The ground trembles.
I feel it through my knees—a shudder, a pulse, like the earth itself is gasping. The silver veins that thread through the stone beneath us flicker once.
Then they gutter.
Then they vanish.
Not fade. Not dim.Vanish—like ink sucked out of stone, like light pulled through a drain. One second they’re there, pulsing with Bree’s magic, and the next there’s just… nothing.
Empty channels where power used to live.
“What the hell—”
I look up.
And I see him.
At the edge of the blast radius, where the worst of the damage hit. A silhouette—horned, silver-lined, shadow given shape.
Ethos.
Or what’s left of him.
He’s staring at Bree. At the place where the veins used to be. At the empty channels that fed into her hands.
His mouth opens.
“What have you done?!”
The words rip out of him—not smooth, not controlled, not the velvet manipulation I remember from the Void. This is raw. Furious.Terrified.
He doesn’t get an answer.
He collapses inward.
It happens at the exact moment the last vein disappears—his form folding into itself like paper crumpling, like something vast being compressed into nothing. A final ripple of magic shudders through the air, pulls toward Bree, and then—
Gone.
I jerk in place. Look around.
No one else saw. They’re all focused on her—on her stillness, her silence, the way she’s not moving.
I open my mouth.
Close it.
I am not mentioning this. Not when everyone is barely standing.
Movement catches my eye. Stellan.
He’s staring at Bree’s hands—at the place where they’re still buried in the dirt. His whole body has gone rigid, that careful control he wears like armor locked down so tight I can see the strain in his shoulders.
I follow his gaze.
Faint wisps of silver drift upward from the empty channels—barely visible, like smoke in moonlight. They pull toward Bree. Sink into her skin. Gather where her palms press into the earth.
I don’t know what it means.
