He should pick up the blade.
He should finish what he started.
That had been the deal. The only real path forward.
But…
The song said otherwise.
The song saidno.
It said:You choose. You always have.
A sound caught in his throat, sharp and unfamiliar. A sound made by someone who had forgotten how towant.
His hands shook as he forced himself to sit upright again, bracing one palm against the tree trunk behind him. The worldfelt different—warmer, brighter, too full and too loud all at once. He hadn’t heard silence in so long, not really, and now he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
The air in his lungs vanished as a strange heat unfurled in his blood, a hum threading through his veins, slow and rising. Not pain. Not magic in the familiar sense. No, this was older. This wasother.
He inhaled, head tipping back as his body tensed.
The shadows, his ever-present companions, stilled with him.
For the first time in centuries, they feltcrowded. Ashterion’s pulse thundered in his ears. It wasn’t their usual sentience. Not the way they pressed or warned or sang. This was… someone. He swore he felt it, fingers brushing the edge of his consciousness.
And just as quickly, it was gone.
Ashterion’s lips parted, a cold breath escaping. “What the fuck?”
No answer.
The hum beneath his skin surged. The tingling became fire.
And the sky screamed open.
Power tore through him. A surge of heat and pressure that twisted up his spine and cracked open the air around him. His back arched with the force of it, eyes flying wide as the magic he hadn’tknownin decades roared back to life, ripped free of the quiet cage it had been buried in.
His power.
His.
It didn’t just burn. It breathed. It remembered.
The wards around the garden shattered. The skies above his city blackened, blotted out by a rising storm of raw magic that howled and shimmered.
From far below, shouts rose.
Cries of fear. Gasps of awe.
Ashterion sat frozen, chest heaving, half-kneeling in the grass beneath the tree as the sky swallowed itself.
He’d seen shadows move. But never like this.
Not to him.
Not toanything.
74
