ONE
TANITH
The ritual node screams.
I press my palms against the anchor stone and push.
Not a sound anyone else can hear—this is the shriek of dying magic, the high keen of spellwork unraveling faster than the ground can hold it. I feel it in my teeth, in the old sigil scars along my ribs. The Termination bloodline reads endings like other witches read auras, and this ending is going to be catastrophic.
My magic surges outward, not to create or counter, but to end. The ritual framework resists for one agonizing heartbeat—then collapses. No residue left behind for the ash to feed on.
The ground stops screaming.
I pull my hands back and wipe them on my travel-worn leggings, leaving dark smears against the leather. Blood. Mine. The anchor stone took its toll, as these things always do.
Around me, the Ashen Reach stretches in every direction—a vast nothing where cities and forests once stood. The air tastes metallic. Wrong. Magic doesn’t work right here; spells misfire or simply die before they finish forming. Even sound travels strangely, muted and flat, as if the atmosphere itself has forgotten how to carry it properly.
Why am I still here?
I stand at the center of a ritual site that the Ash Choir almost completed, surrounded by the fading echoes of their work. Three hours of careful dismantling. Three hours of pushing my bloodline magic harder than I should.
My hands shake. I ignore them.
The ash storm rolling in from the west doesn’t care about my exhaustion. It moves against the wind—that’s the first warning sign. Ash storms in the Reach follow their own logic, tracking ley-line scars and magical residue like predators following blood trails. I’ve been working active magic for hours.
I’ve made myself a beacon.
“Fuck.”
I grab my pack and start moving north, toward the collapsed trade road that should—emphasis onshould—lead to safer territory. The terrain here shifts constantly. Maps become obsolete within weeks. What was passable yesterday might be impassable today, or might not exist at all.
The Reach doesn’t kill you with violence. It kills you with erasure. You walk into a dead zone and simply… stop.
I’ve seen it happen. Watched a merchant caravan cross what looked like solid ground, only to watch them wink out of existence mid-stride. No screams. No bodies. Just an absence where people had been.
The ash storm gains on me. Its leading edge carries the whisper of ritual magic—not the node I collapsed, but a different resonance. Alive. Hunting.
The Ash Choir.
I break into a run.
The ground hollows beneath my feet without warning. I throw myself sideways, rolling clear of a patch of terrain that simply ceases to be. The void left behind is geometric, perfect—a rectangle of nothing where dirt and stone existed a moment ago.These are the scars the Reach leaves. Not craters. Not damage. Spaces where existence has been revoked.
I scramble upright and keep moving.
The storm hits harder, ash coating my hair, my clothes, the exposed skin of my hands and face. It burns where it touches—not with heat, but with wrongness. My protective wards flicker and strain. They weren’t designed for this. No ward was designed for magic that wants to unmake you.
Figures emerge from the ash.
Their faces blur with erasure magic, features sliding away like water off glass. This is a signature of the Ash Choir—they sacrifice pieces of themselves to power their work. Memory. Identity. The markers that make them human. They believe this is liberation. They believe nonexistence is mercy.
I believe they’re fucking insane.
“Yael witch.” The voice comes from all of them at once, a chorus of damaged throats speaking in unsettling harmony. “The Cardinal wants you alive.”
The Cardinal. The leader of the Ash Choir, the architect of the annihilation theology that’s been spreading through the Reach like a disease. I’ve heard stories. Whispers from survivors who shouldn’t have survived, fragments of information gathered during months of tracking Choir activity through dead zones. A figure whose face no one can remember, whose gender shifts in recollection, whose very existence seems to blur at the edges.
I’ve never seen them. No one has, not clearly. But their name carries weight, and that weight presses against my wards now like a physical force.
