Hurstinal lies in a widening pool of blood.
No one moves. No one speaks. The air itself feels drawn tight, held in place by something unseen.
Then his body begins to rise. It does not happen all at once. The movement begins deep within him, a slow pull upward that travels through muscle and bone in a way that does not follow breath or pain. His torso lifts first, resisting the damage done to it, dragging itself upward with a persistence that feels wrong, and his head lags slightly before correcting, tilting and then aligning with a stiffness that does not belong to anything living.
Uncle Uralish exhales under his breath, the words slipping out before he can stop them. “A fucking deathmage.”
As if on cue, Hurstinal sits upright.
His eyes open, and they are wrong. Too clear, too aware for what has just happened to him.
His eyes meet mine. “I was simply here to congratulate you on the twins,” he says, and the words carry something beneath them.
“A secret,” he continues, almost amused, “you have managed to keep even from those closest to you…your healer…your uncle…and the Queen Regent herself.”
A cold line moves down my spine, my body reacting before my mind catches up. He should not know about the twins. My fingers tighten around Colsar’s hand without thought, grounding myself as the realization presses in from every side.
Hyverin said nothing.
The question does not leave me once it takes hold, circling back on itself with a persistence that feels too precise to ignore.
How would he know?
There is no surge of panic, only a tightening of focus as everything else in the room recedes, pressed outward to make space for the thought as it sharpens. My fingers close more firmly around Colsar’s hand, the contact grounding as I follow the line of it without resistance.
Outside of Hyverin, there should have been only two people who knew about the twins: Aunt Jularin and myself. I remain still, letting the room continue as it is, voices rising and falling,movement shifting at the edges, the low current of unrest carrying on without interruption, while my attention moves elsewhere entirely.
I reach for my intunar without thinking. Venya’s fear comes through first, uneven and spilling over itself, too loud to miss. Uralish holds himself in check, his focus fixed on what stands in front of us, refusing to look beyond it. Syle draws inward, contained and controlled, his attention narrowed exactly where it needs to be.
Then I find Jularin. There is no grief in her, no fracture in the calm she presents, nothing that reflects what has just taken place before us. What reaches me instead is something quieter, held close but unmistakable once I touch it.
Disappointment. It rests beneath her composure, contained and steady, as though something anticipated has failed to unfold as expected.
I lift my eyes to her.
She is already looking at me. Her expression has not changed. The softness remains, the same gentle smile she has worn from the beginning, the same quiet warmth that once made this place feel less isolating.
Now it reads differently. The word returns, insistent: twins. And she was the one who told me that Alarnan royals can weaken the wards. From experience, perhaps.
My fingers tremble as I remember what she told me just months ago."Sometimes it is the presence of outsiders that ignites the change that is necessary.”
The pieces align too cleanly to ignore.
I smile back at her kindly, determined to still play this game until the bitter end. The moment does not linger. Whatever passes between us folds back into the room, swallowed by the tension that has not eased, the air still thick with what stands before us.
Hurstinal turns his head toward Venya, who has gone pale, her face draining of everything it once held. “No need to cry, mother. The deathmage using this body has far more purpose than I ever did.”
Enovar tears free from Syle's body without hesitation, his sword already in his hand as he steps forward and drives it through Hurstinal’s chest with force.
It does nothing.
Hurstinal’s expression lifts into something empty and wrong, and he reaches down to grasp the blade and pull it free from his own body with a slow, controlled motion before turning back toward me.
He begins to walk.
Each step lands with a certainty that does not belong to him.
Colsar shifts again.
