Page 128 of Property of Scar

She is twenty feet away.

What if you’d been stronger?

The field is already white with frost when I hit it at speed, the ground cracking under my boots as I force through it, every step biting and unstable beneath me. The light is too pale, too flat, the kind that burns everything clean of shadow, and she’s in the middle of it.

Still moving.

Still tearing through anything that gets close enough to matter.

She’s rabid, completely out of control.

Astrid turns through another strike, her movements sharp and violent, power snapping through her limbs in uneven bursts that don’t quite hold together, like something inside her is pushing harder than her body can sustain. I see the fracture points in it, the places where control slips for half a second before snapping back into place, and I know exactly what’s coming.

I push harder, forcing more speed out of a body that already knows the limit, closing distance that never seems to close fast enough. The frost splits under me in jagged lines, the ground resisting every step like it’s trying to hold me back, as if it knows where this ends and is making sure I don’t get there in time to change it.

“Astrid!”

She doesn’t hear me.

Or she does, and it doesn’t reach the part of her that would know what to do with it.

She turns again, too fast, too sharp, her focus snapping to a new target that isn’t there, reacting to something only she can see. Mordain’s poison is still deep in her system, still driving her, still tearing through whatever is left of her control.

I know this moment.

I know this exact shape of it, the timing, the way her movements start to destabilize, the way the power begins to burn too hot, too fast, pushing her past anything her body can hold.

This is where it starts to go.

This is where I lose her.

I force more speed, every ounce of strength I’ve got pushing into the distance between us, but it isn’t enough.

It’s never enough.

All those years, and it still comes down to this.

Still comes down to being just out of reach.

What if… The thought cuts through hard, sharp enough to feel like it comes from somewhere outside of me. What if I hadn’t hesitated the first time? What if the second I saw the change in her, the first crack, the first sign that something was wrong, I didn’t wait, didn’t try to understand it, didn’t give it time to become this?

She stumbles.

Just slightly.

Barely enough to notice if I didn’t know exactly what it means.

My chest locks tight around it.

That is the point.

That is where it starts to slip past the point of saving.

What if I’d moved then?

What if I’d ended it before it became this, before it took her, before it turned her into something I have to fight through to reach what’s left?

“Astrid!” I’m closer now.