Balroth’s grip tightens on my arm.
“Balroth?” My voice comes out small. Confused. “What is this? What’s happening?”
He doesn’t answer. Just keeps walking, dragging me toward the altar, his grip iron where it was gentle moments ago. And his smile?—
His smile hasn’t changed. That’s the worst part. He’s still smiling at me with the same warmth, the same reassurance, even as he delivers me to my death.
“No.” I dig my heels into the earth, fire flaring at my fingertips. “Balroth, stop. What are you doing?”
“What I should have done years ago.” His voice is calm. Almost kind. “What I’ve been planning since I realized you would always be more than me.”
The Shadow Clan members close in around us. Hands grab my arms, my shoulders, forcing me toward the altar. My fire flares wildly, but something is suppressing it—wards, maybe, or magic I don’t understand. It sputters and dies even as I scream.
They strap me down. Cold stone against my back. Leather bindings cutting into my wrists, my ankles. I’m crying, tears streaming down my face, my voice breaking on my brother’s name.
“Why?” The word comes out broken. “Balroth, why?”
He leans over me, and for one terrible moment, I think he’s going to apologize. Going to say it’s a mistake, that he didn’t mean it, that someone is forcing him to do this.
But he doesn’t.
“You were always the special one.” His voice is soft, almost tender. “The powerful one. The one everyone loved, everyone praised, everyone expected great things from. And me?” A bitter laugh. “I was nothing. Just Nasyra’s brother. Just the one without power, without magic, without anything that made me worth noticing.”
“That’s not—I never?—“
“You didn’t have to.” He straightens, and the warmth bleeds out of his expression, leaving something cold and satisfied behind. “Everyone else did it for you. But then I found people who valued what I could offer them. People who saw my potential. And all I had to do...” He gestures at the altar, at my bound body, at the Shadow Clan waiting with their blades. “Was give them you.”
The blade catchesmoonlight as it descends.
I scream when it bites into my arm—not just from pain, though there’s plenty of that. From the wrongness of it. The way my power responds, rushing toward the wound, being pulled from my veins in rivers of light and heat.
They’re draining me. Not just my blood—my fire. My magic. Everything that makes me what I am, flowing out of me and into the channels carved in the altar, feeding something ancient and hungry.
The pain goes beyond physical. It’s like having my soul ripped out piece by piece, each fragment torn away, leaving emptiness behind. I feel myself becoming less with every heartbeat, my power bleeding into the stone beneath me.
Balroth watches. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show any sign of the brother who used to hold me when I cried. He watches with the same cold satisfaction as the Shadow Clan members, and something inside me breaks in a way that has nothing to do with the blade.
This is worse than dying. This is knowing that the person I loved most in the world orchestrated my death. That every smile, every kind word, every moment of apparent support was a lie covering jealousy so deep it became hatred.
“Zyphon.” I gasp his name between screams, reaching for the bond I can feel forming between us—incomplete, unclaimed, but real. “Zyphon, please?—“
I feel him respond. Feel him fighting, somewhere in the distance, tearing through Shadow Clan forces to reach me. He’s coming. He’s coming, and maybe?—
But I can feel myself fading. The life bleeding out of me with every pulse of power they drain. The world going gray at the edges, sound becoming muffled, the pain becoming distant.
He won’t make it in time.
The realization hits with a grief so profound it eclipses the physical agony. I’m going to die here, on this altar, betrayed by my own blood. And Zyphon is going to arrive too late, and he’s going to blame himself, and I can already feel the darkness waiting to claim him—the curse they’ve prepared, the punishment for loving me.
“I’m sorry.” The words slip out, barely audible, meant for a man who can’t hear me. “I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you.”
And then?—
Silence.
Darkness.
Nothing.
