Read Chapter 30: Spirits United

The roar of the Great Court had become a physical thing. Dust and debris swirled in the column of light rising from the scales, catching motes of gold and silver that spun like frantic stars. The priest hovered at its center, his funerary wrappings no longer brown with age but burning a dull, furnace orange. He was a wound in the air itself.

Eamon’s feet planted on the marble floor, cracked and upheaved from the roots of the museum’s rage. But he didn’t feel the tremor anymore. He felt the hum of every case, every plinth, every bronze and bone and shard of clay behind him. The tether sang with them—not in pain now, but in chorus.

The priest’s voice rolled out, deep and doubled, like a man speaking from both ends of a long, dark tunnel. “Little mediator. You carry the weight of a million dead hands. Do you think their applause will save you?”

Eamon wiped blood from his split lip. “No,” he said. “Just their aim.”

He didn’t move. But the museum did.

Behind him, the dome’s shattered rim groaned. A stone panel from the Temple of Artemis—carved with a hundred-breasted goddess and prancing deer—ripped itself from its mount and flew. It didn’t glide. It *threw* itself, spinning edge-first, and struck the priest’s energy barrier like a battering ram. The priest’s form shimmered, flickered like a bad signal.

He snarled, raising a hand. A wave of cold blue pushed back, and the stone cracked in midair, falling to pieces. But already more were coming.

A Norse runestone, scraped and scarred by decades of tourist fingers, smashed into the ground before him, raising a wall of dust. Behind it, a bronze Etruscan mirror spun and slashed across the priest’s arm. He hissed as a line of black ichor wept from the cut.

“You cannot command what you do not understand!” the priest bellowed.

Eamon grinned, though his chest burned. “I don’t have to command them. I just have to stop holding them back.”

That was it. That was the lie he’d been carrying—the one that had blackened his discharge papers, the one that had poisoned every night shift since. He had spent three years in the desert holding a checkpoint, holding his anger, holding a friend’s body up so he wouldn’t have to look at what had been left of him. He had held everything so tight that his hands never opened again.

Now he let go.

He didn’t ask the tether. He *released* it.

The surge was immense. He felt his knees buckle as the raw grief of centuries poured through him—loved ones wailing over graves in Aksum, children sacrificed in Tenochtitlan, soldiers weeping over broken shields on the plains of Gaul. He didn’t fight them. He let them pass through him, each one leaving a spark.

And then he gave them a target.

The whistle shard—the same bone that had called warriors home—glowed white-hot where it was embedded in the scales’ golden rim. Eamon pointed at the priest.

The museum responded.

A Sphinx statue lunged forward on its stone haunches, jaws cracking as if remembering old curses. A samurai sword in a chipped lacquer case tore through its glass with a scream of steel and embedded itself in the priest’s aura. Egyptian ushabti figures—little blue faience workers meant to serve the dead—rained down like hail, each one exploding on contact with a tiny, furious heat.

The priest staggered, not from the damage but from the **volume** of it. He was a sorcerer, a master of ritual, but he was built for quiet magic, for whispers in dark temples. This was a riot.

“Enough!” he shouted, slamming his foot down. The scales tipped, and a wave of gold energy washed outward, freezing the flying artifacts midair. The Sphinx ground to dust. The Great Court fell silent for a half-breath.

Eamon was on the ground, one knee down, but he was still *there*. And the priest was close. Closer than before. The act of stopping the artifacts had forced him to anchor himself, his writhing, unstable body solidified in the push.

Eamon saw it. The priest’s wrappings had compressed into a near-human shape—a chest, shoulders, a face with eyes that burned like twin eclipse suns.

But it was the *name* that mattered.

In the chaos, Eamon’s tether had flickered across the Rosetta Stone. Three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek. But the tether had gone deeper. It had read the stone’s memory—not of words, but of *names*. The priest had once inscribed his own name on the stone’s base, in the lost place where no one had thought to look.

Eamon’s throat seized. The name tasted like copper and ash.

“Imhotep,” he whispered.

No. That wasn’t right.

The tether corrected him. Not the name he’d heard in movies. The older one. The *true* one, before the temple rewrites, before the cult stripped him of his first identity.

“Neverwraith,” he said aloud.

The priest froze. His eyes widened—genuine, terrible surprise. In that moment, he was not a god. He was an old man who had just heard his mother call him home after all these years.

“No—” the priest started.

Eamon didn’t let him finish. With the name on his lips, the tether snapped like a whip, wrapping itself around the priest’s form and *pulling*. The scales howled. The gold binding fragment that had been consumed, the scrap of Danny’s hair, the bone whistle shard—everything flickered, and for one impossible second, Eamon saw through the priest’s eyes.

He saw the desert. He saw a temple collapsing, a king screaming, and a priest who had been betrayed by the very man he guarded.

But he also saw the **ritual**. The scales weren’t just a power source. They were a **door**. A door that swung on a single hinge: the priest’s name. And with the name spoken, the hinge was now free.

The name seized the priest’s form like a harness. He screamed—a real scream, high-pitched and mortal—as his body folded inward, collapsing into a tight, glowing coil. The coil spun, wound itself into a knot of light at the scales’ center, and then sank into them. The golden mass absorbed him.

For a moment, there was silence.

The flying artifacts dropped. Some shattered. Most wobbled, but didn’t crash. The Great Court was a wreck—glass, dust, and debris everywhere—but the priest was gone. Bound. Inside the scales, sealed by his own name.

Vance staggered out from behind a collapsed pillar, her face pale, her suit torn. She stared at the scales, which were no longer emitting light but pulsing with a deep, rhythmic thrum, like a heartbeat.

“You did it,” she said, disbelief cracking her voice. “You bound him.”

Eamon didn’t answer. He was staring at the scales. The thrum was accelerating. Faster. Faster still. The gold was warping, swelling like a tumor about to burst.

“He was the anchor,” Eamon said, understanding dawning with cold horror. “The priest wasn’t *trying* to empower the scales. He was *controlling* them. Now that he’s gone, there’s nothing holding back the charge.”

Vance’s face went white. “How long?”

A crack split the face of the scales, glowing with white-hot light at the edges. Somewhere beneath the museum, a long-forgotten steam pipe burst, and the whole building shuddered.

“We have minutes,” Eamon said.

That was when the ghost appeared. Danny’s shimmering form rose from the floor beside the scales, his eyes kind, his borrowed body translucent in the dawn light slanting through the broken dome.

“Then maybe I can help with that,” he said softly.