Maldenis dragged a hand through his hair, his gaze flicking between Liora and the child. They looked wrong. Not injured.
Not…anything he could name. Just still. Too still.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asked, the question sharper than he meant it to be, edged with something he couldn’t quite keep down.
Zara didn’t answer right away, her expression tightening in a way Maldenis didn’t like.
“I’m not sure,” she said finally.
The words landed hard.
He let out a breath that didn’t feel like enough air. “Not sure?” he repeated, quieter now.
She glanced up at him, something strained in her eyes. “Their energy’s…off. It’s like it spiked and then—” she stopped, jaw tightening. “Collapsed.”
He looked back down at Liora, his chest tightening at the sight of her lying there, unmoving.
“Hecate will be here soon,” Zara added, her voice firmer now, like she was holding onto that as much as he was.
He didn’t respond. He just stayed in place, staring at Liora, willing her to move.
The minutes that followed blurred together.
Time stretched and warped, each second dragging and slipping all at once, and then the air shifted. A surge of magic rippled outward, and two figures appeared.
Hecate and a woman beside her.
Maldenis barely registered anything else at first, just the weight of Hecate’s presence, ancient, controlled, powerful in a way that pressed against the air itself. But then his focus snagged on the other woman. She was unfamiliar, Asian, with dark hair braided over one shoulder, her expression calm but intent, her eyes already locked on the bodies on the ground like nothing else in the world mattered.
Hecate’s gaze flicked once to the fading smoke curling through the air—the last remnants of the attackers, before she turned to the woman beside her.
“Go.” The command was quiet, but absolute.
The woman moved instantly, dropping to her knees beside Liora and Korinnae, her hands already glowing with a soft, golden light that spread warm and steady against the cold aftermath of the fight.
It felt like he was watching from somewhere outside himself, like his body was there, but everything else had gone distant and unreal.
He heard Elian’s voice, dim at first, then sharpening as he forced himself to focus.
“They appeared out of nowhere,” Elian was saying quickly. “Multiple hunters. We held them back, but the girl, her power?—”
“It erupted,” Zara cut in. “Completely uncontained.”
Maldenis’s gaze dropped back to Liora as they spoke, tracking the rise and fall of her chest, but it seemed too shallow, too slow.
“Something hit them,” Elian added. “Right before the surge collapsed.”
Hecate nodded once and stepped forward, kneeling beside the other woman. The moment she joined her power to the golden light, the air thickened, layering over with deeper, older, and heavier magic.
And then the illusion broke.
Wounds surfaced across Liora and Korinnae’s bodies as if pulled from beneath the skin, dark, spreading, and wrong. Marks that hadn’t been visible before now bled into existence, jagged and unnatural, like the magic itself was forcing them into the open.
Liora whimpered.
The sound hit Maldenis harder than anything else had.
Korinnae cried out a second later, her small body jerking as the pain caught up to her.
