I love you.
The sound does not bridge the distance between us, but the meaning strikes me like a wrecking ball at full speed. It hits the center of my chest, shattering the fragile composure I have been clinging to since the first stone fell.
It is not a promise. It is a eulogy.
He is saying goodbye. He is accepting that he—the Master of Night, the Khuzuth Lord who terrified a city—is going to die on his knees in the dirt, powerless, while I watch.
Something inside me fractures.
It starts as a sob, a jagged shard of grief lodging in my throat. Why? Why is it always this way? Why am I always the spectator to my own ruin? I was a child when they put me in chains. I was a girl when they taught me to be invisible. I have spent my lifeholding my breath, making myself small, building walls to keep the ocean of the world’s pain from drowning me.
And for what? To stand here, held by the rough hands of soldiers, while the only person who ever saw me—the only person who saw me for who I am—is butchered like cattle?
No.
The word screams through my mind, louder than the roar of the blood in my ears.
Is this my fate? To be the thing that is taken? To be the thing that is broken?
I look at Malek. I see the glee in his red eyes, the arrogant, unchecked power radiating from his skin like heat off a furnace. He thinks he has won. He thinks power is a heavy axe and a loud voice.
He does not know what power is.
He does not know what happens when you compress a lifetime of fear into a single point of density.
The grief in my chest curdles. It boils, turning from the watery weakness of sorrow into something white-hot and solid. It is rage. It is a cold, blinding fury that tastes of iron and ancient starlight.
I am done being the dam,I think.
The soldier holding my hair yanks my head back, forcing me to watch the axe fall.
I do not pull away. I lean into it.
I find the barrier in my mind—the fortress of gray stone I built to keep the empathy out, to keep the Purna curse contained. I don't just open the gate.
I tear the walls down.
My vision goes black. Not the darkness of unconsciousness, but the absolute, starry void of my heritage. I feel my pupils dilate, swallowing the sapphire, swallowing the whites, until my eyes are twin tunnels into the Aether.
The air around me drops fifty degrees in a heartbeat.
The soldier’s hand on my hair freezes. Frost blooms on his gauntlet.
I open my mouth, and I scream.
It is not a sound that vibrates the air. It is a psychic shockwave, a spear of pure, concentrated will thrust outward into the mental fabric of the room.
I do not push calm. I do not push peace.
I reach into the darkest, most terrified corner of Imas’s memories—the place where his god used to live—and I pull it out. I reconstruct the horror he lived with for centuries. I take the image of The Serpent—the devouring, endless hunger, the coils that crush the world—and I project it into the minds of every living thing in this room.
LOOK AT HIM,I command the room.LOOK AT THE GOD YOU FEAR.
The psychic blast hits Lord Malek first.
The axe stops inches from Imas’s neck. Malek freezes, his muscles locking up as if turned to stone.
His mouth opens in a silent O of absolute horror.
