He hits again.
Again.
Again.
His knuckles split into a bloodied mess, but he descends into calm with every strike. Like he’s reclaiming a part of himself with every one.
“HE IS MINE!” Morrathys commands in a voice that shudders the stone.
Come back to me.I whisper down the tether, because I can see that he’s lost to it.Do not let Maldrak take you from me. You kill him, you kill us both.
And somehow, it reaches him. He stops, breathing ragged and broken.
Teddy stands wrecked and raw by Maldrak’s barely alive body, and he does the only thing he can do—he spits on him with such violent disgust, and retreats to the side of the room.
The shouts of soldiers are closer still, traveling to us on the wind.
“We need to keep going—hurry!” Seren urges in hushed chaos.
“Do it!” I command.
“Bring the altar!” Seren signals to Teddy, and he lifts the heavy stone altar I saw in my Obsidian Crown vision. The one carved with runes.
“One rune by a Runewright,” she begins. “Maldrak must trace the rune in reverse—it’s the lattice between planes that allows him to draw Death’s power.”
But Maldrak is unconscious. And even if he wasn’t, there’s no way he’d trace it for us.
Fuck.
I look to the others, but no one knows what to do.
Kael, Teddy, Jax—they’re broken. And Ronyn and me? We have no idea.
But Lesara moves to me. “Recall your vision, Little Star. You are our only hope,” she breathes, reciting the last words she said to me before she was taken.
And they gut me.
I kneel beside Maldrak, resenting the closeness, lifting his terrifying hand that scratched through my mind like entitled claws.
The altar stares back at me, appearing clear and unhindered. But I know better.
I close my eyes, taking myself into the vision from Starlit Grove, reliving the vision of Maldrak killing King Aurius. Remembering. Recalling.
And then?—
The vibrant green of the spell from the vision forms in my mind.
I drag his finger into a twisting shape, trying desperately to cling to the vision in reverse.
Playing the vision over and over in an attempt to retrace it.
I twist, flick, carve until the shape from my memory is complete.
I drop his hand like a dead weight, staring at the altar.
Waiting.
Hoping.
