Chapter 28 Alerie
TWENTY-EIGHT
ALERIE
The attack is unlike anything I’ve experienced.
Threx’s power tastes wrong—ash magic twisted by blood-binding techniques until it becomes a perversion of everything my bloodline represents.
Where my Vireth abilities sever bindings and reject imposed authority, his workings invert that power.
They don’t strike at me directly. They try to turn my own magic against itself.
The first blow nearly drives me to my knees.
Pain lances through my blood like fire, and I feel my power convulse in response—reaching for the bindings Threx creates and finding them designed specifically to trap Vireth magic.
Every instinct screams at me to pull, to sever, to break his workings the way I’ve broken every blood-oath I’ve encountered.
That’s exactly what he wants.
I understand with cold clarity an instant before disaster. His magic is a trap. If I sever his bindings with my Vireth power, the backlash will tear through me instead of dissipating safely. He’s turned my greatest strength into a weapon pointed at my own heart.
He studied us. Prepared for exactly this.
So I stop trying to break his magic. I redirect it instead.
The cistern’s aether residue responds to my intent, answering the way ash has always answered Vireth witches. I pull the ancient power into myself, use it to buffer Threx’s attacks rather than confronting them directly. His workings slide off the aether like water off volcanic glass.
Threx’s expression shifts from certainty to confusion to rage in the space of three heartbeats.
“Impossible.” He hurls another strike—more power, more perversion, more of the twisted ash magic he’s spent years perfecting. “Your bloodline can’t access raw aether. The Vireth domain is severance, not channeling!”
“My bloodline defines itself.”
I don’t give him time to recover. The aether I’ve gathered coils around his workings, not severing them but containing them—wrapping his magic in a prison of ancient power that neutralizes its effects. He staggers, thrown off balance by the counter he never anticipated.
My knife finds his shoulder.
He screams—the high, animal sound of a fanatic whose faith has cracked. Blood sprays across the cistern’s ancient stone, and his magic falters as pain disrupts his concentration. The smell of copper mingles with the chamber’s thick residue.
I press the advantage. Strike after strike, each drawing blood, each driving him back toward the altar he’s spent years building.
He tries to rally his magic, but every working he creates, I contain or redirect.
The techniques he developed to counter Vireth witches were designed for a bloodline that plays by established rules—and I’ve spent my whole life learning that rules are cages for people who can’t think beyond them.
“You were supposed to complete the ritual.” Threx’s voice has gone high and desperate, blood staining his gray robes. “You were supposed to be the final component—”
“I know.” I drive my knife toward his throat. “That’s why I came.”
A hand closes around my wrist before the blade connects.
Not Threx’s hand. His grip is too weak, his body too broken by the wounds I’ve inflicted.
This hand is stronger. Smoother. Wrong in the same way the Blood Regent’s eyes are wrong.
“Impressive.” The Blood Regent’s voice brushes against my ear from behind, close enough that I feel the unnatural heat radiating from his skin. “Truly impressive. Threx always was overzealous in his preparations. But his techniques were only ever the bait.”
I try to twist free. My magic surges toward the bindings that power him—
And finds nothing to sever.
No blood-oaths I can unravel. No imposed authority I can reject. The Blood Regent’s power isn’t borrowed or stolen in any way my Vireth abilities can touch. It’s mimicked. Processed through rituals so elaborate that the power has become part of him rather than a constraint upon him.
“Did you believe I wouldn’t prepare for you?
” His other hand presses against my spine, and I feel magic that isn’t Threx’s twisted ash—magic designed specifically for this moment, specifically for me, specifically for everything I am.
“Your bloodline severs bindings, yes. But I don’t need to bind you to use you. ”
The pain begins.
I’ve known pain before.
The binding rituals of my childhood, when captors tested how much my Vireth blood could endure. The casual cruelties of owners who saw my body as a resource to be exploited. The wound across my ribs that I hid from Izan, earned in an alley fighting beside him.
This is different.
The Blood Regent’s magic doesn’t attack my body.
It attacks my blood. My Vireth heritage itself becomes the conduit for his working—the very thing that makes me valuable transformed into the weapon that will destroy me.
I feel my power being drained, pulled through channels that lead directly to the ritual altar, feeding the binding magic he’s building with the essence of everything I am.
I try to fight. Try to sever the working, redirect it, contain it the way I contained Threx’s attacks.
But the Blood Regent has spent years preparing for this moment. His magic slides through every defense I raise, finds every weakness in my power, exploits every instinct my bloodline has developed over generations. My Vireth abilities don’t protect me—they enable him.
“Don’t struggle.” His voice comes from very far away, clinical and calm.
“The more you fight, the faster it drains. Your grandmother lasted nearly an hour before her heart gave out. The others—your cousins, the scattered survivors I found across the realm—lasted less. You’re stronger than all of them combined.
I’m hoping you’ll prove more resilient—the ritual requires sustained power, not brief surges. ”
My grandmother. The others. All of them consumed for this.
The knowledge should fuel my rage, should give me strength to fight harder.
