I stopped sliding, he was already walking toward me. Slow. Controlled.

Like a predator approaching something already dying.

“Stop playing hero,” Carter said. “This isn’t your story anymore.”

His words hit harder than his fist.

“What happened to you?” I demanded, summoning light again—even though my hands were shaking badly. “Why are you doing this?!”

He tilted his head slightly, studying me the way someone examines an insect they’re deciding whether to crush.

“I didn’t choose this,” he said calmly. “I became it.”

And the way he said it—flat, emotionless—made my blood run cold.

I hurled a blast of light toward him on instinct, white heat flaring from my palms. It struck him dead-on, exploding in a burst bright enough to blind.

The dust settled.

Carter stepped forward through the light, untouched.

Not even singed. His lips curled—not into a smile, but into something darker. A warning. “Try again.”

Black fire coiled around him like serpents, writhing, snapping at the air.

I staggered backward. “Carter—please—this isn’t you.”

“It is now,” he said.

He vanished. The world spun—

—then his hand clamped around the back of my neck, slamming me face-first into the stone. My breath burst out of me. Before I could recover, he flung me upward like I weighed nothing. I crashed onto my back, gasping.

My vision doubled. Carter walked toward me again, fire dripping from his fingers like liquid poison.

“Get up,” he ordered. “Or don’t. It makes no difference.”

I forced myself upright, trembling but refusing to fall.

“You’re not going to kill me,” I panted. “Because somewhere—deep down—you still care.”

He stopped walking. For a moment, the courtyard fell silent.

Then Carter raised his hand. Black fire flickered to life, swirling violently.

“I don’t care,” he said.

Thunder ripped the sky in half, a jagged wound of crimson tearing through the heavens. Shards of burning ash spiraled downward like embers from some dying god, raining around us in a storm of fire and ruin. Instinct surged through me—I threw up a shield of blinding light, the dome curving over us just as flaming debris hammered against it.

Carter didn’t even flinch.

“Carter, I KNOW you’re in there!” I shouted, my voice cracking beneath the roar of the collapsing sky. “Somewhere inside—YOU ARE STILL WITH ME!”

He lifted his head slowly.

And the fire in his eyes… wasn’t fire at all. It was emptiness set ablaze.

“Then you’re a fool,” he said, voice low and rasped. “I’m not the same, Charlie. I’m never going to be.”

“I’m not letting you go!"

Before the words even left my mouth, something slammed into the shield—violently, viciously, like a meteor.

The impact rattled my bones. The shield buckled… then detonated, flinging me backward across the courtyard.

I hit the ground hard.

I barely had time to breathe before the sky fractured again. This time, the pieces fell.

Chunks of scarlet and obsidian—literal fragments of the broken heavens—crashed down around us. Firewater poured from the cracks above, coating the world in ash and blood-stained smoke. I blinked through the burning haze—

—and saw Carter on his knees.

He wasn’t attacking. He wasn’t advancing.

He was folded in on himself, clutching his arm, shuddering like something inside him was tearing its way out.

Black cracks spiraled up his skin, glowing ember-red between the fractures.

“Carter?” My stomach dropped. “Carter!”

I surged to my feet, slipping on ash-coated stone, and sprinted to him. He groaned—a sound I had never heard from him before. A sound that didn’t belong to the monster he’d become. I knelt, grabbing his shoulder.

“Carter, LOOK at me!”

He lifted his head. For one split, aching second, I saw it—

A flicker.

A tremor. A whisper of recognition buried beneath agony. But it vanished beneath the surge of darkness twisting through him, pulling him deeper.

“Charlie…” he rasped, voice breaking like glass. “You shouldn’t have come.”

His fingers spasmed, leaving scorch marks on the stone. The ground trembled beneath him, as though the entire world was reacting to his pain.

Above us, the sky cracked again, showering us in flame.

He gripped my wrist—hard, desperate, trembling. “Run.”

The word wasn’t a threat. It was a warning.

A plea.

A dying spark of the boy I knew.

And the darkness around him was already rising to smother it.