Not the screeches of hunger he was used to. Not the frantic calls of beasts on the hunt. No—this was something else. This was a celebration. The guttural sound of feasting.
Ciaran’s blood turned to ice.
He tore forward, faster, shadows flaring sharp enough to cut air. Branches lashed his face, snapped underfoot, until at last the forest broke open into a clearing that had never existed before.
It was carnage.
The earth was cratered, scarred with scorch marks, the remnants of explosions. He knew the signs. He had watched her wield the Fifth Power before, seen how it ravaged everything it touched. Stones were split, trees cleaved, the ground blackened with ash.
And in the center—
Dead sangins piled in heaps, dozens, maybe hundreds, bodies clawed and burned and broken. And yet still more writhed and fought, a frenzy of talons and snapping teeth, shoving and snarling, desperate for what lay at the heart of their circle.
Forher.
Ciaran’s shadows exploded.
They roared outward from his body, a torrent of pure darkness that devoured the clearing whole. Hundreds of beasts seized mid-lunge, their shrieks cut short as shadow-thorns pierced throats, eyes, hearts. One by one they fell limp until the corpses blanketed the ground like black rain.
Ciaran stood in the ruin of silence, chest heaving, his vision rimmed in red. And then he unleashed more. More than he had ever dared, more than his body should have contained. His shadows swelled, rose in a storm, covered the skies themselves.
“DIE.”
His roar shook the forest. Darkness writhed from his fingertips, suffocating, slicing, shredding, choking every sangin left alive. They collapsed in heaps, twitching, crushed under the weight of his rage.
When the last one fell, when the storm ebbed—
The clearing was still.
No beasts.
No sound.
Not even her.
Ciaran staggered forward, his breath shattering, his eyes searching desperately.
The ground bore proof of her fight. Crystal shards scattered—the broken case that had once held the South piece of the Queen’s heart. The fragments of the cage of shadows. She had done it. She had destroyed them.
But she had paid.
He pushed sangin corpses aside with shaking hands, flinging beasts away, shadows carving through the mess until—
“Hope.”
Her name broke from him in a whisper that gutted him.
She was sprawled across the ground, black feathers scattered through her blood, skin torn raw. Her body was wrecked, black and red and broken.
His vision blurred. His knees almost gave out. He reached her, hands trembling, and gathered her against him—one arm sliding beneath her knees, the other cradling her neck. Her head lolled against his chest, her hair heavy with blood.
“No. No, no, no…” His voice cracked, a sound he didn’t recognize.
Her chest didn’t rise. Her lips, stained with blood, did not part for breath. Her hand—her new hand, the gleaming creation she had marveled at only hours before—hung limp.
He pressed his forehead to hers, his shadows curling tight around them, wrapping them in black.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Only feel the hole tearing through his chest, cavernous and endless.
