Strikes came in fractions of heartbeats, blocks just as fast.
When she saw Lavana’s face would be left open in the next move, she snapped back the blades of her left hand, all but the ironwood, and drove it towards Lavana’s throat.
In that moment, the world melted away, until it was only her arm tracking through the air to Lavana’s pulsing vein.
Sounds went mute. All sense of her own wounds, her own breath, her own pulse, vanished. Time seemed to stop.
And that was when she saw her mistake.
Too late.
The opening had been there, but she wasn’t fast enough to seize it.
Time leapt back up to speed.
Lavana ducked the ironwood, came back up on the outside of Magda’s left arm, spinning.
All five of her daggers drove deep into Magda’s exposed side.
She lurched.
Pain exploded and then ebbed away just as fast, tricking her for half-a-breath.
The fleeting thought skated through her mind—That didn’t just happen.
But it had happened.
Her whole left side went weak. Her leg gave out. Her arm turned limp. She buckled and crashed to her knees.
Pain like oil lit aflame rolled through her, sucking the oxygen from her lungs.
Every desperate beat of her heart, grasping to hold on, only seemed to push her further away.
Away from the field and the Spire and the world all around.
Away from her breath and her body and her life.
Lavana gripped her hair and yanked her head back.
She had drawn her daggers back into their sheaths. Blood dripped over the metal—Magda’s blood.
In Lavana’s hand, Magda’s three-sided ghast blade. It flashed with some reflected light, a torch maybe, lightning perhaps.
A second, two, had passed since Lavana’s daggers had sunk deep into her flesh.
Time warped, speeding and slowing at once.
Sweat or tears or rain traced the vicious sharp planes of Lavana’s face that were filling her vision.
Without a word, Lavana brought the ghast blade down towards her throat.
A single brilliant burst of pain, so intense it spun a delicate spider-silk bridge across that chasm between agony and revelation—the physical left stranded while the light of consciousness rushed onward, breathless, freed, towards the High Road and the Godlands.
And so it ended.
She died.
Or so it seemed.
