Draekir
The chamber is already dying when I reach her. Stone splits along ritual lines scored into the floor. The wildspont's energy tears at the walls in ribbons, peeling carved stone away in long strips.
Then I see Malrec standing over Elowen, and every instinct I have ever cultivated goes completely quiet.
She's on the ground. Her arm is braced beneath her, blood darkening the stone where her palm presses flat, fighting to push herself upright.
Her face turns toward Malrec with an expression that is not fear — it is fury, cold and defiant — which is the only reason I do not completely lose myself.
Malrec turns at the sound of my entry. He does not look surprised. He looks triumphant.
"I wondered how long you would take," he calls over the noise around us. "She's more difficult to break than expected."
I cross the chamber in a run, and Malrec does not wait for me to reach him.
He's faster than a man his age has any right to be — wild magic floods his limbs, pulsing visibly beneath his skin where the corruption has eaten further into him than I realized.
He drives into me with a blade charged with unstable energy, and the impact sends both of us crashing into the stone.
Pain flares through my shoulder. I register it distantly.
I catch his wrist before he can strike again and twist until bone pops, and the blade clatters against the fracturing floor.
He doesn't stop fighting. That is the difference between Malrec and Zevrik. Zevrik was precision. This is desperation wearing ideology as armor.
"You think this ends here?" he shouts, driving a knee into my ribs when I force him back.
Magic surges through the floor and I move sideways before it erupts upward in a column of corrupted light.
"You are not even the real target, Draekir.
You were never the point of this. You were the obstacle.
Remove you, destabilize the region, and every noble house that has spent forty years chafing under Mournhold's shadow walks through the door you leave behind. "
I get my forearm across his throat and drive him into the wall.
"Tell me something I have not already pieced together."
"Did you piece together which houses?" His voice is strangled but his eyes burn with the satisfaction of a man who believes he has already won even while losing.
"Did you puzzle out which of your allies spent the last decade sending letters to my office?
Which noble-born signatures sit on documents promising Mournhold the moment you fell?
" He bares his teeth. "This wasn't a scheme born in my study.
It was built in the courts you thought supported you.
You have no idea how many of them wanted you gone. "
A shockwave rolls through the chamber and throws us both sideways. I hit the ground and roll to my feet while a section of ceiling collapses behind Malrec, filling the air with dust. Through the debris —
Elowen is upright. She's pushed herself to standing using the edge of a broken pillar, her left hand pressed to her ribs where she is clearly hurt, but her eyes move fast across the chamber. She meets my gaze across the wreckage.
"The anchors," she calls, her voice steadier than it has any right to be.
"He lost control of three when you came through.
There are still four holding. The herbs—" She lifts her hand.
The leather pouch at her side is torn but intact.
"I need you to get me close to each one.
I can't sustain the pressure long enough alone. "
Malrec lunges for her before I finish processing the words, I move faster.
My fist connects with his temple and drops him, and I step between him and Elowen. The chamber shakes again. A ritual line detonates, the backlash punches through the air like something physical — hot and metallic against my skin.
"Draekir." Her voice cuts through the noise. "Look at me."
I do not want to look away from Malrec.
"Look at me." Her tone — not a command, not a plea. Recognition. "He wants you like this. He has always wanted you like this. Uncontrolled, consumed — the monster they wrote about in every accusation. If you lose yourself here, he wins something he doesn't deserve."
The rage does not leave. But she's right. I breathe through it until it becomes a blade again rather than a wildfire.
"Show me the anchors."
We move through the collapsing chamber together.
It's nothing like fighting beside trained soldiers.
Elowen doesn't follow tactical signals or yield ground reflexively.
She moves on instinct and knowledge. I keep my body between her and the backlash, absorbing anything that would knock her off her feet.
At the first anchor, she drops to her knees and drives the crushed herbs into the fracture at its base. The stone reacts violently, light flaring white beneath her palms. I force my own ward over hers, not closing it, holding it open just enough for the paste to reach the carved channel beneath.
"Again," she says through her teeth.
The second anchor fights harder. The energy bucks against my hands, hot enough to split skin, but Elowen leans into the pressure and presses the herbs deeper. The line between the stones gutters. For one breath, the ritual loses its rhythm.
"It's working," she says.
Then the third anchor screams.
Wild magic tears through the chamber in every direction at once — not controlled, not directed, simply released.
I am already moving. No anger driving me past reason this time. Only clarity. I catch Malrec's wrist, turn his momentum against him, and drive him backward through the air.
He hits the center of the rupture. The wildspont takes him, energy strips him apart from the outside in — his control gone, his will irrelevant, every calculation he ever made about commanding something uncontrollable meeting its final consequence.
Then there is nothing where Malrec stood. The chamber shudders and goes still.
I cross to Elowen in four strides and get my hands on her before she finishes processing what just happened. She lets me.
"Is it over?" she asks.
I want to tell her yes. But the corruption is still moving. It no longer has a hand on it.
"Malrec is gone," I tell her. "The ritual is broken." I draw away just far enough to read her face. She reads mine in return and finds what I am not saying.
"But the wildspont," she understands.
"Is no longer his weapon." I keep my hands at her arms, steadying. "Which means it belongs to no one. Which means—"
"It's going to collapse on its own. Removing the hand that controlled it didn't heal it. It just made it uncontrolled."
She reaches for my hand.
"I know what to do," she says. "I think I know. But I'm going to need more of the herbs, and I'm going to need you to trust me completely."
I look at her in the failing light of a chamber that is actively eating itself, with a wildspont rupture breathing at our backs and the ruins of everything Malrec built collapsing into the ground beneath our feet.
"Tell me what you need," I tell her.