Too much distance.
Too little time.
There was no wind fast enough, no shield strong enough, no storm violent enough to undo it once it was loosed.
The bond pulled tight, screaming without sound, instinct and certainty slamming together in my chest.
I didn’t think.
I knew.
If I didn’t move, she would die.
Everything slowed.
The rain hung suspended in the air. The battlefield blurred at the edges, sound dropping away until all I could hear was my own breath and the deep, steady pulse of the storm answering me without question.
I saw her again, mud-streaked, blood-spattered, alive and incandescent in the middle of it all—and the thought came, not loud, not desperate, but absolute.
She survives this.
Not a hope. Not a prayer.
A decision.
I folded the space between us.
The storm answered before I finished the thought. Lightning snapped tight and precise, just enough to tear a clean line through rain and smoke. The field vanished and reformed in the same breath.
I came down in front of her.
Close enough that I felt the heat of her skin through soaked cloth. Close enough that my hand brushed her arm as she turned, surprise just beginning to register in her eyes.
“Atlas…”
The fire hit.
There was no sound at first.
Just pressure.
Weight.
Heat so dense it felt solid, like the world itself had decided to strike.
It tore through me all at once, not burning, so much as overwriting, fire packed tight by will and authority. It slammed into my chest and driving the breath clean out of me. Pain exploded white-hot, absolute, racing through bone and nerve faster than thought.
I felt myself lift, felt the storm recoil, felt the bond stretch, strain, scream.
Then the ground came up hard and everything went wrong.
I couldn’t draw breath.
My body didn’t respond when I told it to move. Heat bled into cold, then numbness, sound dropping away until all that remained was the distant roar of the storm and the thunder of my own pulse slowing, slipping.
Above me, the rain kept falling.
Somewhere far away, someone was screaming.
