She becomes aware of it in fragments—splintered wood digging into her spine, grit between her teeth, the taste of iron thick in her mouth. The ringing in her ears pulses, high and relentless, swallowing everything else until it feels like the world has narrowed to that single, piercing sound.
Then something breaks through it.
A scream.
Another.
The distant collapse of stone.
Sound comes back all at once, too loud, too sharp, and her body recoils against it. Jax drags in a breath that tears at her lungs, coughing as ash and dust scrape down her throat.
She forces herself to move.
Her arm trembles as she plants her palm against the ground and pushes. Pain flares up her side, hot and immediate, but it’s distant compared to the deeper wrongness of everything around her.
The street is gone.
Damage is mendable. Fracture is fixable. But this is not that.
This is gone.
Where buildings had stood, there is only a jagged, smoking hollow, edges still glowing, heat rolling off it in waves that distort the air. Bodies lie scattered at the outskirts—those who weren’t close enough to be erased entirely, left instead in pieces that don’t quite make sense when she looks too closely.
Venomshades.
Runewrights.
Men who had been moving beside her a heartbeat ago.
Jax swallows hard and drags herself upright, one knee under her, then the other. Her balance wavers, vision swimming again as she fights to stay present.
Move.
The word cuts through the fog.
Move or die.
She grips her blade tighter, forcing her fingers to obey, forcing her body to follow.
Shapes begin to resolve through the haze.
Survivors.
A Venomshade crawling, one arm useless at her side, dragging herself away from the heat. A soldier—enemy or ally, Jax can’t tell—stumbling blindly, skin blistered, mouth open in a sound that barely reaches her through the ringing.
Another tremor ripples through the ground.
Gods.
Too close.
Jax’s head snaps up, instinct screaming at her to move, but her body lags a fraction behind.
“Jax!”
Her name cuts through everything.
She turns.
