Toward her.
A pulse of blue-white force detonates from its center.
Pain slams through Elyssara’s ribs like a battering ram.
The world vanishes.
Then returns in pieces.
Stone against her spine.
Blood in her mouth.
Sound distorted, distant, like she’s underwater.
She looks down.
Red blooms across the rust silk at her side.
No.
No, no, no?—
Kael sees it.
And he breaks.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
But with the kind of finality that feels like the sky tearing in two.
He turns with a violence so pure it stills the room.
One soldier loses his head.
Another is thrown so hard into the wall his body folds wrong on impact.
Kael’s chest heaves, veins black as pitch, eyes nothing but endless obsidian.
“Touch her again,” he says, voice low enough to be more terrifying than a scream, “and death will feel like mercy.”
For one heartbeat, the room believes him more than it believes in survival.
Even the soldiers hesitate.
Even Marin stills.
But Maireth does not.
“Take him,” she says.
The command snaps the hesitation.
The shield wall reforms, tighter now, pressing inward. Hooks of metal lash out from behind the shield wall—curved restraints, barbed and gleaming, meant not to kill but to catch.To maim.One hooks Kael’s forearm. Another his shoulder. A third wraps around his throat.
He tears one free with brute force, the hooks shredding the palm of his hand.
