“That’s the idea.” The words sound strange. Distant. Like someone else is speaking through my mouth. “Everything you built. Everything you stole. Everything that belongs to you.”
I grip the ritual with every ounce of will. Feel it writhing in my grasp, fighting to release in the pattern the Matron designed. And I force it into a new pattern. My pattern. Imara’s pattern. The shape of destruction we’ve chosen instead of the destruction she planned.
The Matron attacks. Fire and blood and the full weight of her magical mastery, all focused on breaking my concentration. But Imara is there—deflecting what she can, absorbing what she can’t.
Her scars surge through pink to red to white-hot as she burns from the inside out.
So am I.
Hold on. Just a little longer. We’re almost?—
The ritual shifts. Locks into place. And the Vale begins to die.
She’s losing.
I can see it in her face—the dawning realization that her perfect system is collapsing. That the weapon she created has turned against her in a way she never anticipated.
“STOP THIS.” She reaches for me with both hands, power blazing. “YOU’LL KILL US ALL?—”
“You already killed us.” I meet her crimson eyes. Let her see the certainty in mine. “The moment you bred us for your purposes. The moment you made us property instead of people. We’ve been dying since before we were born. This is just the part where we choose how it ends.”
Her attack hits my chest. Tears through what’s left of my defenses. I feel ribs crack. Feel blood fill my lungs. Feel death closing in from every direction.
But I don’t stop channeling. Don’t stop pulling her world apart around her.
The Vale’s magic floods through me—screaming souls, burning blood, all the horror the clan has created. I feel every death. Every sacrifice. Every life ended to fuel the Matron’s ambitions. They’re mine now. Their pain is mine. Their rage is mine.
And I’m giving them release.
The Matron makes one last calculated attempt. Throws everything she has into breaking my concentration, into seizing control of the ritual before it’s too late. But Imara intercepts her—a lance of precise magic that disrupts the attack, that buys me the seconds I need.
The ritual reaches critical mass.
For one frozen moment, everything stops. The power I’m channeling hangs suspended, balanced on the edge of release. The Matron stares at me with those ancient crimson eyes, and I see something I’ve never seen in her face before.
Then the panic drains. I watch it happen—the raw terror bleeding away, the ancient composure reassembling like pieces of armour clicked back into place. Whatever she is, whatever she’s done, she is not a woman who breaks.
Acceptance.
“Well played,” she whispers. “Son.”
Then the Vale burns.
Light.Heat. Destruction beyond comprehension.
The power releases in a single catastrophic burst—not the slow consumption I planned, but an instantaneous erasure. Everything within the Vale’s original boundaries becomes ash. The wards. The blood-channels. The accumulated magic of generations.
The Matron.
She doesn’t have time to scream. One moment she’s standing before me, two centuries of stolen life blazing in her eyes. The next moment she’s gone—consumed by the very power she spent her life accumulating. Her body ruptures from within, crimson light fountaining from every pore as the magic tears her apart.
Two hundred years of evil, ended in an instant.
I barely register it. The power is still flowing through me—less now, the tide ebbing as the sources of magic burn out, but still enough to destroy. Still enough to kill.
I should be dead. Should have been ash the moment the ritual released.
But Imara is there.
