“Stand still,” Lara says.
They obey. Not because they trust her.Gods no. Because they recognize something in her now that they did not before.
Lara draws the blade across her palm without ceremony. Blood wells immediately, dark and steady, and she dips her thumb into it before stepping toward the first of them.
The Melder stiffens as Lara approaches, but she does not pull away.
Lara lifts her hand and presses her bloodied thumb to the center of the girl’s forehead. The contact is brief, precise.
She moves around the Melders, pressing a thumb to each forehead without explanation or artifice.
She steps back, the group of them staring at her for answers. For anything.
She spreads her arms out wide, calling in magic from her surroundings. It answers instantly. It does not surge—itthreads.
Lara draws from the world around her, pulling from the life that still clings stubbornly to the ruined city, from the roots beneath the earth, from the breath in every living chest nearby. It gathers in her with a deep, steady pull that feels older than anything Nyrielle has touched.
She directs it forward.
Into the mark.
The girl gasps.
Sharply, but not in pain, in… freedom.
The moment tastes strangely like freefall to Lara. There is no undoing it now.
Magic ripples down the girl’s form, stripping away the bindings that have held her captive for years. That have caged her.That have caged them all.
The bindings that stripped Dravara of protection and the realms of balance.
Lara can see it now.
The way she broke it all.
“I—” the girl’s voice falters, breath catching as her body tenses. “I can feel it.”
Lara moves to the next.
Directing her magic.
Another thread of magic.
Another binding stripped.
Another piece of atonement.
“It’s there,” someone else says, voice shaking. “It’s—gods, it’s right there?—”
The air shifts.
The Melders begin to straighten, their bodies reacting to something returning to them, something that had never truly been gone—only buried, restrained, denied.
Lara does not rush.
She moves between them with deliberate intent, marking each one in turn, her blood acting as the anchor, a silent incantation reversing a spell that never should’ve been uttered, and her magic serving as the tonic that purges the bindings that hold them in mortal skin.
Vren is the last.
