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She looked at him for one second. One full second, which was all she could afford.

Then she turned and ran.

Caelith was ten feet ahead of her, moving through the tightening circle with the efficiency of someone who had been trained for centuries and had days of imprisonment’s worth of fury to burn through. He wasn’t fighting to win. He was fighting to arrive.

Twenty feet to the convergence point.

Fifteen.

The Fracture’s light was blinding at this distance, pressing against her eyes even when she looked away. The wardlines beneath her feet blazed white, each pulse a physical force she felt in her bones.

Ten feet.

Something screamed at the tear’s edge. Not a human sound. Nothing she had a name for.

Five.

Caelith reached the convergence point and turned. She reached him a second later, the spent shard warming again in her fist, as though the tear were filling it.

Behind them, the circle had stopped advancing. Something in the Fracture’s behaviour had changed in the last thirty seconds, and it had given even the most certain of them pause.

The alignment was reacting to Caelith’s presence at its centre. It was not reacting the way the faction had planned.

Caelith looked at her. She looked at him.

Around them, the curtains of violet light swayed and nothing on the plain moved at all.

She caught the movement too late - something fast, from her left, inside her reach.

Safir.

He didn’t go for Caelith as she expected. He crossed the last few feet toward Maia with terrible precision, closed his hand around her arm and turned, putting himself and her at the very lip of the tear itself, the violet light washing over both of them. It was close enough she could feel the pull of it, dragging at her hair, her clothes, the air in her lungs.

“Caelith.” Safir’s voice carried easily over the roar of the tear. “Step away from it. Or she goes in, and I go in with her, and you can finish this on your own.”

Nobody on the plain moved. Not the Umbralyn, not Julen on one knee in the glass, not Caelith.

And Maia, with the tear dragging at her hair, understood that Safir had not come to stop them at all. He had come to make Caelith choose, in front of every one of them, exactly what she was worth.

51

The Final Decision

“Let her go,” Caelith said. His voice had lost every trace of its earlier calm.

The convergence point held them in its centre and everything else on the plain had stopped mattering.

“Give me a reason to,” Safir snarled.

Around the glass plain, the faction Umbralyn had drawn back from the advancing wardlines, their formation broken by the alignment’s unexpected response to Caelith’s presence.

Maia felt the pull of the tear at her back, patient and enormous. “He doesn’t need a reason,” she said, forcing her voice steady, even with Safir’s hand locked around her arm. “If your plan works I die anyway, Safir. Everyone in Eryssan dies. Pushing me in now won’t make a difference.”

Safir looked at Caelith over her shoulder. “Stop this, Caelith. All of it. Call off whatever you think you’re about to do at that convergence point, and I let her - and the boy - walk.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you watch the Fracture take her. You watch it unmake her. You watch it melt her skin, her hair fall off in burnt pieces, her organs fail one by one as you stand close enough to smell her burn.”