Still fighting. Still burning his way through endless waves of soldiers with fury that shakes the chamber’s ancient stones. His roar of rage when he sees what’s happening to me—when he understands what the Blood Regent is doing—makes stalactites crack and fall from the ceiling like crystallized tears. Fire erupts with intensity that should be impossible, the dragon fully unleashed, caring nothing for control, caring only for reaching me.
Too far.
Too slow.
The Blood Regent has calculated every variable, anticipated every response. By the time Izan reaches us, the ritual will be complete. I’ll be dead, my bloodline consumed, and an entire city will be bound to the will of a man who sees people as resources to be exploited.
The same way he sees me.
The thought surfaces through the fog of fading consciousness. My whole life, powerful people have looked at my blood and seen a tool. A resource. A thing to be used and discarded when its purpose was served.
I made different decisions. Stayed when I could have run. Wanted a dragon who terrifies me in ways that have nothing to do with his violence—because he makes me want things I never thought I could have.
Izan.
His name surfaces in my fracturing mind, and with it comes a clarity that cuts through the Blood Regent’s drain.
I don’t want to die without telling him what he’s become to me.
The thought is absurd. Ridiculous. I’m bleeding out my power into a ritual that will enslave thousands, and my dying concern is that I never told a dragon that I?—
That I?—
The word won’t form. Even now, even dying, I can’t quite name the thing that’s grown between us since that first interrogation in the Ash Cells.
But I feel it. Burning in my chest even as my magic drains away. A fire that has nothing to do with Vireth power or Izan’s volcanic nature. A choice I keep making, over and over, even when making it costs me everything.
I reach for that fire.
Not with magic. Not with technique. With pure, desperate will—the same will that kept me alive through years of captivity, that let me stand on a balcony and tell a dragon I refused to be owned, that made me walk into this trap knowing I might not walk out.
The Blood Regent’s working stutters.
“What are you—” For the first time, uncertainty fractures his clinical composure.
I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t know if it will save me or accelerate my destruction. But it’s mine. My choice. My will. My refusal to be a tool for anyone, even in death.
The cistern responds.
Ancient power floods through channels I didn’t know existed. The aether residue I used against Threx awakens on a scale I couldn’t have imagined, recognizing Vireth blood—recognizing a witch who works with ash and endings—and offering an alliance I never requested.
The ritual altar cracks.
Not from my attack. From the cistern itself, ancient infrastructure rejecting the Blood Regent’s workings the way a body rejects a foreign organ. Power meant to enslave a city feedsback through his carefully constructed channels, and the Blood Regent releases me with a snarl of fury as his ritual begins to collapse around him.
I fall.
The stone rushes up to meet me. Cold. Ancient. Indifferent to the magic tearing itself apart above my broken body.
Through dimming vision, I see the Blood Regent retreat into shadows, abandoning his altar, abandoning his Cardinals, abandoning everything he’s built in order to escape the backlash of power he can no longer control. He moves with purpose, not panic—toward a passage carved fresh into the cistern’s ancient wall. A prepared exit. A contingency. He always had somewhere else to go. Stalactites crash down around me. The ceiling buckles. The cistern that stood for millennia begins to collapse.
Izan.
His name surfaces one more time.
I still feel him. Not through magic—my magic is gone, drained or burned or simply absent in ways I can’t understand. But I can feel him fighting toward me, burning through rubble and soldiers and his own endless waves of enemies with a desperation that matches the feeling dying in my chest.
He’s coming.
