“Even with a gods-given weapon, you can’t best me,” he continued loudly, backing away. He tapped his blackstone armor. “Can’t get past these, can you? You think yourself superior with your birth status, but I’ve outsmarted and outmatched you time and time again, Sister Dearest.”
She was practically spitting, bent over in agony, face pale with rage. Her lips curled white as her eyes snapped to him—a gaze swallowed by madness and hatred, a gaze from which there was no return.
With an animalistic yell, Sorsha broke into a run toward him.
He was aware of the soldiers in his unit poised just beyond the riverside promenade, in the shadows of dachas and backalleys. Bows drawn, arrows trained on Sorsha Farrald. Awaiting his signal.
Ramson held his hand high in the air for just a moment longer.
And then he brought it down.
Arrows whistled through the air.
He had to admire his half sister for her tenacity. Her hands wheeled and her iron gathered into a shield before her, forming to her arm as she ran. Arrows plinked off its surface and the ground cracked beneath her feet, slabs of concrete and earth rising to shroud her in a tunnel.
Ramson began to run toward her, misericord lifted.
Ten steps away, Sorsha’s shield began to morph, tip sharpening into a blade.
Four, three, two—
Ramson dodged. Swung.
She pivoted.
His blade caught.
Pain bloomed.
Intertwined, they fell together on the steps of the Kateryanna Bridge.
—
The pain was lightning, searing white into his vision. Looking down, he saw her half-formed iron spike digging into his stomach; felt the cold of it through his skin. Hoped against hope that it would give him just enough time to finish this.
His misericord, though, had cut through her heart.
His half sister made a small, choking sound. Red ran downher chin and neck, coursing down her arms, staining the turquoise siphon on her wrist.
She looked at him then, black gaze meeting his hazel one, the light rapidly fading from hers. Blood welled from her mouth as she scrabbled at his hands, her fingers weak as a newborn’s. The siphon on her wrist was clouding, strands of black drifting across the surface, growing slower and slower every second.
In the moments before death, the cruelty on his half sister’s face seemed to fade, leaving behind an expression resembling fear. She stared at him, eyes wide, still grappling with his hands, the hilt of his blade in her heart.
Ramson might have felt sorry for her, this girl raised to be a monster, who had embraced the worst and cruelest pieces of this world and turned them into a part of herself.
“Good-bye, Sorsha,” he murmured. “May the next life treat you kinder than this one.”
She drew a shuddering breath. And there, beneath the statues of the watching Deities, she grew still, her eyes turning glassy to reflect the emptiness of the skies.
Ramson’s own thoughts were dimming, the familiar haze of blood loss and pain clouding his world. It was growing harder to breathe, to see, to feel…yet there was one thing he still had todo.
He stood and turned back to the riverside promenade.
It was agony to lift one foot in front of the other. Time blurred; it seemed like an eternity and no time at all before he was standing in front of her.
Ana.
She lay in front of him in a pool of blood, dark hair fanned out in the snow. His legs gave way and he fell to his knees by herside. The pain in his abdomen was excruciating, reaching into the dark of his mind and drawing out stars, but Ramson gathered the last of his consciousness and focused on her.
