The drain continues without pause, without mercy, without any regard for the destruction it’s causing to the body that houses the power it wants.
I try to fight. Try to close off the channels through which my magic flows, to build barriers between myself and the ritual’s insatiable hunger. But the binding runs too deep—woven into the fundamental fabric of my bloodline, threaded through generations of Yael witches who never knew their gifts would be weaponized against their descendants.
I can’t stop it.
I can’t?—
My knees hit stone.
I don’t remember the final collapse. One moment, I’m fighting to maintain control over magic that no longer obeys my commands. The next, I’m kneeling in ash that coats everything—the floor, the walls, my hair, my skin, the inside of my lungs with every labored breath.
The ritual pulses above me, vast and terrible andgrowing.
Through the haze of agony, I perceive what’s happening beyond the chamber walls. The framework is activating—not the controlled erasure the Cardinal intended, but a cascade triggered by the instability I’ve introduced. Cities are vanishing at the edges of my awareness. Kharos Spire, the last remnant of its erased population center. The forward strike camps where Vaelrix coordinates what remains of the Ashen Flight’s resistance. Villages and trade routes and refugee shelters I never learned the names of.
I feel each one wink out of existence. Not as pain—there’s no room for additional pain in a body already drowning in it. Asabsence. Holes in the world where life used to be, gaps in the fabric of reality that my bloodline registers with terrible clarity. A village of two hundred people, gone between one breath and the next. A ley-line junction that powered three territories, snuffed like a candle. A trade route that survivors had been using to ferry supplies to safe zones, simply ceasing to exist.
The Reach is expanding.
I’m feeding it.
I try to disconnect. To sever the link that binds my magic to the ritual’s hunger. My hands scrabble at my own arms, nails dragging furrows through ash-coated skin as if I could physically tear out the bloodline that’s killing me. The pain barely registers against the larger agony—surface damage lost in the catastrophe of internal collapse.
My magic pours into the ritual without permission, without control, without any of the precision that defined my Yael training. The more I try to pull back, the harder the framework grips. The more I fight, the faster it drains. My body collapses—not hypothetically, not eventually, but moment by moment, as the ritual converts my life force into fuel for the annihilation I came here to prevent.
“Stop.” My own voice is cracked and barely audible. Addressing what? The ritual? My magic? The fundamental unfairness of a universe that would design a trap this perfectly suited to destroying someone like me?
The ritual doesn’t stop.
My body doesn’t stop.
The cascade doesn’t stop.
