She’d been prepared to strip herself bare, but in doing so, she would’ve burned me out, too.
Fae magic wasn’t simply magic. It was marrow and bone. The structure and soul. The breath. The heartbeat.The self.And she’d almost torn that thread inside me without my consent.
“Finley wasn’t thinking about you when she tried to burn herself out.”Hoshiko’s words cut through the storm brewing in my mind.
My laugh came out hollow. “That’s the problem,” I said, voice hoarse as if I’d spent the past half hour screaming. “Too many times she makes decisions for me without thinking about me. I’m a puppet on her strings. A stupid one at that, constantly falling at her feet.”
“She wasn’t choosingagainstyou, Brenton,”he said, not unkindly but without softening his opinion.“She was choosingfor everyone else. She believed she could either burn Zaicha out or burn herself out. She was trying to stop Zaicha from using her.”
I barked out a bitter sound that was more pain than humor. “When the Elders stripped me of my magic and exiled me, it was as if they ripped out my bones and demanded I crawl. It was like this constant, hollow wrongness that lived inside me. It felt like something vital had been stolen.”
“And yet she was prepared to lose herself for something bigger.”His golden eyes blinked down at me, patient and waiting for me to grasp his words.“She was willing to live in a world, boneless and wrong, for me. For the other dragons.”
I dragged my fingers over my face as guilt scraped like glass against my throat. “And I’m the asshole who left her when she was trying to do right by you.”
“Neither of you was right nor wrong,”he said.“You’re both doing what you can, making impossible decisions in moments that don’t give you time to think.”
The words hung between us while I turned my attention back to the horizon as if it held answers for questions I didn’t know how to ask.
Something inside me shifted. It started like a tremor, a slight pulse along the tether that bound Finley and me. Then the bond convulsed. My very soul quivered beneath the force of it.
I turned, my heart slamming against my ribs, my attention locked on the direction of the pull.
“Something’s wrong,” I said.
“Get on,”Hoshiko said, already preparing to take flight.
I didn’t waste a breath. My feet pounded on the sand, lungs burning and heart suspended somewhere between terror and fury.
Hoshiko barely made it into the air before he lowered us to the square. Shouts, sobs, and the sharp scent of blood held through the thick air.
All I saw was Finley. She knelt in the center of it all. Trembling, her hands barely held over the small, still body of a child. Her magic thrummed around her like wildfire, eating itself alive. Too much, too fast.
I felt it in our bond how the edges frayed, yet pulled sharper and tighter like a noose.
Hoshiko landed us fast and hard, but all I could hear was the thundering of my heart.
Finley wasn’t simply offering her magic but letting it consume her entirely. Her magic burned wild and bright. Brighter than I’d ever felt it. And Willow knelt at her side, her hands fisted against the grass, trying to hold Finley’s magic steady. Trying to hold Finley steady.
“Finley,” I said, but my voice barely cut through the storm of power ripping off her skin.
She didn’t hear me. Or she didn’t care.
Power flooded through our bond as she reached deeper, pulling too much to try to save the child. Her pulse braided with mine, desperate and reckless.
I felt it the exact moment her magic tilted toward sacrifice.
I stumbled at the realization.No. No. No.
My magic stirred in reply, slamming through our bond to stop her. Because Finley was going to give everything she had. Everything she was for this child. If she died, she’d take the weapon that was her magic with her. Leaving Zaicha with nothing. Because if Zaicha didn’t have a vessel as powerful as Finley, she’d lose her way back into the astral realm. She’d lose everything she’d worked for. Even with the magic siphoned into the orb, it wouldn’t be enough.
And Finley was once again trying to save everyone but herself. But me.
The bond screamed.
I staggered, hand clutching my chest as Willow’s voice strained against the crackle of magic.
“I can’t hold it much longer,” Willow whispered, her shoulders sagging.
