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Cedric stood in the aftermath—chest heaving, Ashrender dripping with dark blood. Bodies lay everywhere, pools of crimson leaking onto the frozen ground.

Cedric knew their forces had outnumbered the cultists, but to have them felled so rapidly, so instantly, one after the other after the other . . .

Something prickled in the back of his mind—a loose, unformed thought he couldn’t quite grasp. Because still, with all the bloodshed and carnage and crumpled bodies, there was no sign of the dark sorcerer himself.

Cedric didn’t need to see in order to know. He could feel Elyria’s swelling rage pulsing in his own head like the beat of a drum.

A low, pained groan sounded from beneath one cultist’s corpse, and Cedric ran over, flinging the body aside to find a woman lying there, head against the ground, red cloak twisted around her neck, her leg pinned beneath her at a terrible angle.

Pebbles scattered when Elyria landed beside Cedric, the force of her descent blowing the matted blond hair off the woman’s face.

“Where is he?” Elyria hissed, slamming the end of her staff into the dirt. “Where is your blood king?”

The woman’s lips pulled back to reveal bloodstained teeth. “Silly little pixie,” she said, cackling. “Don’t you know you’re far too late? We give ourselves freely. Our blood will herald a new age under the rule of mi sanguinexos.”

She said the final two words like they were the most reverent prayer, a liturgy falling from her lips.

Cedric’s stomach turned.

The cultist’s gaze slid past him—past Elyria’s furious face, past the line of soldiers bristling in the wake of the slaughter—and fixed on something in the distance. But when Cedric turned, there was only the empty, mist-covered field where the Chasm used to lie, and the Midlands beyond it.

“Answer what we ask,” Cedric said, “and we will heal you. We can help you.”

“Stupid, stupid boy,” hissed the woman. She turned her gaze to the aurora-filled sky, her eyes rolling back slightly. “We don’t want to be healed.”

And then she moved, quick as a viper’s strike.

There was a flash of red crystal at her wrist, a blood-forged knife forming where there wasn’t one before. Cedric jolted, reaching for Elyria.

But that was not who the cultist aimed for.

No, she took her sanguinagi dagger and drove it into the soft flesh beneath her own jaw.

Elyria lunged. “Don’t⁠—”

It was too late.

The woman dragged the crystal blade across her own throat, the wet sound of tearing flesh one that Cedric would carry to his grave. Blood surged from her wound like a waterfall, gushing from her neck and pooling beneath her.

She tried to laugh again.

It came out as a gurgle.

And her eyes went blank.

Elyria froze where she stood, her face twisted in horror, dark mist pouring off her shadowy armor.

Somewhere behind them, a soldier retched. Another screamed.

Because the woman wasn’t the only cultist who had survived the onslaught.

And she wasn’t the only one now taking her own life in some twisted final act of defiance.

“What the fuck—” Tristan’s voice cut off as the remaining survivors severed their throats and wrists, as they ripped through their own skin and let their blood pour, steaming as it touched the frozen earth.

“Fools!” Kit’s voice was a strangled, furious shout as she came up behind Elyria and Cedric. “Why would they do that?”

Cedric’s heart slammed against his ribs. Why, indeed.