The Herald in front of me presses its advantage. Another strike. Another. I dodge, deflect with projected truth, buy myself seconds that cost minutes of my lifespan.
I’m not going to survive this.
The realization arrives without softening, without doubt. The Auric Veil doesn’t lie, especially not to its bearer. I read my own pattern, my own trajectory, and the math is unforgiving: too many wounds, too much cost, not enough time remaining.
My bloodline is killing me faster than the Herald ever could.
Tyr destroyshis opponent with a sound like shattering glaciers.
The Herald comes apart under his assault—crown-forged armor cracking, divine ice exploding outward in razor shards. His power refuses to let it reform, and I see the Herald’s magic unraveling, dissipating, dying.
He turns toward me. Toward the remaining Herald.
I see the moment he registers my condition—the blood on my arm, the way I’m moving slower, the truth written in how my body carries itself. His pupils dilate. His control fractures visibly, gold flooding through irises that had dimmed.
“ZEPHYRA.”
The word tears from his throat with a quality I’ve never heard. Raw. Desperate.
The Herald between us recognizes the shift. Recognizes the new threat. And it does the one thing I didn’t anticipate:
It stops trying to kill me.
It turns its blade and drives it directly through my abdomen.
TWENTY
ZEPHYRA
There’s a moment—between impact and understanding—when the body doesn’t register what’s happened. Nerves haven’t caught up. Pain is still traveling. The brain knows, but the flesh doesn’t.
I look down at the blade emerging from my stomach. Divine ice, glowing with divine light, the cold radiating through me in waves that have nothing to do with temperature. The Herald has impaled me cleanly—the blade entering through my lower back and exiting through my abdomen. Professional. Efficient.
Well done. Clean kill.
The Herald releases the hilt. Steps back.
“THE LEVERAGE IS SECURED.”
Oh, I think with that same strange detachment.That’s why it stopped trying to kill me outright. Dying is faster. This way, I suffer first.
The Arbiter doesn’t want my death. It wants my death to break Tyr.
Pain arrives.
It’s not the impalement that breaks me—it’s the aging. The divine ice blade does what it’s designed to do: accelerates mortality catastrophically. I feel time collapsing inside me,years compressing into seconds, my already-shortened lifespan shredding like paper in a hurricane.
The sensation is indescribable. Not pain exactly—pain is physical, immediate, localized. This is… erasure. I can feel pieces of my future disappearing. Moments I’ll never experience. Choices I’ll never make. The life I might have lived, burning away before I can live it.
My knees hit stone. When did I start falling?
The Auric Veil shows me everything with pitiless accuracy. Every second of my remaining life burning away. The cost of my bloodline, amplified a thousandfold by divine assault. I was supposed to live another forty years, maybe fifty if I was careful about how I used my power. Time enough to see what the world became after the gods lost their enforcer. Time enough to know whether the partnership with Tyr evolved into…
Into what? I don’t know. Will never know, now.
Now I have minutes. Maybe less.
Tyr roars—a sound that’s more dragon than human, more primal than language. Through fading sight, I see him collide with the Herald. See violence that transcends technique, that becomes pure expression of emotion.
