All those visions—claws in my ribs, power failing, the world going silent—they were leading here. Showing me the inevitable.
The dreams never revealed a way out because there was no way out.
I could have run in any direction. Could have sought any ally, any shelter, any alternative to this frozen canyon and the dragon who refuses to let me go.
The ending would have found me anyway.
This is the dream’s conclusion.
The Anchor gutters. Flickers. The power that has burned through my body for years—shortening my life, costing me more with every use—goes quiet. Not depleted. Not resting.
Dying.
It unwinds inside me. Threads of bloodline magic pulled loose with surgical precision. The toxin works methodically. Targeting the foundations of my power. Dismantling what makes me an Anchor with the same patient inevitability the abomination showed in hunting me.
Without it, I’m a human body. A fragile thing of flesh and bone that can’t survive what’s been done to it.
My heartbeat stutters. Skips. Resumes with an irregular rhythm that I recognize as the beginning of systemic failure.
The creature retreats.
I hear it—fire erupting, stone fracturing, the abomination screaming as Kaster drives it back toward the ice fall. He’s winning. Forcing it away from me, back toward the blocked passage, fighting for every foot of frozen ground.
Too late.
The poison doesn’t need the creature anymore. It’s already inside me, doing what it was designed to do. The abomination could die right now—could burn to ash and scatter to the wind—and it wouldn’t change what’s happening in my blood.
I’m past the point where killing the monster matters.
My vision narrows. Darkens at the edges. The cold that has been a constant companion in this frozen canyon seeps deeper now, past skin and muscle into the core of me, into places that should never be cold.
At least I killed some of them.
The thought surprises me. In my final moments, that’s what surfaces—satisfaction at the things I helped end. The Executors whose deaths became permanent because I anchored them. The divine regeneration that failed when I made it fail.
I did what I was made to do. Even if it’s ending now. Even if the gods built a weapon specifically to unmake me.
I still made some of them stay dead.
TWENTY-TWO
SOREIA
Footsteps. Heavy. Irregular. The sound of someone running on damaged legs through an ice-slicked passage.
Kaster drops to his knees beside me. His hands find my face, my shoulders, the wound that’s still spreading poison through my system. His touch carries a frantic urgency—searching, desperate, as if he could find the poison and tear it out the way he tears apart monsters.
“Soreia.”
His voice cracks on my name. Breaks apart, like the sound was torn from him against his will, like my name became a wound in his throat.
I try to respond. My mouth refuses the command. My lungs don’t have enough air. The muscles that should shape words have forgotten how to function.
“Stay with me.” His hands cup my face, force my fading gaze to meet his. “Soreia. Stay.”
I can’t.
The words won’t come. My body has started shutting down—systematic failure cascading from my poisoned blood into my organs, my muscles, my ability to control my own responses.
