Because like he’s anticipated me, the Cataclysm pivots on his knees and slits my throat with the blade. As if that was his plan all along.
The dire weapon — once coated in Disa’s preserved blood, used to murder his soul-bound brother, then twisted to a new purpose by Bellamy and Reck — slices through my skin.
The pain takes longer to register.
The cu-sith shoulders me away from the Cataclysm, shoving me to the side hard enough that I come down on my wrist and feel it snap.
The cu-sith’s momentum carries him directly into the path of his father’s next strike — a direct upward plunge … into the beast’s heart.
The cu-sith hovers there, momentarily suspended, horrifyingly connected to his father.
Then his front legs buckle.
The cu-sith falls.
Cradling my broken wrist to my chest, I wrap my hand around my throat, but the wound there is already healing over.
But my blood …
My blood is on the dire blade … in the cu-sith’s chest.
The Cataclysm remains on his knees, chest heaving, bleeding heavily, and watching as essence writhes and twists over his eldest son.
The cu-sith transforms, shifting into human form in an attempt to heal himself, or maybe simply to dislodge the knife.
Naked and streaked with blood, Reck simply falls back onto the craggy rock, unable to catch himself.
The blade still juts out of his chest.
A blade coated in my blood.
Muta appears before me, clearly using me as an anchor to teleport into the middle of this bloody fucking mess. The death god trapped in the body of a bushmaster strikes at the Cataclysm before I can shout at him, sinking his venomous fangs into the Cataclysm’s exposed neck.
The Cataclysm stumbles to his feet, dragging Muta with him. The mortal wound at his chest weeps blood laced with essence, his body trying to heal the wounds inflicted by the cu-sith’s claws and teeth. Still unsteady on his feet, he rips Muta from his thick neck, along with a chunk of flesh, flinging him off the side of the bluff.
Energy contracts around the bushmaster as he falls out of sight. Then Muta reappears, settling tightly around my neck. Too tightly, as if trying to protect my own clearly vulnerable throat.
The gryphon hits the Cataclysm from above. I didn’t even feel him take flight again. The strike knocks the Cataclysm directly into the dragon’s maw.
The Cataclysm and the dragon both tumble off the edge of the cliff. The gryphon dives after them.
I should … I should help … I should be trying to seal the dimensional breach, but …
I blink.
All of Reck’s threads, all his life force — all his vibrant and multilayered threads of fate — darken, then begin to crumble into ash around me.
I throw myself forward, heedless of my knees on the rock or my still broken wrist. I grab for those threads. The two most vibrant of them lash around my hand and forearm. The last two threads.
The terrible, soul-deep wound that I thought was healed yawns open in my chest. But I hold fast to those two threads, crawling across the rock toward Reck.
He’s on his back and gazing up at the darkly clouded sky, rain pummeling him. I lean over him, holding those fucking threads tightly as I try to shield his face from the downpour.
Reck meets my gaze, eyes practically bleeding pain. “Maybe in the next lifetime … my love … my Larkspur.”
“Fuck you, Reck,” I snarl. “I’m the Conduit now. There is no next lifetime for me.”
He laughs. He fucking laughs at me.
