“You did, too. Once,” he replies.
A pause stretches between them, thin and dangerous.
“Men taught me better than that,” Nyrielle says.
Elyssara watches them, the weight of it settling into her chest as the shape of what stands between them becomes clear. This is not just a battle. Not just power against power.
This is history.
This is what came before her, what shaped the world she was born into, what broke it long before she ever had the chance to try and fix it.
“And yet,” Thalmyr says quietly, “I loved you.”
Nyrielle’s gaze flicks back to Elyssara.
“Not enough,” she says with finality.
The air shifts.
The pressure builds.
Elyssara feels it before it happens, her body reacting instinctively as her magic surges upward, bracing, preparing.
Nyrielle lifts her hand. And the world breaks beneath it. Earth splits. Structures give way. The air trembles. Her power… it is… endless. Absolute.
The strength of nine gods channels through her, flooding the air, the earth, the structures, time itself. It is not light or shadow. It is pure unadulterated force. The kind of power so absolute that nothing survives it.
The air bends around Thalmyr as he steps forward to meet it. Lightborne power surges through him, and something else—something old and terrible and earned through years of siphoning from her. For one impossible moment, the force of Nyrielle’s magic slows against him.
Not stopped completely. Just… held.
“Now!” Thalmyr commands, and his arms rise by his sides, his head tips back like he’s making peace with destiny, and his eyes close as if he’s already at the End Gate.
Daphinia hears the call, and closes the distance, her hands poised, ready for… something.
Elyssara steps forward, gripping the hilt of her blade like the pressure can offer her absolution.
She presses its edge to Thalmyr’s throat, a single drop of blood beading at the tip. She holds it there, for just one heartbeat, and like their thoughts align for a single instant, their voices overlap in a chorus of regret.
“Forgive me,” they both whisper. “I’m sorry,” they breathe. “Forgive me,” they echo, and she slits his throat.
Daphinia binds his blood in a golden thread of magic, and Elyssara is already moving.
She slices her palm, and Daphinia uses the opening as a funnel for Thalmyr’s blood. His magic. The thread of Nyrielle’s power that he still possessed.
It slips under her skin, and into her veins, and she feels it instantly: a surge of power that adds to her own.
Thalmyr slaps to the broken earth, his neck falling at an unnatural angle, and his form goes limp. Lifeless. Dead.
Elyssara does not mourn and she does not wait.
She conjures every thread of power that runs in her blood and she hurls it at Nyrielle, rage and loss and grief culminating in a single blast of power.
Nyrielle smiles, holding up a hand and enveloping the blast like a flame snuffed between fingertips.
Dread rips through Elyssara. Not the sharp, reactive kind that demands movement or fight, but something heavier that settles into her bones with undeniable certainty. It is hopeless, desperate, gut-wrenching despair.
That was everything.Every thread of power she could reach. Every fragment of rage, of grief, of desperation she had to give.
