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Lady Ashford’s limbs flew wide and she screamed, her body vibrating, shaking, convulsing as the power rebounded within her and could not find its rest. Flames burst to life on her skin and I gasped, flinging myself away from her—but there was no need.
Lady Ashford panicked. Screaming. Her voice growing shrill, then hoarse as she inhaled the flames and smoke of her own flesh.
It was a horrible sight and would have turned my stomach. But as I reached for Voski in the dirt, rolling him aside so he wouldn’t be burned by her, I had to watch. Had to make certain she didn’t survive this—that her torment ended only in her death.
But to my shock, as the woman twitched and jerked, her body bucking so she flopped in the dirt like a suffocating fish—screams began elsewhere, as well.
Voski twitched, groaning, his eyelids fluttering, but I could do nothing but hold onto him while I made certain every last drop of that poison was fed into her.
And somewhere in the vastness around us, something happened.
‘It burns its own path,’ Koa breathed in the link. I didn’t know what she meant, and couldn’t articulate the question, but she sensed it, and showed me instead.
As the Lady Ashford was consumed by the power she’d sought so ambitiously, it couldn’t be satisfied. It sought to land in a place where it could settle in darkness and be embraced by its home. But, given in love, it recoiled from that place… and as it burned her to ash, it became a weapon.
When Voski’s mother succumbed, the power wasn’t diminished. It spewed out of her, roaring, flaming, seeking whom it could devour, by following the path of the weaves she’d used on others, crackling down those residual links that Voski had once described. The woven lines of magik that lingered after some spells were cast.
It started on some of the nearby men, first. Screams and shouts rose in the clearing and surrounding trees, and Koa showed me what the dragons could see.
That web Ava had spent decades spinning was consuming itself.
The schemes, the plots, the people she’d cursed, anyone she’d increased—anyone she’d controlled with the power—it sought them, crackling like unspent electricity through water. And because it fed on darkness, but fled the good that sent it, it couldn’t find anywhere safe to rest.
Power, like lightning crackling through the branches of a struck tree, sizzled along those webs from one man to the next, following every magical bond and pathway—until it left the woods around us and reached for others, farther away. A burning spider web, slowly consuming everything it was once tied to, then turning to bolts that crackled along the path of its mindless search for safety to alight in the next dark soul, and consume once more.
Our dragons raised their heads and called, singing grief and triumph in the same voice as a despicable web of evil and ill intent screamed from one body to the next, then tore on, leaving some dead, others wounded… All of them lessened.
I don’t know how much Koa showed me, and how much was the power itself, bleeding out to everyone it had touched. But as I slumped, weak and shaking, clinging to Voski, the Lady Ashford shrieked and writhed. And in the moments her movements slowed, my mate heaved upright, gasping, trembling—and utterly unwilling to leave me near her.
Still weak and shaking, he dragged me farther away, both of us trembling as we watched it cauterize the wound that she had been, a blight on this land for decades—and her ancestors for centuries.
When she finally stopped breathing, her flesh blackened, then crisped. Her body slumped and her eyes glazed, then turned smoky. Still, we watched, stunned, as the few men and women in the clearing who’d survived that torched web to walk away, staggered to their feet in those awful robes.
Bereft. Insane. Babbling. Or simply stupefied… Only the ones still living stumbled away, leaving the rest, souls seared, and as lifeless as the power they sought.
Smoke made a haze in the air, the acrid scent of burned flesh and hair wrinkling my nose.
Voski helped me to my feet. Still supporting my weight, he blinked and tried to clear his own head, then raised his voice to speak to the remaining, dumbfounded Cruors.
“You are defeated!” he shouted hoarsely.
A few moans rose, but the dragons raised their roars, and those that could move, fled on weak legs.
Yet, as we limped away, weak and injured ourselves, our hearts sang along with the dragons.
The spider was dead, and her web utterly broken.
The Ticking Clock
~ VOSKI ~
It was like walking out of a dream. My head spun. My skin hummed, sensitized, as if burned. Even the slightest touch would sting. But all around us, they fell. One by one, dead, dying. The Cruors had taken a mortal blow, because my magnificent mate’s love was greater than my mother’s hatred.
I’d felt so weak when I gave the power away to Grace, for a moment I was afraid I’d killed myself. That my heart would stop. But as my mother writhed under its power, strength slowly seeped back to my limbs. I’d pulled Grace away from her, still uncertain if this would actually end her.
It did.
The witch was dead.
