But she didn’t have time to feel victorious.
Chapter 72
The air stank of blood and burned stone.
Alaric’s sword arm was slick with sweat, fingers cramping where they curled around the hilt. He moved on instinct now—honed by years of training with Gareth and sharpened by desperation.
A man lunged from the left but Alaric caught the blow with the flat of his blade, turned it, and slammed the pommel into the man’s temple. He dropped like a wet cloth. Another took his place, and another.
Ravik stood just behind the forward skirmish line, shoulder braced against the tunnel wall, barking orders to soldiers who emerged from the tunnel, his injured side slowing him but not stopping him. His blade punched into a mercenary gut and twisted hard. Cedric dragged another one to the ground and ended him with a short, brutal stab in the throat.
Somewhere behind him, Vesena’s knife flashed again. She moved like a shadow and consequence, elegant death in a robe that didn’t quite fit.
And at the center of it all—Evelyne.
Stars.
Alaric caught a glimpse of her through the chaos. She screamed. Something in his chest cracked open. Her pain was his. Not metaphorically.
Itwasreal.
Magic coiled around her like threads of silver and ice. Something ancient and fierce that had chosen her, or maybe remembered her. She hurled a stone with furious aim that cracked against a mercenary’s skull.
He barely registered the blade slicing across his ribs. The sting came after—warm blood blooming beneath his tunic, soaking through fabric and adrenaline.
He drove his sword forward, impaling the man who’d struck him, twisted it free with a grunt, and turned just in time to see the ground beneath the altar shake.
Alaric forced his way forward, closing the distance to the altar—to her. Smoke and dust scraped at his throat, each pace a fight through the heavy drag of heat and magic, the air thick and unforgiving.
“Evelyne!” he called out.
She pivoted toward him, unsteady, blood streaking from her temple, her expression blown wide with something that didn’t belong to this world. She looked carved from prophecy. He stared, undone by something too vast to admire and too cruel to look away from. It felt like standing too close to a god. He couldn’t tell if he wanted to kneel or run.
A flash of pain tore through his side—sharp, not deep. His palm clamped over it instinctively, and when he glanced down, dark red was already blooming through the fabric of his tunic.
Damn it.
He was five paces away from Evelyne, when a bolt of silver light tore across the stones. It singed the altar, cracked the ground, and then stopped. To Evelyne’s right, one of the mercenaries was circling in, a blade already raised to strike. Alaric opened his mouth to warn her, only to see Thalen, ropes hanging from his wrists.
He threw himself between Evelyne and the blade with all the fury of a child who hadn’t yet learned fear. His wooden sword clutched in both hands was raised like it could stop steel.
He said something. Alaric couldn’t hear it.
“Thalen—no!”
The mercenary’s blade came down. It cleaved through the wooden sword with a crack, and then—
Time broke.
The world narrowed to steel meeting flesh, to the sound no child should ever make. Alaric couldn’t breathe. The blade was still in the boy, gleaming. The rest of the world kept moving, deaf to the sound of a shattering heart.
Chapter 73
Her whole life collapsed with a choke that she’d never forget. A sharp exhale, like the wind had been kicked out of the world itself. His small body folding in, blood blooming across his tunic. The fight blurred. The torches, the smoke, the screaming—all of it pulled back.
Her knees hit the stone before she realized she’d moved. Pain lanced up her legs.
“Thalen—”
