"Look at me." Her tone — not a command, not a plea. Recognition. "He wants you like this. He has always wanted you like this. Uncontrolled, consumed — the monster they wrote about in every accusation. If you lose yourself here, he wins something he doesn't deserve."
The rage does not leave. But she's right. I breathe through it until it becomes a blade again rather than a wildfire.
"Show me the anchors."
We movethrough the collapsing chamber together. It's nothing like fighting beside trained soldiers. Elowen doesn't follow tactical signals or yield ground reflexively. She moves on instinct and knowledge. I keep my body between her and the backlash, absorbing anything that would knock her off her feet.
At the first anchor,she drops to her knees and drives the crushed herbs into the fracture at its base. The stone reacts violently, light flaring white beneath her palms. I force my own ward over hers, not closing it, holding it open just enough for the paste to reach the carved channel beneath.
"Again," she says through her teeth.
The second anchor fights harder. The energy bucks against my hands, hot enough to split skin, but Elowen leans into the pressure and presses the herbs deeper. The line between the stones gutters. For one breath, the ritual loses its rhythm.
"It's working," she says.
Then the third anchor screams.
Wild magic tears through the chamber in every direction at once — not controlled, not directed, simply released.
I am already moving. No anger driving me past reason this time. Only clarity. I catch Malrec's wrist, turn his momentum against him, and drive him backward through the air.
He hits the center of the rupture. The wildspont takes him, energy strips him apart from the outside in — his control gone, his will irrelevant, every calculation he ever made about commanding something uncontrollable meeting its final consequence.
Then there is nothing where Malrec stood. The chamber shudders and goes still.
I cross to Elowen in four strides and get my hands on her before she finishes processing what just happened. She lets me.
"Is it over?" she asks.
I want to tell her yes. But the corruption is still moving. It no longer has a hand on it.
"Malrec is gone," I tell her. "The ritual is broken." I draw away just far enough to read her face. She reads mine in return and finds what I am not saying.
"But the wildspont," she understands.
"Is no longer his weapon." I keep my hands at her arms, steadying. "Which means it belongs to no one. Which means?—"
"It's going to collapse on its own. Removing the hand that controlled it didn't heal it. It just made it uncontrolled."
She reaches for my hand.
"I know what to do," she says. "I think I know. But I'm going to need more of the herbs, and I'm going to need you to trust me completely."
I look at her in the failing light of a chamber that is actively eating itself, with a wildspont rupture breathing at our backs and the ruins of everything Malrec built collapsing into the ground beneath our feet.
"Tell me what you need," I tell her.
27
ELOWEN
Istand at the edge of what remains of the ritual ground and look at the wildspont's center, and I understand what has to happen next.
The problem is that stopping a ritual mid-collapse doesn't seal what the ritual opened. The energy Malrec poured into it doesn't disappear because he did. If it fully breaks open in the next quarter hour, the pressure wave alone will level the forest. What follows will reach Duskmire before dawn.
I know this because I understand what the plants have been telling me for months. The stabilizing compounds work by absorbing the excess charge from corrupted tissue and redistributing it back into the earth safely. Every test I ran in the workroom, every sample, every interrupted anchor — they all pointed to this. It works, but it requires proximity. Physical contact with the core, not the perimeter.
The only way to stop this is to go inside it. I am still weighing the words when Draekir appears at my left, coat torn at the shoulder, a gash at his side that he hasn't acknowledged and I haven't yet found the right moment to address. He sees the samecollapse I'm looking at, and the calculation behind them is fast and accurate.
