I felt my pulse shatter into irregular beats. My vision blurred.
“You are just an idle seerling cluttering the halls of a court that was never meant for you.”
The blight swarmed me, trying to devour the fragile thread between me and the souls, and between me and Kael’s storm outside.
But then…
Beneath the agony, beneath the suffocating pressure, I felt something.
Not theirs.
Mine.
A flare beneath my ribs, small as a spark at first, then rising, rising, bright, wild, alive. A current I had felt before but never understood. A force that had always answered Kael’s storm not with fear, but with instinct.
Power rippled through me like wind through tall grass.
I lifted my head.
“No,” I said again, but my voice was different this time—steady, resonant, carrying breath and will and something older than either.
The false Kael froze.
The vines around my hands began to peel back, drawn into spirals of pale light that shimmered beneath my skin. My power—my true power—was not storm, not memory. It was the joining place between them. The space where echoes lived.
“I am not an idle seerling,” I said quietly. “I never was a seerling in the first place.”
And I had never understood what I was. But now, I finally did.
The false Kael recoiled, lightning stuttering across its form.
“I am the echo itself,” I breathed. “Power comes to me, and I send it where it must go.”
The blight shuddered.
The souls stirred.
And the storm outside, Kael’s storm, answered me, not as something battering the walls, but as something I could feel through the veil. Not hurting. Calling.
I reached toward it.
Light burst from my palms, a ripple of echoing radiance, the same storm that lived inside Kael, the same thunder that had always roared in anger but now roared with purpose. It struck the false Kael full in the chest.
The creature screamed, its voice fracturing like glass. Vines peeled from it, tar burning away into nothing. It clung to the blight with desperate hands, but the blight itself recoiled, pulling back, no longer certain, no longer willing to cradle.
“You’re done,” I whispered.
And my thunderstorm took it.
The false Kael tore apart, unraveling into a tangle of black lightning that blinked out in a single breath, leaving only trembling vines behind.
The souls gasped as one.
The blight loosened.
And for the first time, the darkness did not press inward—it exhaled.
The crowd gazed upon me, people in soiled and torn linens, their feet drenched in black tar mixed with their shit and piss. They were bruised, bloodied, some missing limbs.
