Kane studies them closely. “Margaux’s work. Has to be. No one else could forge Kian’s signature this perfectly.” He glances toward the checkpoint, and I see him calculating odds and weighing risks. “Might give us a chance if we’re lucky.”
But the word hangs dead between us.If. The silence stands sculpted now, a held breath before the executioner swings.
“We could try another path,” I offer, knowing exactly how useless it sounds. We both know there is no other route; every perimeter is surveilled, each tunnel logged, the checkpoints designed as bottlenecks for containment, primed for ambush. “We don’t have a choice,” Kane says quietly. “It’s this or worse.”
We start forward, the checkpoint looming ahead with blackened steel, spell-layered glass, and automated scanners that shimmer just beyond the visible spectrum. I clutch the documents tighter, the high-grade paper stiff under my grip. Margaux’s work may be flawless, but perfection won’t save us if someone decides to make an example.
Kane’s hand clamps around my wrist, halting me several yards from the barrier. “Hold up. Look.” His gaze sharpens as he watches the checkpoint. “Happens more than you’d think. Desperate people, forged documents. Usually ends the same way.”
A family presses forward; mother clutching two little ones, both too small for the weight they carry. Their clothing hangs from them in tired folds, nothing left to fill it. Even from here, I see the tremor in her grip as she extends the documents. Her children press close, their wide eyes hollow with fear that rots early and never leaves.
“Please,” she begs, the word carrying across the sterile space. “We need to leave. I have confirmation paperwork—”
“No one leaves without executive clearance.” The enforcer’s voice grinds through his helm’s filter, warped and lifeless. “Return to your designated sector.”
“But my children.” Her voice cracks. “There’s nothing left. We were promised—this city promised—”
The enforcer’s magic blasts the air. Not the refined, controlled bursts I study at the Academy, not the precise spells we practice in the Scholar’s Wing. This is death distilled into pure energy, condensed into a heartbeat of absolute horror.
The woman’s body convulses as the force tears through her chest, bone reduced to debris, her scream silenced before it can escape. Her sternum detonates outward, shredded by internal collapse. One moment she’s pleading, the next she’s rupturing, organs liquefying under the pressure, blood atomizing in midair.
The children are still clinging to her when she breaks open, their fingers locked in her skirt as her lungs drag for breath through a wound that no longer exists. Her ribcage peels apart in a spray ofviscera, the body not falling so much as collapsing as muscles unravel, nerves misfire, and limbs twitch in refusal. Her head lolls, one eye ruptured, her mouth agape, jaw slack, leaking heat and ruin.
Kane seizes up beside me. His grip locks around my arm, bone-deep, but I barely register it. I’m locked in place, air static in my lungs. His breath turns ragged, too practiced to be shock. This isn’t new to him. He’s seen it. Again and again.
My stomach revolts, and bile floods my throat, bitter and burning. I force it back down, clenching every muscle to silence the betrayal. I can’t afford a sound. Not here. Not now.
The body crumples like a puppet with its strings torn out in a single violent snap. Her face is unrecognizable. An earring still glints in the red light.
“Mama?”
The sound is faint and fragile, two syllables, cracked open by grief. And then the screaming starts.
The younger child reaches out with trembling hands, blood slicking his fingers, as if contact could make her whole again. As if love could undo slaughter. His brother doesn’t move. He just watches, face hollow, then splits open in a sound so visceral it shakes the air.
My knees give. Something ancient howls awake.
The first wave strikes with irrevocable force, vast and ancient, crashing through my mind with a silence so absolute it annihilates sound itself. I blink, and I am no longer only myself, but a legion of eyes, a litany of deaths, an ocean of violated moments inscribed in an age older than grief.
Astrafel.
The name never forms, but the knowing does, and its weight shatters me as centuries of slaughter unspool inside my skull—limbs torn, cities razed, children hollowed by policy that paraded as order. The fury is not mine, yet it floods my veins all the same.
Magic tears at my skin, clawing for release; the taste of metal and smoke on my tongue as pressure builds in my fingertips, energy fracturing beneath my nails and begging to be loosed. My heartbeatfalters, colors leach from the world, light bends, and my mind buckles inward, unable to contain what presses outward.
Stop, I try to plead, but the thought disintegrates the moment it’s formed.
He is inside me now, buried beneath blood and bone, moving through me as a second heart. Cold and inhuman. Watching. Waiting. Judging.
Please, I beg the silence.If you can hear me—I don’t want to die. Not here. Not like this.
The presence coils tighter, my spine arching as magic pulses behind my eyes and splinters my vision into fractal shards, everything turning glass-slick and broken while my throat seals shut and the world sheds its weight and shape.
And then the cold comes.
A bitter, dead winter settles in my chest. The power presses outward again, not with anger, but with judgment. It’s not emotion, but design. Execution. As if I am nothing more than a vessel, and this moment demands something far beyond my right to contain.
I am breaking.
