My magic reaches out—weak now, scraping the bottom of my reserves. The power catches the hunter two feet from my face, sinking into its core with desperate force.
The anchoring holds. Barely.
The creature dies. I sway on my feet.
One hunter left. It’s backing away now, retreat taking precedence over attack. It’s seen what happens when I anchor kills. It’s learning, adapting, preparing to report what it’s witnessed.
Kaster doesn’t let it run.
He closes the distance before the creature reaches the ravine edge, catches it by the skull, and tears its head from its body in a single savage motion.
The corpse falls. God-light reaches for it, trying to rebuild.
I anchor it before the process can begin.
The hunter stays down.
Silence falls over the ravine.
SIX
SOREIA
My legs give out.
I don’t remember deciding to sit. One moment, I’m standing, watching the last hunter die, and the next, I’m on the ravine floor with my back against the wall and blood dripping from my nose onto my shirt.
The stone is cold beneath me. Small mercy. Everything else burns—my eyes, my sinuses, the inside of my skull where I’ve scraped my reserves raw.
Seven kills. Not all mine, but I anchored most of them. Made endings stick when divine regeneration should have reset the count.
I’ve never anchored that many in a single engagement.
I’ve never survived an engagement that required it.
Kaster stands in the center of the ravine, surrounded by bodies that won’t be getting back up. Blood runs freely from the wound in his side, from the parallel slashes across his shoulder, from a cut above his eye that makes him blink against the red.
He’s breathing hard. The sound fills the ravine, echoing off stone walls until it surrounds me.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
Then he turns and looks at me.
His attention landslike a physical weight.
I’ve been looked at before. Weighed. Measured for threat potential and survival likelihood. I know what calculation looks like in a killer’s eyes.
This isn’t calculation.
His gaze moves over me—checking for injuries, probably. Noting damage. The unsentimental arithmetic of whether his investment in keeping me alive has paid off.
But the assessment takes too long. Lingers in places it shouldn’t. His eyes catch on my hands, my throat, the rise and fall of my breathing.
I’m suddenly aware of how close we are.
The ravine isn’t wide. Fifteen feet of killing ground that felt enormous during the fight and now feels like nothing at all. He’s standing six feet away, close enough that I see the individual drops of blood tracking down his face. Close enough that fire bleeds off him and reaches me despite the cold stone at my back.
Dragon fire. I noticed it before—that constant blaze that marks his kind. But I didn’t feel it like this. Didn’t let myself register the way it pushes against my skin, fills the space between us, makes the air heavier to breathe.
