chapter fifty
Kaden
Elysia moves before I can even understand what’s happening. Determined and fierce as she marches straight toward the blood mage, blue fire blooming across her hands, and my shadows coiling at her feet as if they were made for her.
For a breathless, impossible moment, all I can do is stare as the world narrows to her alone.
She moves like she was born for this, as if the battlefield bends around her will. The snow sizzles and melts beneath her boots as blue fire scorches through it, steam hissing into the air.
The blood mage grins as she approaches him, and fear begins to lodge in my throat as crimson magic licks across his fingers like living veins. He raises his hands, sending tendrils of blood straight for her, and she answers with fire.
They collide in a violent clash of power.
Fire slams into crimson magic with a thunderous crack, the impact throwing sparks and embers high into the sky.
She pivots, spinning out of his counterstrike as crimson tendrils lash for her throat, slicing through the space where her head had been a second before.
She ducks low, rolls, comes up on one knee and sends a crescent of blue flame arcing toward his chest.
Gods… she’s devastating.
Inhaling a sharp, steadying breath, I try to run after her… but my body doesn’t respond. My limbs lock, my lungs seize and panic slams into my chest so hard my vision blurs.
FUCK.
No, no, no—
My eyes tear across the battlefield, frantic and desperate, searching for anything, anyone… but everyone is frozen. Every warrior is locked in place, wide-eyed and unmoving.
A deep snarl rips itself from my throat as my shadows surge forward, reaching for her desperately, only to smash into an invisible force and get flung back.
I need to get to her.
I need to fight with her.
Why can’t I fucking move?!
This is what it feels like to be powerless.
To watch the person you love walk straight into death while your body betrays you.
All my life, people have looked at me and seen only the weapon. The title. The power. They bowed or cowered away, or they wanted something from me… power, protection, proximity.
No one ever cared who I was beneath it all.
Except her.
She never flinched when my shadows moved, never cowered from my threats, never tried to use me or soften me or shape me into something easier to swallow. She looked at me… really looked, and saw the man buried beneath the darkness.
And gods help me, she chose him.
She chose me.
The good, the bad, the man, the monster.
And I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her so much I’d rewind time until my bones turned to dust if it meant she’d live. I’d become every monster they ever feared if it meant she’d never have to face this alone.
If I lose her… I lose the only colour my world has ever known.
Blue flames and shadow whirl around her, licking up her arms, trailing at her feet. They swirl and mix together like a celestial storm, divine and violent.
A tendril of fiery shadow lashes out, clashing against the blood mage’s crimson magic just before she runs at him, dagger in hand. It flares silver-blue beneath her palm before she throws it at his heart, but a second before it sinks into flesh, it flips mid-air and flies right back at her.
My heart sinks as she narrowly dodges her own blade, sending blue flame birds to descend on the blood mage. But every attack she throws at him, he counters.
Blood magic surges in jagged waves, ripping through the ground at her feet. She leaps back just in time as crimson spikes tear up from the earth where she stood, slicing through her leathers and grazing her calf.
She stumbles from the impact, and my heart lurches violently in my chest, my breath leaving me in a sharp, broken sound.
Then she straightens and fire blooms brighter in her hands, silver-blue flames climbing her arms. A flash of pain and heat steals the breath from my lungs as her power spikes so sharp it hurts.
She shouldn’t still be standing.
She shouldn’t still be fighting.
And yet she does… because that’s who she is. Because she is stubborn and determined and defiant, because she will always choose to burn herself to ash before she lets the darkness take someone else.
Terror coils tight and suffocating in my chest.
She’s pushing herself too far.
And I can’t get to her.
I can’t touch her.
I can’t help her.
All I can do is watch.
Time stretches… an eternity strangled into seconds until suddenly, the crushing pressure around my heart snaps, and my body lurches backwards, along with everyone else.
I don’t hesitate.
I sprint.
I feel her magic sputtering and dimming faintly through the bond, worse… her heart. Her heart is slowing, like something is squeezing it in a cold and merciless fist.
I feel it against my ribs just as I feel my own hammering in a frantic, wild rhythm.
“Elysia!” I roar, shadows thrashing at the ground violently, echoing my fear as I sprint towards her. Lungs burning, heart aching, and all-consuming fear pumping through my veins.
She turns her head just enough for me to see those beautiful blue eyes.
Then her soft, shattering voice whispers into my mind.
“I love you.”
My soul fractures.
“No—wait!” The words are a plea. A prayer. A desperate command.
She is love and light and warmth and the home my soul has always yearned for. She is everything good in this world and everything good I’ve ever been, all of it, all at once.
Her heartbeat slows to an agonisingly slow rhythm as the blood mage, wounded and flickering, vanishes in a blink. Then she falls, her body collapsing against the snow, and the sight breaks me open.
My shadows reach her first, scooping her up a second after she hits the ground and pulling her against my chest.
“Brynn!” My voice is a strained yell as I call out.
Brynn can help; Brynn has taught her shadows to heal. She can fix this. She can save her. She has to.
