When the last creature falls, the shelter is silent except for our breathing.
My body won’t stop trembling. Magic depletion and cold and adrenaline combining into spasms I can’t control. My nose bleeds—I taste the copper at the back of my throat—and my vision keeps graying at the edges.
Kaster turns to me.
His hands come up—bloody, clawed, still half-shifted from the fight. They hover near my face without touching.
“You used too much.”
“We’re alive.” The words slur. I’m more spent than I realized. “That’s what matters.”
His hands stay raised. Near enough to touch. Near enough that I feel the heat against my skin.
The distance between us contracts to nothing. Expands to everything.
“We need to go.” I force the words out through numb lips. “The survivors will report our position.”
“You can’t walk.”
“Then help me.”
It’s not what I mean to say. Not a request I planned to make. But the words escape before I can cage them, and now they hang in the air between us.
His hands lower.
Then his arm slides around my waist, pulling me against his side with careful pressure, supporting my weight without crushing me.
The Anchor flares at the contact. Not the painful burn of combat use, but a deep, instinctive pull—toward his heat, his strength, the fire that lives beneath his skin. My body wants to press closer. My mind screams at me to pull away.
I do neither.
I let him help me through the ruined doorway, over the bodies of the hunters he killed, into the gray light of morning.
And when his arm tightens fractionally around my waist—possessive, protective, something between those words—I don’t object.
We walk east.
The ash storm has passed, leaving the landscape painted in gray-white. Bodies of hunters litter the terrain in our wake—creatures that found us during the morning hours and paid for their pursuit. Kaster kills them. I anchor the deaths when I can afford the cost.
My magic is nearly gone. Every use brings me closer to collapse.
But I keep using it.
Because when I anchor a kill, he looks at me differently. Not as a burden. As an ally in a war neither of us asked to fight.
The sun breaks through the ash haze at midday. Weak light that does nothing to ease the chill, but visibility improves enough to see the terrain ahead. The plains stretch endlessly—no trees, no structures, no break in the monotony of dead grass and gray sky.
Kaster stops at a natural rise, scanning the horizon. His head tilts, reading the wind, the scent, the invisible language of threat that his instincts translate without effort.
“Rest.” Clipped. “You’re past your limits.”
“We need to keep moving.”
“We need you functional more than we need distance.”
I sink to the ground because my legs won’t support me anymore. The grass is cold and damp beneath me, but I’m too exhausted to care. Every muscle aches. Every breath burns.
Kaster lowers himself beside me.
