TWENTY-EIGHT
TANITH
The Cardinal’s laughter reaches me through the chaos.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? The mathematics of self-destruction.” Their voice drifts from a direction I can no longer identify, casual despite the battle they must be fighting against Arax. “Your bloodline was always going to end here. Every Yael witch who ever lived has been walking toward this moment—the ultimate expression of Termination, applied to Termination itself.”
I try to respond. Form words. Offer defiance or rage or any of the emotions that should attend my murder.
My mouth produces only blood.
“You could’ve lived, you know. If you had stayed away. If you had hidden in whatever corner of the Reach you’d claimed for yourself and refused to engage with the work I’m doing.” A pause, thoughtful. “But your kind never can, can they? The Yael bloodline doesn’t permit cowardice. It drives its carriers toward endings, compels them to seek the things that must be terminated. You didn’t come here because you chose to. You came here because you couldn’t have chosen otherwise.”
Wrong.
The denial burns through me with intensity that briefly overwhelms the pain.
But the words stay locked behind lips that no longer obey, thoughts that fragment under the weight of damage I can’t repair. The Cardinal doesn’t hear my defiance. Doesn’t know that their philosophy of predetermined endings has missed the most important truth of my existence:
I chose. Every step of the way, I chose.
And if I could choose again, I would make the same decisions.
“Your dragon can’t save you. His domain can erase what exists, but it can’t restore what’s being consumed. He will watch you die, and then he will watch the Reach swallow everything he has ever claimed to protect.” A pause, weighted with satisfaction. “This is kindness, you understand. This is liberation from the burden of existing. You should thank me.”
But even defiance requires strength I no longer possess. The words exist only as intention, as the ghost of resistance that my body can no longer manifest.
Somewhere in the distance,Arax is still fighting.
I hear his domain flare—the distinctive absence of sound that accompanies Oblivion magic, the sudden void where existence used to be. He’s powerful. More powerful than any dragon I’ve encountered in three years of running through the Reach. The Cardinal’s philosophy has no defense against what he represents.
But he’s fighting the wrong battle.
The Cardinal is a symptom. The ritual is the disease. And I’m the vector through which that disease is spreading, myTermination magic feeding the very annihilation I swore to prevent.
Stop.
The thought is a plea, directed at my own body, my own power, the inheritance that has defined my life since before I understood what it meant to carry the Yael bloodline.
My magic doesn’t stop.
The drain intensifies instead, as if responding to my desperation with increased hunger. I feel systems inside me beginning to shut down—organs that have survived three years of constant stress giving way under the assault of magic that no longer belongs to me. Kidneys struggling to filter blood that carries toxic levels of magical residue. Liver overwhelmed by the metabolic demands of channeling power at this scale. Heart laboring against pressure that increases with every pulse of the ritual above me.
This is how I die.
Not in battle, not in sacrifice, not in any of the ways I imagined during the long nights when death seemed inevitable. I die as fuel. As a resource. As the tool that finally completes the annihilation the Cardinal has been building toward since before I was born.
Arax.
His name surfaces through the fragmenting wreckage of my thoughts, bright and clear and terrible.
The chamber begins to collapse.
Structural damage cascades outward from the ritual’s increasingly unstable core—pillars splitting, walls shifting, the impossible architecture of the Sanctum beginning to give wayas the power that sustained it is redirected into the framework I’m feeding. The destruction creates a pocket of relative stability around my dying body, the chaos paradoxically preserving this small space while annihilating everything beyond.
Ash falls like snow. Gray particles coating my skin, filling my mouth, layering over the blood that’s begun to seep from my nose and ears. The pressure inside my skull is immense—my brain rebelling against the magical drain, neurons firing in patterns that produce colors and sounds that don’t exist.
I don’t want to die.
