His steps close in on her.
One heartbeat.
Two.
She risks a glance over her shoulder.
Lara. Daphinia. Caev.
They stand unfazed behind her. Weapons sheathed. Hands clasped behind their backs.
In the space of a single heartbeat, Seren’s mind moves from feeling alone, to abandoned, to remembrance, to power.
They do not hold back because they will not help.They remain because they do not need to.They are not watching her fail. They are waiting for her to remember what she already is.
The fear recedes… like ocean water drawing back from the shore.
And something else takes root: guts.
And power.
And now she must decide what to do with it.
No one is coming to save the girls in those wagons. The world works precisely because girls like Seren were taught to stay frightened.Until now.
The guard lunges, hand outstretched like he’s moving to grab her.
Seren draws magic straight from him, shaping it in her palm.
He reaches for her, but he stops short, hands shooting to his throat, clawing and gripping at the golden thread wrapped around him like a noose.
The noose coils around his neck, pulling tighter with every heartbeat.
His eyes fly open in shock, never leaving Seren’s face. He’s choking, the golden noose cutting off his air just like it did to Rhyven before she snapped his neck. He struggles, dropping to his knees like he’ll find salvation there.
He won’t.
She knows he’d plead for mercy if he had the chance. But she won’t give it to him. Because the only way to eradicate cruelty is to eliminate the source.
Seren squeezes tighter, and a blood vessel bursts in his eye.
His body crashes to the ground in a heavy thud.
Seren leans over him, her eyes narrowing to disgusted slits. Her voice drops into a feral snarl.
“You built a world that fed on girls like me,” she snarls. “You don’t get mercy from me now,” she growls as she twists her wrist and closes her fist in a wet crack of finality.
The struggle stops the instant his neck breaks. But Seren doesn’t wait. Doesn’t give herself a moment to process. She spins, stalking forward. Because the guard called for support, and she knows she has less than sixty heartbeats to get to those godsdamned wagons before the Royal Guard descend on her.
Lara moves out of her way, a wicked grin of pure satisfaction kicking up the corners of her mouth.
The line of wagons races toward her, and her eyes start scanning. The place is crawling with guards inspecting each one. All of them look too similar. Tarps, crates, cages, boxes.
Until—
The wagon reveals itself not by sight alone, but by instinct.
Seren feels it before she fully sees it—a wrongness in the air, a stillness too deliberate, too contained for the chaos of Virellin’s trade lines. The others blur into the background as her focus narrows, locking onto the single covered wagon positioned just beyond the inspection line.
