You’re still here, I said. After yesterday… When Raven had screamed and bled and broken open under the weight of the master’s commands.
Aurora handed Lucas one of the cups. Her hands shook slightly. I’m staying.
Your parents… I started.
Can wait. Her amber eyes held steel. Raven needs us. I’m not leaving again.
I nodded, letting her have that choice. Then I turned to Raven and said, I should let you rest.
She nodded, relief evident.
Lucas walked me to the door. She’s alive, he said quietly.
I know.
Phillips says she might improve. Or this could be it.
I didn’t answer. Because tomorrow would bring more Ravens. More wards full of people we didn’t have enough magic to fix.
Keane’s room at the medical center was dark when I passed.
I slipped inside quietly. He didn’t stir—deeply unconscious, his body forcing the rest his mind would never choose.
His tablet sat on the bedside table. I picked it up, scrolling through the last entries before his collapse. I couldn’t parse the mathematical notation, something about dimensional lattice and termination boundaries. The equations felt important even if I didn’t understand them, like the framework for a solution neither of us could see yet.
I set the tablet back down carefully and left him to the healing.
A while later, I found myself beneath the auditorium in the wellspring chamber.
Stone walls. Old magic. Water that remembered what it meant to be part of something older than our crisis.
I sat at the pool’s edge with Scout curled in my lap. My fingers trailed through the wellspring and it stirred at my touch.
Tired, I offered. Spent. Hollow around the edges.
It understood.
And then it showed me something—not vision, not voice, just sudden understanding, like the moment you see a shape you didn’t know you were building.
I could end it.
I could use the network. Wickem’s wellspring had granted me access. My necromancy could spread through the latticework like dye in water to override the master’s design, collapse corrupted nodes, cut the pattern at its joints, and force every connection to burn clean.
No solstice. No cascade. The world would survive.
The cost: thousands of deaths. Wellsprings damaged beyond repair. Magic that might never regrow.
But the pattern would end.
I sat with the knowledge like a weight in my chest. It didn’t feel noble. It didn’t feel wrong.
It felt efficient. The solution fit.
I saw my father’s words in the margins of his old journal. Warnings, not sermons. Questions, not commands.
Power offered is always seduction first. Make sure you understand what it’s offering to replace.
He hadn’t written about domination like it was evil. He wrote about it like it was easy. Too easy. And I understood that now.
