“Finn.” Her voice comes out small. Wrong. “You’re dead. I watched you?—”
“Drown?” The thing laughs, and the sound fills the hall with cold. “You watched me drown, love. While you swam for the surface. While you chose yourself, like you choose yourself every time.”
I step forward, putting more of my body between them. “This isn’t your partner, Aviora. It’s a puppet—Oreth’s using him to break you.”
“Is he?” The Finn-thing tilts its head, and the gesture is so human it makes my skin crawl. “Or did Oreth just find what the sea already held? Years on the bottom. Years of waiting. Hoping you’d come find me. Hoping you’d at least try.”
“I couldn’t—” She’s moving forward now, pushing past my arm. “The ship was going down. There was no time?—”
“There’s time. For the things that matter.” The monster’s smile widens. “But I didn’t matter, did I? Not enough. Not as much as survival.”
I grab Aviora’s arm, yanking her back. She fights me. Not hard. Not enough.
“Listen to me.” I keep my voice low. Steady. “Whatever he was, he isn’t that anymore. The curse has him. Everything he’s saying is designed to hurt you. To make you vulnerable.”
“I know what he is.” Tears stream down her face now, cutting tracks through the blood on her cheek. “But that doesn’t make him wrong.”
The Finn-thing moves closer. Guards try to intercept it, and it throws them aside like dolls—casual strength, horrifying ease. Its attention never leaves Aviora.
“Oreth found me in the deep.” Its voice drops to something almost intimate. “All those years on the bottom, waiting. He gave me purpose. Gave me a reason to keep holding on.” The smile turns sharp. “You. Finding you. Making you understand what it feels like to be abandoned.”
“I didn’t abandon you.” The words tear out of her. “The ship was going down. I couldn’t reach you. I tried?—”
“You didn’t try. You decided.” The thing reaches toward her, one rotting hand extended. “You decided you were worth more.”
I attack before it can touch her.
My blade catches the thing in the shoulder, biting deep into flesh that should be too solid to cut. It screams—a sound that shakes dust from the rafters—and turns on me with speed I can barely track. Claws rake my armor, finding gaps, opening lines of fire across my chest.
I don’t stop. Can’t stop. If I give ground, it reaches Aviora, and whatever it wants from her won’t end in survival.
We trade blows across the Great Hall, the thing’s unnatural strength matched against my decades of training. It’s faster than me. Stronger. But it fights with hunger, not skill—every attack aimed at getting past me, getting to her.
That gives me an advantage. It’s not trying to kill me. It’s trying to move through me.
I use that. Bait strikes. I know it will try to bypass. Position myself to force its attacks into angles where I can deflect rather than absorb. My blade finds flesh again and again—shoulder, ribs, the meat of its thigh—and each wound slows it slightly.
But it doesn’t stop. The wounds don’t bleed. And I’m tiring.
“Zoric!” Thorne’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Down!”
I drop without thinking. Something whistles over my head—a throwing axe, buried to the haft in the Finn-thing’s face. It staggers back, hands clawing at the blade lodged in its skull, and for a moment, I think it’s over.
Then it pulls the axe free.
The wound closes as I watch, flesh knitting over bone with wet sounds that make my stomach turn. The thing smiles again, broader now, pleased by our futile resistance.
“You can’t kill what’s already dead, Captain.” It drops the axe. Steps forward. “But I can kill you. And when you’re gone, when she has no one left to hide behind?—”
“She’s not hiding.”
Aviora’s voice comes from my left. I turn—and she’s there, standing in front of a brazier, her hand wrapped around one ofthe iron poles we use to stoke the flames. Ward fire blazes at its tip, blue and hungry.
“You want me, Finn?” Her voice is steady now. Cold. The tears have dried, replaced by something harder. “Try and catch me.”
The thing lunges. Aviora moves.
She’s fast—faster than I expected, faster than the creature anticipated. The blazing pole catches it across the chest, and the ward fire does what our blades couldn’t. The monster screams as blue flame eats into its flesh, consuming the curse that animates it. It thrashes, trying to extinguish itself, but Aviora doesn’t let up. She follows it across the hall, driving the fire deeper, her face set in an expression I’ve never seen—grief and rage and grim resolve.
