“We have to go!” he shouts.
I twist back in time to see Zeidan tear the final sigil free from Malrend’s chest. The Dark Elf falls into the collapsing root-fire below. Whether he dies or vanishes, I cannot tell.
Then the chamber implodes.
We barely make it out before the temple collapses into itself in a roar of stone and screaming roots. When the dust clears, Nytheria is burning. Not just the temple. The coven grounds.
The blight backlash tears through weakened wards. Buildings collapse. Sacred groves fracture. The Wildspont pulses violently, unstable but no longer siphoned.
We stopped Malrend’s network. But we did not save the coven. I drop to my knees in the ash and stare at the ruins of everything I was born to protect.
Zeidan lands beside me, bleeding, shaking, wings half-shredded but still standing.
“I failed,” I whisper.
He kneels in front of me, gripping my shoulders.
“You are alive,” he says.
The words are not comfort. They are relief. I let myself break, because I can’t take it anymore.
The silence after the battle is the worst part. It presses in where noise and chaos used to be, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the crackle of dying fires and the distant collapse of stone. The coven grounds lie in ruin behind us, pillars shattered, sacred trees scorched down to blackened stumps, wards torn apart so completely I can still feel their absence like missing teeth in my skull.
I am alive.
The realization comes slowly, in pieces. My hands shake where they clutch the front of Zeidan’s armor. My lungs burn each time I breathe. My magic feels scraped raw, as if I’ve bled it down to the marrow. But my heart is still beating. His is too. I can feel it through the bond, steady and fierce, anchored to mine like a promise that refused to break.
Then the grief hits.
It is not a single blow. It is a collapse. I turn my face into his chest and the sound that leaves me is not dignified. It is not controlled. It is the sound of a woman who has just watched her world burn and lived when others did not. I sob for the elders who stood their ground. For the Purnas who were taken before we could reach them. For the Wildspont, still wounded and trembling beneath the land. For the coven that raised me, fractured beyond recognition.
Zeidan does not tell me to be strong. He simply holds me.
His arms come around me fully now, shielding, solid, his chin resting against the crown of my head as if anchoring me to something real while everything else falls away. I feel his breath hitch once, just once, and I know he is carrying his own losses too, his warriors, his people, the title torn from him like a limb and thrown aside by those who feared what he represented.
“We can’t stay,” he says quietly, not to rush me, but because he knows I need truth more than comfort. “Not here.”
I lift my head enough to look at him. There is blood dried along his jaw, shadow still clinging to him like a second skin, wings half-manifested as if his power hasn’t decided whether it is safe to rest yet. His eyes search mine, fierce and worried and achingly human.
“Is Malrend—” My voice breaks.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I felt him retreat. Not fall. If he’s alive, he’ll disappear into the underworld until the ground cools. We won’t find him now.”
The words should terrify me more than they do. Instead, I feel a strange, hollow clarity settle in.
“Then we survive,” I say. “For now.”
Something shifts in his expression, not relief, exactly, but respect. Acceptance. He nods once.
“There is a place,” he says. “Hidden. Old. Beyond Velcryn influence and beyond the coven’s broken reach. A sanctuary guarded by those who stepped away from power when it became poison. Arvyn and Evalie lead it now.”
The names stir something faintly hopeful in me. A reformed coven. Not untouched by loss, but not ruled by it either.
“Will they take us?” I ask.
“They already have,” he replies softly. “I sent word the moment you disappeared."
“Let's go,” I say.
