I sink to my own knees.
“Not to leave you, my love. She wanted to love you, in spite of wanting to stay.”
“She chose this,” she murmurs, and this time, I nod, barely able to breathe.
“She chose it.For you.”
I hated Lesara for what she did. I hated the way Elyssara has not known the affections of her mother since she was just five summers old. But I respectthischoice. It’s the only way Elyssara can truly live: knowing she was loved.
Her gaze finds mine—fractured, unblinking, as if she’s looking through me into the memory itself.
Then something shifts. The fight leaves her body, and she collapses forward, pressing her forehead to Lesara’s still chest. The sound that leaves her splits the air open—grief made flesh.
I want to reach for her, but I can’t. I don’t deserve to touch her. Not yet. Not until I know she can look me in the eyes without hating me.
Her magic ripples out of her like breath—soft, luminous, uncontrolled. It clings to her mother’s skin, weaving light into the dark, and for one terrible, beautiful moment, I see it—understanding dawning through devastation.
“She loved me,” she whispers. “Gods, shelovedme.” She says it like she finally believes it, and I know I’ve made the right choice.
Her fingers clutch Lesara’s leathers tighter, anchoring herself to that truth, even as the rest of the world crumbles.
I feel it down the tether—not her forgiveness, but her understanding, blooming like an open wound turned scar. It doesn’t absolve me, but it steadies her.
She turns to me then, eyes glassy but clear.
I ready myself for her hate, her grief to barrel towards me.
“You did what she asked,” she says. Not a question. A verdict.
I nod once, jaw locked.
Her hand lifts, slow and shaking, finding my face. The touch is brief—blood and salt and unbearable grace.
“Then, we finish this,” she murmurs, straightening her spine and setting her jaw.
The air shifts. The reversed rune on the altar still flares, and Lesara’s blood begins to move—pulled into the rune like veins filling with light.
Seren’s voice fractures through the chamber, half-human, half-divine.
“It’s begun! We need to keep working!”
The castle trembles around us, the stampede of soldiers boots in the halls above us a reminder that we have no time to dwell on the dead—only the living.
Elyssara rises beside me—face streaked with tears, spine straight as a blade, grief shoved down for a time beyond war—and though her hands still shake, her eyes are steady.
Whatever mercy or ruin comes next, we’ll meet it together.
“Morrathys, we need your magic!” Seren calls, and it’s not lost on me that she’s commanding Death himself, as if he bends to her will. “It must be given freely.”
His arms stretch wide, his chin tilting skyward, calling on his magic to descend into the chamber.
Shadows bloom first—myshadows once, though they no longer answer to me. They pour from his hands like living smoke, black and fluid, rippling through the air with a pulse Istill recognize in my bones. They were born to me, but he wields them now with impossible grace—controlled, measured, divine.
Then his own power follows.
It rises beneath the darkness like a tide of liquid silver—cold, radiant, absolute.Death magic.It doesn’t burn or breathe or contort; it simplyis.A light that consumes without heat, a silence so total it hums.
Together, the two magics weave—shadow and silver, mortal and god—spiraling through the air until the rune carved into the altar blazes with an undeniable emerald pulse. The castle groans around us, but this time, it’s from him—stone protesting against forces older than itself.
