37
Kaelren
The chamber was a war zone.
Guards collapsed in my wake, their lives snuffed out as casually as candle flames. I didn’t strike them, didn’t even look at most of them—they just stopped. One moment advancing with raised weapons, the next crumpling to the floor as if someone had cut their strings.
I was carving a path straight to Elle.
Around me, the battle raged with brutal intensity. Bryx’s sonic pulses shattered stone and bone alike, his compound eyes tracking three fights simultaneously while Kevin divebombed guards with his damaged wing dragging behind him like a broken banner. Mora moved like violence given purpose, her kitchen knife finding gaps in armor with the precision of someone who knew exactly where joints connected, where arteries ran close to skin, where a single thrust could end a threat.
Thrak fought with the efficiency of a man who’d been at war his entire life, each movement economical, each strike lethal. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Just brutal effectiveness honed over decades of resistance.
But my focus was singular: Elle, suspended in the Bloom’s apparatus, flowers blooming from her skin in impossible beauty. The conduits pierced her flesh, drinking her transformation, and I could feel through our bond how close she was to dissolving completely into the building’s awareness.
A guard rushed me with a blade coated in some sort of mixture. I didn’teven look at him. My corruption simplyreached out,and he crumpled mid-stride, armor clattering empty to the floor.
“Kaelren!” Sarnyx’s voice cut through the chaos, her thorns dripping with guard blood. “The apparatus! If you can disrupt the conduits from the inside—”
“Working on it,” I snarled, pushing forward through another cluster of guards. They simply dropped where they stood, life draining from them before they could even raise their weapons.
Auradelle stood between me and Elle, his hands dancing over controls, adjusting crystals that made her scream. The sound echoed from every wall simultaneously, a chorus of her agony that made my corruption spike with murderous intent.
He looked up as I approached, and for the first time since I’d known him, I saw genuine fear in his eyes.
“Stay back,” he commanded, power radiating from him—not just Bloom magic, but Root too, stolen from Elle through the apparatus. He stood at the center of competing forces—Root and Bloom magic warring for dominance. “The convergence is peaking. If you disrupt it now, the feedback will destroy everything within a mile radius. Everyone in this chamber will die, including her.”
“Good thing I don’t care about everyone.” I didn’t slow down. “Just her.”
He threw a wall of twisted power at me that crashed against my corruption like a wave against a cliff.
For a moment we were locked in a stalemate, entropy versus synthesis, ending versus transformation. The floor cracked in a spiderweb pattern spreading from our feet, pieces crumbling away into the void beneath the Heartspire.
“You know nothing of sacrifice!” he shouted over the clash of energies. “Centuries I’ve helped hold this realm together! Keeping the corruption at bay, maintaining order, preserving what the first Crown built!”
“You created more corruption than you ever stopped,” I shot back, forcing him backward step by step. My corruption ate through his defenses like acid through paper. “You broke people to fix a system that was already broken.That’s not sacrifice—that’s just cruelty with delusions of nobility.”
Around us, the battle raged on. I saw a rebel go down under three guards, saw Mora scream and drive her knife through one’s throat with the cold efficiency of someone who’d decided killing was easier than dying. Saw Thrak take a blade to the shoulder and just keep fighting, blood streaming down his arm, but his grip never faltering.
Elle screamed again, and something in mesnapped.
I stopped holding back entirely.
The corruption exploded outward, throwing Auradelle across the chamber.
I reached the apparatus in three strides.
The conduits were burrowed into Elle’s skin—thorned vines that pulsed with stolen power, drinking her transformation like vampires feeding on light itself. Through our bond, I could feel each one like a violation, like theft of something essential.
“Get. Out. Of. Her.”
My corruption wrapped around the conduits, and theyscreamed—an actual sound, like dying animals, like reality protesting what was being done to it. The apparatus hadn’t been designed to channel entropy, couldn’t process what I was forcing into its carefully calibrated systems. The thorned vines began to wither, blackening, releasing their grip with reluctance that felt almost conscious.
But slowly. Too slowly.
“You’ll kill her!” Auradelle screamed from where I’d thrown him, scrambling to his feet with wild desperation. “The apparatus is the only thing keeping her consciousness together! Without it, she’ll scatter completely, dissolve into the Heartspire’s awareness with no way back!”
“Then we find another anchor.” I reached for Elle, my corruption-coated hands somehow gentle as I touched her face. Her skin was hot, feverish, slick with sweat and blood. “Elle. Stay with me.”
