Move, damn you.
My body doesn’t listen.
The creature feints.
Kaster reads it—I see him adjust, anticipate—but the feint isn’t meant to deceive him. It’s meant to create an opening. A fraction of a second where his body is committed to one direction while the abomination moves in another.
Its arm extends past him. Reaches for me.
I try to move. My legs refuse.
Talons rake across my shoulder. Tear through fabric and flesh and muscle, scraping against bone with a sound I’ll hear in my nightmares—if I live long enough to have them.
The pain is immediate. Blinding. White-hot agony that steals my breath and my balance in the same instant.
But beneath the pain?—
Wrong.
My magic recoils. Twists inward. Screams in a register I’ve never heard, a frequency that bypasses my ears and resonates directly in my skull.
I hit the ground without remembering falling.
The wound burns.
Not the ordinary heat of injury—this is different. Chemical. Invasive. Hungry. The sensation spreads from my shoulder into my bloodstream, racing through my veins with a purpose that has nothing to do with natural infection.
Poison.
My bloodline recognizes it before my mind does. The power that has defined my existence—the Anchor blood that makes endings permanent—writhes beneath my skin. Fights an intrusion it can’t expel. Claws at the toxin like a trapped animal claws at cage bars.
Divine poison. Designed for witches. Designed for Anchors. Designed for me.
I’ve heard of this. Stories passed between covens in whispered warnings, tales of weapons the gods created to destroy specific bloodlines. Toxins that don’t kill the body first—they kill the magic. Unravel it at the source. Strip away the power that makes a witch dangerous, then let the flesh fail afterward.
The unraveling has already begun.
I feel it—threads of bloodline magic that have been woven into my cells since before I was born, now being pulled loose one by one. The anchor power that costs me years of life with every major working, that burns through my reserves like fire through dry wood—it’s dying.
And when it dies, so do I.
Kaster roars.
The sound shakes ice from the walls. Fills the cramped passage with fury that borders on physical force. Not the controlled violence I’ve grown used to.
This is anguish shaped into sound. The roar of a creature watching the thing he refuses to name slip away from him.
Through my dimming vision, I see him drive into the abomination with renewed savagery. Fire pours from his wounds as much as his hands—his own body burning to fuel an assault that can’t be sustained. The creature staggers under the onslaught, its adaptive defenses overwhelmed by sheer, devastating force.
He’s destroying himself to save me. Spending strength he doesn’t have. Fighting with a desperation I’ve never witnessed from him—not when the Executors cornered us, not when the canyon tried to crush us, not when any of the previous horrors threatened our survival.
Because I’m dying.
The thought arrives with strange clarity. No panic. No denial.
This is how it ends.
I’ve dreamedof this moment.
