I square my shoulders, lift the chalk, and kneel a little closer to Jules, ready to count the next contraction, ready to do what I can while the man I’m dangerously close to loving fights to keep all of this from falling apart.
“Alright,” I tell Jules, forcing a smile. “Let’s meet this baby and give the SoulTakers one more reason to regret ever touching our worlds.”
She grins through a grimace. “Now that’s the kind of fairytale ending I can get behind.”
Chapter 20
Dagan
Stone’s Edge
Stone’s Edge should be quiet by now.
Instead, the village hums with the raw, broken noise that comes after battle—low moans, distant sobbing, the scrape of boots over shattered stone.
Smoke stings my throat. The air tastes of ash and old blood.
The earth here is wrong.
Too loose.
Too hollow.
Like it’s been scooped out from the inside.
And at the center of it all lies Masielle.
Once, she was a Dreamwright of renown—silver hair braided with lumen-thread, hands stained with ink and star fire, laugh like a bell over stone.
She retired to Stone’s Edge to die surrounded by the cliffs she loved.
Idris did not grant her that mercy.
She sits propped against a cracked wall now, breathing.
Heart beating. Flesh alive.
But her eyes… devoid of life.
They are completely empty.
Not even a flicker of recognition as I kneel in front of her.
“She was drained by the time we arrived,” Kael murmurs behind me, voice hoarse. “We felt it—a backlash of power. But he was already inside her mind.”
Thorne stands a few paces away, arms folded tight across his broad chest, flames weaving slow and sickly around his fingers.
He watches Masielle like he’s daring her to move, daring Idris to still be here so he can burn something he can actually hit.
“He hollowed her out,” I say quietly.
It’s not a guess.
I feel it, too.
The well of magic inside her—the place where ideas once gathered and spun into shape—is a gaping void.
A tunnel bored straight through her soul and out into the dark.
