Chapter 18
The inevitability of her
KADE
Pain lances through my side as I force myself upright, the weight of the destruction around us settling like a suffocating shroud.
Nothing is recognizable. Nothing survived.
Blackened earth and splintered trees stretch as far as I can see and the putrid smell of magic gone badly wrong clings to the air.
This is worse than when our magic collided.
Zara lies a few feet away, her chest heaving as the last embers of whatever hell she unleashed fade from her hands.
Her eyes are glassy, unfocused and there’s blood smeared everywhere.
It’s on her hands and face, it’s streaking through her hair and its crimson coats her clothes.
She wears the scarlet like some grotesque mark of victory and the witch is too distracted by her blood-stained fingers to notice my ragged breathing.
She hasn’t noticed my hand pressed against my ribs as it tries to stem the flow of blood from my chest. My magic isn’t touching it, and whatever she did can’t be undone by warlock magic. At least not mine.
I don’t want her to see me like this.
Weakened. Wounded. Vulnerable.
I don’t have a choice if I want to survive
“Zara,” I rasp, my voice as dry as the burned wood around me.
The witch doesn’t respond. She just lies there, panting, like she’s trying to understand what the fuck just happened. Maybe she needs a moment to compose herself, but I’m not sure I have the time to indulge in such excesses.
“Your magic…” I swallow and her eyes roll up to meet mine. “I’m wounded.”
She crawls along the ground and I assume she’s too tired to stand.
The blood weave wouldn’t let her leave me like this, and as much as it appalls me, it’s trying to do me a fucking favor right now.
It’s forcing her to help me and I should be grateful but I’m repulsed by the witch doing all she can to save me.
Fuck, I’m going to owe her.
Worse, I’m going to have to trust her.
“How bad?” she mumbles, barely coherent.
“Bad enough that you’ve got no fucking choice,” I reply as I let my knees bend and sink to her level.
Her lip curls. “You’re insufferable, even half-dead.”
“And you’re…” My breath catches as a fresh wave of agony rips through me. My fingers dig into my side but the wound is too deep and my magic isn’t doing nearly enough to heal me.
Zara’s in front of me before I can blink, her hands already reaching for the wound. I try to pull away, but she grabs my arm and forces me to still. Her tiny fingers pry at mine, and for a moment I wonder if it would be so wrong to slip my palm over her pale and trembling hand.
“You’d better not die,” she snaps. “This damn ebon chain will make my life even worse than it is now if you stop breathing.”
I smirk through the pain, though it costs me. “Touching, Zara. Truly.”
Her glare is as sharp as her magic, which flares to life in her hands as she presses them against my side. The heat of it makes me flinch, searing into my flesh and making the already agonizing wound scream louder.
“Hold still,” she barks, and for once, I obey the despicable creature I think I could be starting to admire.
The world narrows to the sensation of her magic. It’s raw, primal, like a wildfire trying to swallow me whole. There’s no finesse to it, no careful weaving of intent. Just power, brutal and unrelenting, as if the witch herself doesn’t care if she heals me or tears me apart in the process.
I close my eyes and the force of nature itself pours through me, its roots breaking the earth that binds me together apart.
They’re unstoppable, relentless and sturdier than stone and as ancient as time itself.
It seeps into places I didn’t know were broken, mending fissures I’d grown used to carrying.
It moves like water over rock, wearing away at the edges of my pain, relentless in its pursuit of what it believes is balance.
Her magic isn’t subtle.
It’s the wind that strips leaves from trees, the flood that carves rivers into stone, the storm that tears apart the sky.
It surges through me, relentless as an avalanche, unstoppable as time.
I grit my teeth as it presses into my wound, a thousand tiny vines burrowing into my flesh and weaving themselves together, knotting and twisting until the pain becomes something else entirely.
When Zara’s magic finally recedes, it leaves behind the ghost of its touch—cool dew settling on scorched earth, the scent of petrichor clinging to my skin. The wound is gone, but her magic lingers, an untamed force that refuses to be ignored.
I open my eyes, meeting hers. Zara’s face is pale, her breaths shallow, and her trembling hands fall away from me. But her magic is still there, rooted deep within me, a reminder that what she’s given can never be undone.
“There,” she mutters, wiping her bloody palms on her thighs. “Now you can be a bastard a little longer.”
“Charming bedside manner, Zara.”
She smirks but doesn’t rise to the bait.
Zara collapses onto her back, her head tilted toward the sky that’s streaked with ash that I only see because of my magic.
Her breaths are shallow, each one hitching as she fights to hold herself together, and her heartbeat is so faint that I can barely hear it.
But I hear the world break around us. There’s carnage and beauty in the destruction, a force utterly foreign to everything I know.
I hear the cracks of branches stretching skyward and the whisper of leaves caressed by a summer breeze.
This hasn’t been done with the precision of warlock magic.
This is chaos, and this force answers only to itself, blooming and withering in the same breath as its roots press deeper and it renews itself, starting all over again.
There’s life and death, agony and relief, and the solid ground turns molten as the forest and this inferno intertwine. The aftermath of Zara’s magic breaks around us, seeking all its greedy dark desires, and the world bends to its will, offering itself up as if it were a sacrificial lamb.
A fragile silence sits between us, as it lies between heaven and the earth below it.
The angels watch in awe, weeping tears for a girl who looks as pure as the first flurries of snow but is as corrupted as the pits of hell, and their song is a rhapsody sung with only the good notes.
Only the right ones. All for a girl who’s brought destruction to their master’s creation and doesn’t deserve the sympathy.
I don’t thank her.
She doesn’t ask for it.
