Page 192 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

“Enough,” Vaustin roared, focused entirely on the barrage of magic being unleashed against him.

I didn’t know when Owain took a sword from one of the guards. I only saw him when he was already moving. No shadows, no power, just a man with determination and the undying drive to protect his people.

Vaustin’s power spiked. Wild and grasping, it lashed out, cracking the flagstone and snapping a battlemage backward with enough force to stifle his cry. I felt it the moment that man’s aura winked out of existence.

The air began to warp around Vaustin, pressure building, as if even it was recoiling from being touched by him. Then it shuddered. The seam of reality he’d just bent seemed to widen, ready to take him.

For just a moment, his eyes found mine across the room. I searched for doubt, for pain, for even the first hairline crack of consequence…but none of that was there. Only madness.

Only the certainty that he would outlast us.

That certainty ended when Owain moved straight through the chaos, through the backlash of Vaustin’s unraveling power, through the last, desperate surge that should’ve thrown him to his knees.

There was no magic behind his choice. In that moment, Owain was just a man who chose to stand where others couldn’t. He crossed the distance between them at a dead run. Vaustin’s next burst of wild magic caught Owain across the shoulder. It knocked him sideways, but he planted one boot, recovered, and kept going.

Vaustin saw him only when it was too late.

Owain drove the blade forward with both hands and the full weight of his body behind it.

Steel punched through Vaustin’s chest. The force drove him backward. He struck the flagstones with Owain’s sword buried nearly to the hilt.

Just a man, Vaustin had said. As if a man willing to die for his convictions wasn't the most dangerous thing in the mortal world.

Power convulsed around Vaustin in a reflexive flood, lighting the chamber as though lightning had struck indoors. Owain released the hilt and staggered clear, shielding his eyes with the rest of us.

I felt the magic inside Vaustin strain to close the wound, twisting desperately around the blade. But all those stolen lives couldn’t save him. Vaustin folded around the blade with the bewildered expression of a man who had never understood that power and invincibility weren’t the same thing.

For a moment, the madness cleared. His lips moved. “My father…” His voice was barely a sound at all. “…won’t end with—”

He had one final, painful breath as a man. Then the light in his eyes dimmed as he was pulled into whatever dark place monsters go after death.

What happened next wasn’t flashy or chaotic. It was a letdown of pressure. The magic in the air evaporated like puddles disappearing on a midsummer day. Queen Amara, Berian, even parts of the assassin were now set free. All that was left behind was smoke, ruin, and the ragged, precious sounds of Larethia’s survivors.

There was joy in victory, but dread underlaid it. One lord had attempted a coup. One prince had killed his uncrowned equal.

The fragile peace holding Avanfell together would not hold. As Vaustin’s dying words had implied, the ground would shake under the footfalls of armies for this.

All of this sank in as the room held its breath. For a moment, nobody moved or spoke, and the silence was so complete that the settling dust was audible.

Owain’s head slowly turned from where he still stood near Vaustin’s body. He was turning toward me, but his eyes landed on the chair positioned in front of the hearth first. Toward the figure slumped within it.

Through our renewed bond, I felt the instant his mind rejected what his eyes had found. He took a step forward, then another, the motion unsteady in a way that felt profoundly wrong after the controlled devastation he’d just wrought.

Owain’s breathing hitched. Everything in him seemed to falter.

Through our renewed bond, I felt the change begin—not a single break, but a slow, irreversible giving-way. The inner structure that had carried him through every horror—duty, command, the certainty that there would always be something he could still do—began to buckle. His purpose and identity collapsed in on themselves now that there was nothing left to strike, and only a very different future than he’d expected in front of him.

But beneath it all, something tied to me relaxed.

He’d known what Berian had tried to do here.

Tangled through the ruin of his grief was something Owain would never accept. The jumble of emotions roiling within him couldn’t easily be named relief. It was more the terrible easing that comes when the future he would’ve burned the world to prevent was no longer possible.

That didn’t make Berian’s loss lighter. If anything, it made it heavier, because Owain was too good to carry that almost-relief as anything but guilt.

The part of him bound to me reached without words. Before I could consider the watching eyes, I was moving. War, consequence, the unraveling of everything we knew—none of it mattered more than this.

The world could demand us again in a moment.