Gray’s transformation starts violent and desperate. Bone cracks and reshapes beneath his skin. Fur erupts along his arms in patches of white. His eyes go completely inhuman, wild and feral.
Phil watches with mild interest, then flicks his wrist.
Gray crumples mid-shift, gasping as the magic forces his body back to human form. The incomplete transformation leaves him writhing on the ground, caught between shapes and in agony.
“Uncontrolled,” Phil observes. “Pathetic, really.”
Rhett’s fury ignites the air around him. Heat waves ripple outward, scorching the grass at his feet. The temperature spikes so fast that people near him stumble backward, sweat beading on their foreheads.
Phil just laughs.
“Wild magic,” he says dismissively. “No finesse. No discipline.”
The flames gutter out like someone blew out a candle.
Jace’s knives lift from their sheaths, spinning in tight circles as air currents catch them. His power builds, ready to send them flying—
They clatter to the ground.
“Did you really think parlor tricks would work on me?” Phil’s voice carries genuine amusement. “I’ve been hunting your kind for decades, boy.”
Wes moves last.
His hunger surges outward, but not to feed. Instead, it carries emotion—raw, desperate feeling that crashes over the entire crowd like a wave. Fear and grief and longing so pure it takes my breath away.
For a moment, everyone feels it. The weight of what we’re losing. The desperation of watching someone you care about slip away.
People gasp. Some stagger. Even Phil pauses, his confident expression flickering.
“Daddy doesn’t care about feelings, parasite,” he says after a beat, but there’s less certainty in his voice now.
Wes collapses to his knees, drained by the effort.
I watch it all with growing horror. Each attempt, each failure, building a wall of helplessness that threatens to bury us all.
But my mind is already moving past the immediate crisis, cataloging what Phil doesn’t know:
He crossed onto sanctuary ground minutes ago. Stepped right over the boundary like it was meaningless.
The Ether around Bree isn’t just convulsing—it’s reaching. Stretching toward something beneath our feet.
The sanctuary itself is stirring. Not just the building, but the land. The stones in the walls hum with energy I’ve never felt before. The trees in the garden lean inward like they’re listening.
Phil thinks he’s won because he overpowered us individually.
But he doesn’t understand what he’s really facing.
Seth’s grip tightens on Bree’s arms, and she looks up at him with such devastation that something breaks in my chest. The betrayal is written across her face in stark, brutal lines.
But underneath the hurt, I see something else.
The same thing I felt when she touched the crown in the attic bedroom. When the voice called her queen and power flooded through her like recognition.
She’s not just standing on sanctuary ground.
She’s standing on land that belongs to her.
And it’s starting to remember.
