“The Cardinal can eat ash.”
I pull Termination from my bloodline like drawing a blade. The power floods through me—cold, final, absolute. My eyes darken; I feel the color drain from them as I invoke my domain. Storm-gray to charcoal in a heartbeat.
One lunges. I end the curse he’s carrying mid-cast, watch his spell framework collapse into nothing. No residue. No echo.
More pour from the storm. Too many. I can end their magic, but their bodies keep coming, and I’m one woman who’s already spent hours dismantling a ritual node.
“End her wards,” one of them chants. “End her protections. The Cardinal needs the bloodline intact.”
They want me alive.
I pivot and sprint for a collapsed structure I spotted during my approach—some kind of shelter half-eaten by erasure, walls ending mid-brick, but enough cover to force them into a chokepoint. If I can?—
The ground hollows again.
This time I don’t clear it. My foot punches through terrain that was solid a heartbeat ago, and I go down hard, ankle wrenching, pack flying. The void beneath spreads lazily, reaching for more of me.
I claw at stable ground, drag myself clear. Blood runs from my palms where the edge of existence scraped skin away. The pain is distant, secondary to the calculation running through my head: I can’t outrun them. I can’t outlast them. I can end their magic but not their numbers.
The Yael bloodline survives by being smarter than whatever is hunting us.
I haven’t been smart. I’ve been necessary, staying to collapse that node when I should have let it complete and fled to safety. But there were refugees sheltering in those ruins—three families who thought the crumbling buildings might offer protection from ash storms. If I hadn’t ended the node, the completed ritual would have unmade a half-mile radius.
Those families are gone now. Fled north while I worked. I bought them time.
This is what it costs.
They close around me in a loose ring, staying outside Termination range. They’ve learned. They know what my bloodline can do, and they’re careful to let their wards absorb the brunt of my power before they close for physical capture.
“The Cardinal says you’re special.” The speaker’s face shifts, features sliding in and out of focus. Female, maybe. Male. Neither. The erasure makes it impossible to tell. “The Cardinal says your magic is the key.”
“The key to what?”
“The great ending.”
“My magic doesn’t work the way you think it does.”
“We’ll see.”
They advance. Ash coats their robes, white fabric turned gray with accumulated wrongness. Their hands extend—not to grab, but to channel. Spellwork building.
I prepare to terminate whatever they cast, even knowing it’ll cost me. The sigil scars along my forearms start to burn in anticipation.
Then the world goes quiet.
Not the muted silence of the Reach—this is absolute stillness, the kind that precedes endings on a scale I can feel in my marrow. My blood knows another ending-touched creature when it encounters one.
The closest simply… ceases.
No scream. No collapse. One moment they exist, the next they don’t. The erasure is cleaner than anything I’ve seen from the Choir’s rituals. Surgical. A perfect void carved in the shape of a person.
Another follows. Then another.
I can’t see what’s killing them. The ash storm swirls too thick, visibility reduced to arm’s length in any direction. But I feel it—power moving through the corrupted air with predatory precision, erasing threats before they can react.
This isn’t my magic.
This is Oblivion.
