Chapter 35 #5
Not metal.
Not boots.
Magic.
Something invisible snapped past my cheek, close enough to sting like a slap, and I flinched hard, stumbling in the snow. The impact hit behind me and the ground erupted, a fist-sized crater blasted into the frost as if the earth itself had been punched.
I didn’t look back again.
I didn’t need to.
That wasn’t an arrow.
That was a force strike.
It was aetherweaving.
Another strike came. It slammed into my shoulder like I’d been hit by a battering ram made of air.
Pain burst, and I went down to one knee, snow swallowing my leg.
My chain clinked uselessly behind my back, and for a humiliating second all I could think was this is it, this is where I die, face down in no man’s land like a discarded thing no one bothered to bury.
Not poetic.
Not fair.
Not remembered.
Rage caught fire in my throat.
My magic answered like it had been starving for permission.
Ice surged up from the ground in front of me, jagged and sudden, a rough wall that exploded out of the snow with no finesse and no grace.
It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t controlled.
It was desperation made solid. The next telekinetic strike hit it dead-on, and the wall shattered, chunks of ice flying outward like shrapnel, but it bought me a heartbeat. Just one.
That was all I needed.
Run, Elara.
Aeliana’s voice was weak, but there.
I scrambled up again, feet sliding, body screaming, and ran harder.
My breath tore in and out of me in ragged bursts that burned my throat raw.
Every swing of my arms was wrong because my hands were bound, my shoulders strained, my balance distorted, and still I ran because it was the only thing left that belonged to me.
Another force hit the snow beside my foot, closer, precise, as if they were herding me like prey.
I threw ice again, not a wall this time but a low, spreading ridge that rose in a crooked line behind me, a stumbling barrier meant to trip, slow, disrupt.
It came from the ground like a thought I didn’t have time to form.
I felt the drain immediately. My vision tunneled for a second.
My body hated me for demanding this from it when it barely had enough strength to keep blood warm.
But I kept running.
A shout carried over the wind from the wall. Too distant to make out cleanly, but I caught pieces of it, harsh and urgent, the sound of men trying to convince themselves they were in control.
“Do not let her reach?—”
“Bring her down!”
“Hold her?—”
The word traitor floated again, and it almost made me laugh because it was such a convenient lie.
A servant becomes a traitor the moment she refuses to die quietly.
That was the rule. That was the entire religion of this kingdom.
Obedience was holiness. Defiance was sin. And death was always the correction.
I was so tired of being corrected.
The next strike came like a hand closing around my ribs.
The air compressed.
My chest seized.
I choked, stumbling, and the snow rose to meet me again, cold swallowing my knees, my thighs, my breath. I fought for air, gagging on panic, because this one wasn’t just a shove. This one was restraint. Like someone had wrapped invisible fingers around me and decided I was finished.
I couldn’t get my arms free.
I couldn’t turn.
I couldn’t even scream properly because my lungs were too tight, my body too compromised, my strength too thin.
My vision blurred.
And in that blur, I saw the wall in the distance, the platform atop it crowded with figures, and I saw movement along the battlements that did not look like victory.
It looked like fear.
It looked like men scanning the sky.
It looked like the preparation of people who had finally realized the monster was real.
The hold around my chest tightened again, and I felt myself lift slightly from the snow, dragged backward an inch like I was being reeled in.
I let my eyes close for one breath.
Not surrender.
Focus.
Because I had nothing left but one ugly trick.
I reached for the cold under the snow, for the ice that lived deeper, for the buried frost that had been here long before castles and queens and husbands who promised forever. The cold did not care about my grief. It did not care about betrayal. It did not care about love.
It only answered power.
The ice surged up around my ankles, climbing like shackles, then snapping outward in a violent bloom.
The hold faltered for half a heartbeat, disrupted by the sudden change in mass and resistance, and I used that crack like a blade through a seam.
I wrenched forward, ripping myself free, and staggered into a run again.
My body felt like it was breaking apart as I moved.
But I was moving.
And then the heat hit my back.
Not warmth.
Not mercy.
Heat so sudden it stole the cold from my lungs and replaced it with shock. The snow beneath my feet hissed. The air itself changed texture, as if the world had inhaled fire.
I looked up.
And the sky darkened under the shadow of wings.