Zara’s eyelids become too heavy for her and she drifts into a fitful sleep, her body curled against the blackened ground like she belongs to the chaos she’s created.
Her hair looks white against the scorched earth, somehow even paler than her skin.
Even purer too, and the faintest shimmer of moonlight gives her an ethereal glow that steals my breath and makes my heart beat stronger as it fights to prove its worth.
I can’t take my eyes off her.
I can’t bear to keep staring at her.
The minutes bleed into hours and I lose myself in a dream that may as well be a nightmare.
Her presence lingers in my thoughts, a haunting melody I don’t think I’ll ever silence.
Zara, lying amidst the ruin she wrought, looks more like a fallen star than a girl—a fragment of heaven cast down to smolder on scorched earth.
The contrast is too much to reconcile and I cannot fathom how someone can look so angelic while being capable of such destruction.
Pain wrenches in my chest, and it isn’t physical. There’s a deeper hurt and I’m not ready to hear its truth. I’m certainly not prepared to witness it nor surrender to its folly.
This quiet cannot last.
She can’t endure the world I inhabit. It’s too harsh for her and she won’t conform to its rules and protocols.
Zara barely tolerates me and I’m certain she won’t survive its restraint and formality, or its order and politics.
The girl has no head for intrigue and she’ll be far too vulnerable to the infighting and backstabbing as warlocks vie for power and she’s a weakness I cannot afford.
She didn’t ask for this and I don’t want it, and the only way to save her is to leave her to her own devices.
It isn’t running away.
It isn’t even abandoning her.
Both would be spineless and I may be many despicable things, but a coward isn’t one of them. The weave will understand that I’m protecting her and I step backward, convinced I’m doing this for her good and not mine.
I can’t do this with her.
I can’t stay with her.
An iron vice wraps around my chest and I step away again.
My breath stutters, the air refusing to fill my lungs as magic seethes in warning.
The blood weave explodes through me like a firestorm, racing along every nerve, scorching everything it touches.
My body jerks, muscles locking as if I’m a marionette being dragged along by invisible strings.
Each step I take away from Zara is met with an onslaught of fury from the weave—a torrent of magic that feels alive, sentient, and utterly enraged by my defiance.
The agony is unlike anything I’ve felt before.
It isn’t a clean pain. It’s jagged and brutal, burrowing into me like a thousand claws.
The magic doesn’t just burn; it ravages.
It tears into my chest, coils around my ribs, and claws at my spine, each pulse a violent reprimand.
The world narrows to the sheer, unbearable force of it, a cacophony of fire and blood that drowns out even my own ragged breaths.
I sprint away and fight against the blood weave, summoning every ounce of magic to push it back.
I reach for the blocks that build the world around us, the tiny atoms and the scaffolding, demanding they rearrange matter in my design.
I insist on order, and I enforce discipline.
I command the elements and yet my legs falter beneath me and my magic fails me, buckling in the same way as my knees.
The ground beneath me trembles, cracked earth splintering like glass as the weave demands my compliance.
I slam a fist into the ground, channeling every ounce of my rage into holding my position.
My magic surges again, raw and volatile, but the weave answers with unrelenting force.
The backlash slams into me like a hammer, and I cry out, the sound swallowed by the roar of blood pounding in my ears.
“You think you can break me?” I snarl, my voice a harsh rasp. My vision blurs, the edges of the world flickering with dark tendrils of pain, but I refuse to give in.
The weave answers with fire. Not literal flames, but something worse—heat that flares inside me, white-hot and searing.
It burns through my chest, spreading outward like molten lava.
My heart stutters, each beat a jarring, uneven thud as the magic constricts around it, squeezing until I can’t breathe.
I claw at my chest, gasping for air, but the weave’s grip doesn’t relent. It digs deeper, slicing through my resolve with every brutal pulse. My magic screams in protest, but it’s not enough. The weave is a force of nature, an unyielding storm that cannot be reasoned with or resisted.
“I won’t do this!” I choke out, though the words are hollow.
I know it.
The weave knows it.
But still, I fight.
The weave retaliates instantly, a fresh wave of torment that sends me crashing back to the ground. My hands claw at the dirt, and black spots dance across my vision. Every inch of me screams for release, for relief, for anything but this. Anything other than this insanity.
Pain blossoms in my chest, spreading like roots burrowing into flesh.
It digs deep, piercing every nerve and joint, until I can’t tell where the magic ends and my body begins.
My vision blurs as the weave coils tighter, binding me with its will.
My own magic flickers weakly, a dying ember against a hurricane, and my limbs collapse as the ebon chain binds me, trying to break me apart molecule by molecule.
The world narrows to a single command: Submit.
My chest heaves, my strength crumbling under the unrelenting assault. I scream, a guttural sound that fades into a hoarse whisper. The fight bleeds out of me.
I’m defeated and the blood weave drains every last drop of my resistance until it’s crystal clear I’m defeated. It wants me to understand I’ve surrendered and to learn that I will never beat or escape it.
Its grip finally eases, leaving me sprawled and trembling on the scorched earth, a bitter clarity settles over me.
I can’t escape her, not the girl who wields chaos like a blade and wears destruction like a crown.
Zara isn’t a burden I can cast off or a choice I can refuse—she’s a sentence handed down by forces I’ll never comprehend, one I’ll carry whether I want to or not.
My chest aches, not from the fight or the pain of the weave but from the sharp, unyielding inevitability of her.
Zara and I are bound, not just by magic but by something deeper, darker.
She is a tempest and I am the fool standing in its eye, daring to think I can survive.
And as much as I hate the thought, I know there’s no turning back.
Whatever comes next, I’ll have to face it with her.
Or be torn apart trying.