I planted my palm against the ground and pushed.
Pain flared through my shoulder and ribs as I forced myself upright, teeth gritted, breath tearing from my lungs, but I rose anyway, shaking and unsteady and very much alive.
The Typhon’s smile faltered, just for a heartbeat.
And in that heartbeat,I stood my ground.
My hand found the dagger without conscious thought.
The moment my fingers brushed the hilt, heat flared, racing up my arm and settling into the scars along my wrists with a painful, familiar burn. I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth as sensation flooded me, lightning humming just beneath my skin, alive and waiting. The blade felt heavier than it ever had before, as though it knew exactly where we were and what was being asked of it.
The Typhon roared, the sound loud enough to rattle my bones, serpents surging forward in response, their bodies tightening and shifting as the circle closed again. One head lunged and I dodged, barely, the movement sending fresh pain lancing through my side as I stumbled back into the press of coils.
I could end this!
The thought was sudden and terrifying. I could raise the dagger, unleash everything it held, drive that power straight into the towering monstrosity in front of me and watch it fall. I could burn the darkness out of him, shatter the thing that had hunted me across the battlefield and call it victory.
But even as the idea took shape, something cold and heavy settled in my chest.
It would change nothing.
My gaze flicked past the Typhon, past the writhing mass of serpents, to the battlefield beyond. Smoke still rose in thick columns. Shadows still crawled over bodies, over wings and claws and human-shaped forms alike.
Killing him would not stop the war.
It would not end the darkness.
It would not save the hundreds still fighting and dying beyond this moment. And if I wasted the dagger here, if I spent everything it held on this one impossible creature, there would be nothing left for what waited ahead.
For Demetrios.
Another serpent struck, and I twisted away, my boots skidding on loose earth as I barely kept my balance. Pain screamed through my shoulder and my breath came fast and ragged now. Each inhale scraping my lungs raw. I was running out of time. Running out of strength.
If I died here, everything was lost anyway.
Atlas. Aster. The soldiers still fighting. The Way Weaver’s sacrifice. All of it would mean nothing if I fell beneath this thing’s shadow.
The scars along my wrists burned hotter, the sensation spreading, sinking deeper, until it felt as though the dagger and I were breathing together. A strange awareness crept in. Not words, not voices, but direction.
Purpose.
My gaze dropped.
Not to the Typhon but to the ground beneath us.
The earth was cracked and scorched, veins of darkness running beneath the churned soil. The Typhon stood upon it,drew power from it, and anchored himself in it as surely as the serpents anchored me.
Understanding bloomed sharp and terrible in my chest.
This was not about striking flesh.
It was about ending what fed the darkness altogether.Demetrios.
My hands shook as I adjusted my grip, the dagger’s blade thrumming now, lightning crawling along its length in restless arcs. Fear surged up again, fierce and honest and rightly deserved. What I was about to do would not be contained. There would be no taking it back.
I lifted my eyes one last time to the Typhon, to the certainty in his gaze, to the belief that I was already dead.
“I’m sorry,”I whispered, not to him, but to everyone who would pay the price for what came next. Then I drove the dagger down, straight into the earth at my feet.
