Blood flows from a gash across my ribs—the blade got through my guard, and I interrupted the cut too late. A deeper wound in my thigh makes each step agony, the muscle torn and already seizing. My left shoulder hangs wrong—not dislocated, but damage to the joint, tendons shredded by a strike I barely deflected.
The Herald hasn’t slowed at all. Hasn’t taken a single wound. It fights with mechanical precision, every attack perfect, every defense absolute.
I keep fighting.
Not because I think I can win. Not because retreat is an option—exit routes sealed the moment combat began, stone grinding closed behind us like the Gate itself has teeth. I heard them shut: three exits, three sounds of grinding stone, three paths to survival removed in the space of a heartbeat.
I keep fighting because Zephyra is ten feet behind me, and the only path to her runs through my body.
The dragon doesn’t need to push me to protect her. We’re aligned. Dragon and man, instinct and will, all of it focused on a single imperative: keep her alive.
“YOU BLEED.” The Arbiter’s voice sounds almost curious through the Herald’s form. “THE ERROR CAN BE DAMAGED.”
“Everyone can be damaged.”
“NOT CORRECTED. DAMAGED.” A pause, the Herald’s head tilting as if receiving instruction from far away. “INTERESTING.”
The blade comes faster. A flurry of strikes that I catch, deflect, dodge, absorb—and one that I don’t. The edge bites into my forearm, slicing through leather and skin, and my power surges—interrupting the cut before it can reach bone. Before the divine ice can work its aging magic on my flesh.
Still hurts. Still bleeds. Still drops me to one knee as my body tries to process damage that should have killed me.
Get up. Get up. She’s?—
“PERHAPS DESTRUCTION IS INEFFICIENT.”
The Herald’s head swivels. Away from me. Toward her.
No.
“THE AURIC VEIL WITCH.”
“No.”
“No.”
My voice comes out wrong. Lower. Darker. Layered with a resonance that vibrates through the frozen air like a struck bell—the dragon’s voice bleeding through my human throat.
The Herald tilts its head again, that almost-curious gesture. “THE ERROR EXPERIENCES ATTACHMENT. UNEXPECTED. EXPLOITABLE.”
It turns fully toward Zephyra.
Something snaps inside me. Not control—I still have that, barely, the thinnest thread of restraint keeping me from losing myself entirely. Something deeper. Something that’s been building since Caelreth, since I first caught her scent and my dragon woke with recognition I didn’t want.
The fear hits like a physical blow.
Not fear for myself. I’ve faced death a hundred times and never flinched. Death is an old companion, a presence I’ve grown comfortable with across lifetimes of violence and survival.
But the thought of the Herald reaching her, touching her, breaking her?—
The thought of her mortality made manifest, her years burning away under divine ice, the light fading from her gaze?—
My dragon screams inside me. Rage and terror and desperate need, all of it tangled into a sound that has no voice but shakes my bones.
EIGHTEEN
TYR
Zephyra doesn’t run.
