Chapter 37 Sebastian
Sebastian
I didn’t remember moving. I didn’t remember deciding.
One moment, I was tearing through bodies, shadows screaming with me as the battlefield collapsed into chaos around us. The next, I was on my knees in the dirt, pulling her from Adar’s arms before he could even protest.
She felt wrong the moment she settled against me.
Too light.
“Violet,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like mine. It came out rough and distant, like it belonged to someone standing across the field instead of inside my own chest. “Violet—wake up.”
Her head lolled weakly against my arm as I adjusted my grip. There was no resistance in her body, no instinctive shift to steady herself. Her cheek rested against my shoulder as if gravity was the only thing holding her there.
No breath brushed my throat.
No sharp comment about how dramatic I was being.
No eye roll.
Gods—give me a fucking eye roll.
My chest tore open.
“I can’t—” The words caught in my throat. I forced them out anyway as I bent forward and pressed my forehead against hers. “I can’t feel you.”
The bond between us was still there.
I could feel it stretched thin between us like a thread pulled too tight, trembling at the edge of breaking. But there was nothing coming through it. No warmth. No emotion. No flicker of the steady presence that had lived inside my head since the moment she had become mine.
It was like shouting into a cavern and hearing nothing come back.
My shadows lost their minds.
They exploded outward in violent bursts, lashing across the battlefield in erratic waves.
Darkness slammed into the ground hard enough to crack stone, ripping through the earth in jagged lines that spread outward like fractures in glass.
Bodies were dragged across the dirt toward me only to be shredded again by shadows that didn’t seem to understand the fight was already over.
They didn’t know what to do without her.
They didn’t know how to exist without the quiet center she had become for both of us.
Neither did I.
“No,” I said hoarsely, pulling her closer against my chest. My hands shook as I tightened my grip around her shoulders. “No. No. No. You don’t get to do this.”
Her blood was everywhere.
It coated my hands and soaked into my sleeves, sticky and warm against my skin as it seeped through the fabric of my clothes. It smeared across the armor at her waist where the blade had gone in. It pooled beneath us in the dirt.
Warm.
Still warm.
Gods, that had to mean something.
“I told you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” I said, my voice breaking completely now as the words forced their way out. “I told you. I promised.”
My chest felt too tight. My ribs were closing inward. Every breath scraped through my throat.
And still, she didn’t move.
I pressed my palm over her stomach.
The wound was bad. I could feel it without even looking at it, the wrongness of it pulsing under my hand. Her body wasn’t sealing the way it should have. It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t reacting at all.
It just kept bleeding.
The blood soaked into my fingers, warm and slick, and the realization clawed its way up my spine with brutal clarity. She wasn’t healing. She wasn’t pushing back against the damage the way her magic should have been.
Shadows surged around us.
They moved without my command, writhing over her body like living things trying to find a way inside. Darkness slid over her armor and across her skin, clawing desperately at the edges of the wound as if they could stitch her back together through sheer force.
“Stop,” I rasped.
They didn’t listen.
The shadows pressed closer, sliding beneath my hands and into the space between us. They tried to sink into her the same way they anchored themselves inside my own body, the same way they held me together when the world threatened to rip me apart.
“Stop,” I said again, sharper this time.
They still didn’t listen.
They didn’t care.
They were panicking.
They were clawing at her because they didn’t understand how to exist in a world where she wasn’t there to steady them.
“I need you to breathe,” I whispered, pressing my forehead against her hair. The words came out rough, scraping through my throat as if they had to fight their way out of my chest. “Just once. I don’t need words. I don’t need you to yell at me.”
My fingers trembled against her armor as I pressed harder against the wound, as if pressure alone could force her heart to keep beating.
“Just—breathe.”
Nothing.
The silence stretched too long.
My shadows thickened around us, growing darker, heavier, rising up into the sky.
If she was gone, there was nothing left worth saving.
The thought slid into place with terrifying ease.
The Night Realm felt it.
The entire land seemed to lean toward me in response, the forest bending inward as if it were waiting for the command. My shadows surged outward again, eager and hungry, ready to devour anything that still dared to exist inside this broken world.
“Stay,” I begged her, my voice breaking completely as I tightened my arms around her. “Just stay.”
Hands tore me away from her.
One moment Violet was in my arms and the next the world snapped sideways.
My back slammed into rough bark hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs, the impact rattling through my ribs before my mind could even catch up with what had happened.
I barely registered the movement itself—only the force of it.
Bronwen had me pinned against a tree.
Her forearm pressed across my chest, locking me in place with far more strength than it looked like she was using.
“What are you doing?” I snarled, shadows lashing violently around us as they tried to rip through her grip. Darkness clawed at her restraint, scraping across bark and dirt as it tried to drag me free. “Get off me.”
Her grip didn’t loosen.
Not even a fraction.
“Look at me,” Bronwen said.
“I don’t have time for this,” I growled, trying to shove past her anyway. My hands braced against her arms as I pushed forward, shadows thrashing wildly around us. “I have to fix her.”
“She’s dead, Sebastian.”
The words barely had time to land before something behind her caught my eye.
Fire.
Real fire.
Not the scattered bursts of flame left from the battle. This was different—wild and consuming, flames wrapping around Violet’s body where she lay on the ground. Adar stood over her with a torch in his hand.
