It rose from somewhere deeper than breath.
Lightning began to form above me, not wild but intentional, drawn down a path that had been marked long before I stood beneath it.
I understood, suddenly and completely.
Lightning wasn’t violence. It wasn’t fury or loss of control. It was precision. Intention given form. A single decision carried out without hesitation. I felt the weight of it then, the certainty, the finality, the way the world bent to accommodate it once chosen.
The lightning gathered, brilliant and precise, waiting.
I understood then that nothing stood between it and the world but my decision.
The world held at the edge of release. But before the moment could resolve, someone moved.
Not toward me.
Across me.
He stepped into the space the storm had already claimed
The alignment shuttered, the path of lightning warping as if dragging sideways. Like it was recalculating around the intrusion. For the first time, the storm hesitated. Not in doubt, but in recognition of interference.
“No…” I said, the word falling too late.
He didn’t look at me.
Didn’t falter.
Didn’t reach for anything but the strike itself.
It hit him with a sound like the sky tearing open, white-hot and absolute. The force driving through stone and air alike. Theimpact threw me backward, the world flashing to nothing but light and noise.
When my vision cleared, he was already falling.
The court came apart with him.
Cracks raced through the ground, splitting sigils and stone as if the structure had been holding itself together by will alone. The sky fractured overhead, seams of light ripping wider, fire spilling through the breaks.
Some rolled thick and choking, stinging my eyes, burning my throat. I was on my knees before I knew I’d moved, the ground trembling beneath my palms.
I reached for him.
Heat scorched my hands. Ash smeared my skin. There was no resistance, no weight, only the absence of where he should have been.
The storm recoiled then.
I screamed his name.
The sound tearing me awake.
Chapter 40
The Raven and Frostlight
CAELIRA
Iwoke too fast, breath catching like I had surfaced from deep water.
For a moment the dream clung to me— heat behind my eyes, my pulse racing in a hard uneven beat that hadn’t realized the danger was over. My throat was raw as if the scream were still caught in it. Then the room resolved around me, familiar stone and shadow, the quiet exactly where I’d left it.
