It felt laughably small.
I slashed as the nearest serpent lunged again, the blade screeching uselessly across its scales, sparks flying where steel met stone-hard flesh. The creature recoiled, more irritated than hurt, and the others closed in, their massive bodies shifting and tightening around me.
The circle quickly shrank, my dangerous world getting smaller as their coils pressed closer. Soon, confining me, forming a living cage that scraped and shifted with every shallow breath I took. The ground beneath me vibrated from their combined weight as I turned slowly, searching for an opening that wasn’t there.
I could not fight this.
The knife was useless. My strength meant nothing. Every instinct screamed the truth I didn’t want to face.
This thing was going to kill me.
A serpent lunged again, and I dodged, stumbling into another solid wall of scaled flesh. My shoulder slammed into it, pain tearing a gasp from my throat as the coils pressed tighter, forcing me down onto one knee.
Above me, the Typhon looked on, his dark eyes fixed on me with a terrible, patient certainty.
He had me.
And there was nowhere left to run.
For a moment, the world seemed to dull, the roar of the battlefield fading into a distant, muffled hum, as though I had been pushed beneath the surface of deep water. The serpents shifted around me, their coils tightening, their weight pressing down until each breath came shallow and sharp. But time stretched strangely thin, like elastic, bending around the pounding of my heart.
This is it,a quiet voice whispered somewhere deep inside me.
Not panic. Not hysteria. Just truth.
I closed my eyes.
And everything came rushing back.
The gryphon, and the moment my world had split open with the loss of my uncle and the certainty that nothing would ever be simple again. The early days after, when the world had turned feral overnight, when survival meant learning fast or dyingfaster. When every shadow hid teeth and claws and the promise of something worse.
Running through broken streets. Sleeping with a weapon in my hand. The first creature I killed, my hands shaking so badly afterward I thought they might never stop. The werewolf, all rage and muscle and inevitability, the moment I realized that fear didn’t disappear when you fought through it.
No, it simply learned to stand beside you.
The base, falling apart under siege, the sound of screaming metal, Atlas’s force descending from the sky like a god and a nightmare all at once, the choice to run when everything in me had wanted to stay. The Rift tearing open reality itself, the sound of it, the pressure, the way the scars had burned into my skin as though the world had marked me and refused to let me forget it.
The Labyrinth, endless and watching, the weight of old magic pressing down on my lungs. The Badlands, beautiful and predatory, the Gorgon King and the quiet, unsettling truth that power did not always roar. The Way Weaver, her silver eyes calm and resolute as she chose to stand where I could not.
Every step. Every fight. Every moment I had thought would be the end.
And yet, somehow,I was still here.
My fingers dug into the dirt, nails biting into my palms as the realization settled heavy and solid in my chest. I had been terrified so many times before. I had been hunted, cornered, outmatched. I had bled and broken and yet…I kept moving anyway.
Not because I was the strongest.
Because I refused to stop.
My eyes snapped open.
The serpents crowded my vision, and all I could hear was the hiss of breath and the scrape of scales. Above them, the Typhon watched, his patience unbroken.
Something inside me shifted.
Fear was still there, heavy and very real, but it no longer owned me. It no longer froze my limbs or stole my breath. It became something else instead, something focused and fierce.
I was not meant to die here, crushed beneath the weight of something that believed itself invincible.