“What is he doing?” I demanded.
The words broke apart halfway through the sentence as panic surged violently through my chest. My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough that it hurt.
“What the fuck is he doing?”
Bronwen released me.
I didn’t remember crossing the distance between us.
One second I was standing beside the tree and the next Adar was hitting the ground beneath me. The impact cracked the stone under his back as I slammed him down, shadows exploding outward with a roar that split the air.
My hands closed around his throat before he could even react.
“What did you do?” I hissed, my vision flooding black as rage swallowed everything else.
Adar didn’t fight me.
He didn’t even try.
“Sebastian,” he barked, his voice sharp and controlled despite the fact that my grip was tightening around his neck. “It had to be done. Look at her.”
I looked.
Violet’s body was fully engulfed.
Flames moved in hungry waves that swallowed the shape of her armor, climbed over her shoulders, devoured the pale strands of her hair. The heat rolled across the battlefield in violent pulses, carrying the sharp scent of burning metal and blood.
My heart seized.
I tore my shadows away from Adar and hurled them toward her without thinking, the darkness exploding outward in a desperate wave. They raced across the ground and wrapped around the fire, trying to smother it, trying to rip it apart and drag it back into nothing.
The flames fought back.
They burned through shadow like it was air.
Black mist curled and vanished the moment it touched the fire, shredded apart by heat that wasn’t natural. My shadows recoiled violently, snapping back toward me in confused, furious bursts as if they couldn’t understand why something in this world refused to bow to them.
“No,” I said, stumbling forward.
My hands were shaking so badly I could barely keep them steady. I reached toward the flames anyway, as if I could just grab them, tear them away from her, pull her back out of the inferno before it finished taking what was left of her.
“No—stop—”
The bond snapped.
Everything that had ever anchored me—every thread of warmth, every pulse of emotion, every quiet brush of her presence against my mind—vanished in a single, brutal instant. One second she had been there, stretched thin but still holding on. The next there was nothing.
Nothing.
The space where she had lived inside me collapsed into silence so complete it felt like the world had just gone deaf.
I couldn’t breathe.
She’s dead.
The realization landed with brutal clarity, carving straight through every fragile piece of hope I had been clinging to. She had become the one constant in the chaos of my life, the single thing that kept the darkness inside me from swallowing everything whole.
Now there was only silence where she used to be.
The shadows around me reacted instantly.
They surged outward in violent, uncontrolled waves, slamming into the earth hard enough to split stone and rip trenches through the battlefield.
Trees shuddered under the force of it. The sky above us darkened again as the Night Realm responded to the thing that had just come undone inside its king.
But I barely felt them.
All I could feel was the empty space where Violet had been.
All I could hear was the echo of that silence.
And for the first time since I had become the thing this realm feared, the darkness inside me didn’t feel powerful.
It felt hollow.
It felt like grief.
And it was growing fast enough to swallow the world.
Then—
Pain.
Not mine.
Hers.
The bond slammed back into place so violently it knocked the air from my lungs. I gasped as sensation flooded through me all at once—heat first, searing and immense, then something far deeper. Power. Vast and ancient and wild in a way that made every instinct I had recoil.
My shadows did the same.
“Violet—” I choked.
The flames detonated outward.
Ash blasted into the air in a violent shockwave that ripped across the battlefield, and heat slammed into me hard enough to force my arm over my face. Through the chaos, I saw her body lift from the ground.
For one heartbeat, she hung there—suspended in the center of the inferno.
Then it changed.
Light erupted from the fire, blinding and molten, and wings tore free from the flames.
They burst outward in a violent sweep, vast and incandescent, each feather forged from living fire and gold-bright light. The wings were enormous, far larger than any creature should have been able to carry, their span carving burning arcs through the smoke-filled sky.
Her scream split the battlefield.
It wasn’t pain.
It was power.
The sound tore upward as she rose with it, fire trailing behind her like a comet as she shot toward the sky. Higher and higher she climbed, the flames spiraling around her body until she became nothing but blazing gold against the dark canopy of the Night Realm.
A phoenix.
My knees hit the ground before I even realized I was falling. My hands trembled where they braced against the ground as I stared up at the sky.
Alive.
She was alive!
A laugh tore out of me before I could stop it. It came out broken and unsteady, somewhere between hysterical relief and the ragged edge of a sob.
“Oh gods,” I whispered hoarsely.
The words barely made it past the tightness in my throat as I watched her wheel through the air above us, wings of fire carving blazing circles through the darkness of my realm.
“You did it.”
Relief flooded through me so hard it made my chest ache.
She was alive.
Not barely clinging to life. Not broken and bleeding in my arms.
Alive in a way that felt bigger than anything I had ever seen before.
The bond pulsed between us again—stronger now. Her emotions flickered faintly through it in flashes of heat and wild exhilaration, power thrumming through every thread that connected us.
She wasn’t gone.
She had never truly been gone.
And yet…
As I stared up at the blazing creature cutting through the sky above my realm, something else settled slowly into place beneath the overwhelming relief.
A quiet, undeniable truth.
The woman who had fallen in my arms a few minutes ago had died on this battlefield.
What had risen from the fire was something more, and I knew one thing without a doubt.
Nothing would ever be the same again.