I drop to my knees with her cradled in my lap, my arms holding onto her tight, as if my embrace could keep her here with me, in my arms, in my mind, in my soul.
Her heart beats in my chest—barely, so faint I could miss it if we didn’t share the same pulse.
“Stay with me,” I breathe, forehead pressed to hers. “Come on, Love. Fight… you have to fight. You can’t make me fall in love with you and then die.”
Brynn reaches me, skidding through the snow, and the panic etched across her face mirrors my own.
“Help her!” I bark, the words tearing out of me.
“Kaden…” Brynn’s voice cracks as she drops to her knees beside us. “I… I don’t—”
“Just do something!” I snarl, shaking with terror. “Anything.”
She swallows hard and nods so fast it borders on frantic. “Okay. Can you lower your shield? If I can get to her heart… if you can keep it beating—”
“I’ve got it.” I force my own shield down, immediately latching onto the faint rhythm beneath Elysia’s ribs.
“Beat with me,” I will it, I will it with everything in me. “Please. Just… keep beating.”
But her shield remains up, strong and stubborn and impossibly defiant, just like her. Even unconscious, her magic protects everyone but herself.
My mind spirals, a thousand frantic thoughts collapsing in on each other. Of all the horrors I’ve lived through… every scar, every betrayal, every night I thought would be my last, every quiet death I’ve had to make peace with, nothing prepared me for this.
For the way my life now hangs on the rise and fall of her chest, for the way my soul strains on the thin, fraying thread that ties it to hers.
“Moonfire…” My voice breaks, raw and pleading. “Come on, love. Live… you have to live, you promised.”
I lean closer, brushing desperate kisses to her hand, her palm, her arm. Every inch of skin I can as I whisper the words I should’ve said long before this moment.
“You are my everything,” I breathe into her skin. “You are the first warmth I ever felt. The first light to touch anything inside me. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you—I love you more than anything this cursed world could take from me. So don’t you dare… don’t you dare leave me.”
For one suspended heartbeat, her pulse answers mine, and then a searing, indescribable agony rips through my body, violent and all-consuming, like my soul is being torn out through my ribs.
A primal, guttural scream tears out of me, so raw it shreds my throat and so violent I choke on it, my breath snagged somewhere between my ribs and my lungs.
The pain is everywhere at once, a wildfire with no edge and no mercy as unseen hands peel my chest open and reach inside. Fingers sink into my soul and tear it from me, piece by agonising piece, stretching the moment until it feels eternal.
And then, after what feels like forever—
It stops.
Not because it eases.
Because something is missing.
That steady hum beneath every breath. That quiet echo beneath every heartbeat.
The soulbond.
It is gone.
Because her chest… her chest is not moving.
Elysia is dead.
epilogue
Brynn
A tormented scream cleaves through the battlefield like a blade. The blizzard answers it, wind howling as snow thickens, as though the universe itself is grieving alongside us.
Beneath the snow, the last of the glowing flowers flicker and die, and even the distant forests seem to dim, their light retreating into shadow.
Elysia is dead. If her lifeless body and the unmoving rise of her chest were not proof enough, then it would have been made horribly clear by the heart-wrenching scream that ripped from Kaden as he held her in trembling arms. His shadows lashing violently around us as crimson tears streaked down his face and onto her skin.
I have seen Kaden in pain before. I have seen him bleed, watched him endure wounds that would have broken lesser men. He wears pain like an old, tattered shirt—uncomfortable, but familiar enough to be tolerated.
As a warrior mage, pain is expected. You are trained to endure it. We’ve all experienced pain and grief and loss under the hands of the war, of The Council… but this—
This is agony in its purest form.
This is the kind of grief that visits once in a lifetime, if at all. The kind that hollows a person out from the inside, leaving nothing untouched and nothing left. He is every tear anyone has ever shed for a lost love, and it is tearing him apart. He is pain and heartbreak given form.
“I’m so sorry, Kaden…” The words fall from me uselessly. “I—”
“Bring her back.” His plea slices through my voice without effort.
It isn’t loud. It isn’t angry. It is broken in a way that makes my chest seize.
His fingers shake frantically as he wipes his crimson tears from her skin, staring at her as if she might vanish from his very arms any second.
He memorises her as though love itself demands it…
the curve of her lips, the scatter of freckles, every silken blue strand of hair.
Almost like he’s afraid that if he stops looking, she will be gone.
“Kaden…” I try again, softer now. “I can’t—”
“Bring. Her. Back.” He finally tears his gaze from her, just long enough to look at me.
The broken, fragile plea behind his bloodshot eyes cracks my chest wide open.
Then, almost immediately, his attention returns to her, as though looking away for even a singular broken heartbeat might cost him something he cannot afford to lose.
His arms tighten around her, fingers digging into her leathers as though sheer force of will might coax her lungs to draw breath again. As though holding her close enough could convince her heart to remember how to beat.
I look down at her face, at the way her eyes stare lifelessly at the storm-dark sky. My throat closes painfully, and tears burn at the corners of my eyes.
I should have done more. Should have been faster. Should have tried harder.