Instead, it slides through a mind that’s becoming increasingly detached from my failing body.
I’m aware of the cistern’s sickly light, of Threx crawling away to nurse his wounds, of the ritual altar pulsing with power that’s being torn from my blood.
I’m aware of Izan.
Still fighting. Still burning his way through endless waves of soldiers with fury that shakes the chamber’s ancient stones.
His roar of rage when he sees what’s happening to me—when he understands what the Blood Regent is doing—makes stalactites crack and fall from the ceiling like crystallized tears.
Fire erupts with intensity that should be impossible, the dragon fully unleashed, caring nothing for control, caring only for reaching me.
Too far.
Too slow.
The Blood Regent has calculated every variable, anticipated every response. By the time Izan reaches us, the ritual will be complete. I’ll be dead, my bloodline consumed, and an entire city will be bound to the will of a man who sees people as resources to be exploited.
The same way he sees me.
The thought surfaces through the fog of fading consciousness. My whole life, powerful people have looked at my blood and seen a tool. A resource. A thing to be used and discarded when its purpose was served.
I made different decisions. Stayed when I could have run. Wanted a dragon who terrifies me in ways that have nothing to do with his violence—because he makes me want things I never thought I could have.
Izan.
His name surfaces in my fracturing mind, and with it comes a clarity that cuts through the Blood Regent’s drain.
I don’t want to die without telling him what he’s become to me.
The thought is absurd. Ridiculous. I’m bleeding out my power into a ritual that will enslave thousands, and my dying concern is that I never told a dragon that I—
That I—
The word won’t form. Even now, even dying, I can’t quite name the thing that’s grown between us since that first interrogation in the Ash Cells.
But I feel it. Burning in my chest even as my magic drains away. A fire that has nothing to do with Vireth power or Izan’s volcanic nature. A choice I keep making, over and over, even when making it costs me everything.
I reach for that fire.
Not with magic. Not with technique. With pure, desperate will—the same will that kept me alive through years of captivity, that let me stand on a balcony and tell a dragon I refused to be owned, that made me walk into this trap knowing I might not walk out.
The Blood Regent’s working stutters.
“What are you—” For the first time, uncertainty fractures his clinical composure.
I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t know if it will save me or accelerate my destruction. But it’s mine. My choice. My will. My refusal to be a tool for anyone, even in death.
The cistern responds.
Ancient power floods through channels I didn’t know existed. The aether residue I used against Threx awakens on a scale I couldn’t have imagined, recognizing Vireth blood—recognizing a witch who works with ash and endings—and offering an alliance I never requested.
The ritual altar cracks.
Not from my attack. From the cistern itself, ancient infrastructure rejecting the Blood Regent’s workings the way a body rejects a foreign organ.
Power meant to enslave a city feeds back through his carefully constructed channels, and the Blood Regent releases me with a snarl of fury as his ritual begins to collapse around him.
I fall.
The stone rushes up to meet me. Cold. Ancient. Indifferent to the magic tearing itself apart above my broken body.
Through dimming vision, I see the Blood Regent retreat into shadows, abandoning his altar, abandoning his Cardinals, abandoning everything he’s built in order to escape the backlash of power he can no longer control.
He moves with purpose, not panic—toward a passage carved fresh into the cistern’s ancient wall.
A prepared exit. A contingency. He always had somewhere else to go.
Stalactites crash down around me. The ceiling buckles.
The cistern that stood for millennia begins to collapse.
Izan.
His name surfaces one more time.
I still feel him. Not through magic—my magic is gone, drained or burned or simply absent in ways I can’t understand. But I can feel him fighting toward me, burning through rubble and soldiers and his own endless waves of enemies with a desperation that matches the feeling dying in my chest.
He’s coming.
He won’t reach me in time.
He—
Blood pools beneath me. My blood, mixing with the ancient stone and the residue of power that’s older than human memory. The wound in my side—the one from the alley, the one I hid—has reopened. Or maybe the Blood Regent’s drain tore it open. Does it matter?
My heart stutters.
Darkness closes in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world to a single point of sickly yellow-green light. The collapsed ceiling. The ruined altar. The bodies of Ash Cardinals crushed beneath falling stone.
And heat.
Distant at first, then closer. Burning through the darkness like a sun rising in the depths of the earth.
Izan.
I try to speak his name. Try to tell him—tell him—
The words won’t come. My lips move, but no sound emerges. My body has failed me at last, the way bodies eventually fail everyone.
But he’s here.
I feel him before I see him—volcanic warmth cutting through the cistern’s wrongness, pushing back the cold that’s crept into my bones.
His hands find me, impossibly gentle for something that burned through stone to reach me.
His voice, raw and broken in ways I’ve never heard, calling my name over and over as a prayer to gods neither of us believes in.
Alerie. Alerie. Stay with me. Don’t—don’t leave. Not now. Not ever.
I want to answer. Want to tell him I’m trying. Want to tell him that I picked him, keep picking him, will keep wanting him until there’s nothing left of me to want.
But the darkness is stronger than wanting.
Stronger than will.
Stronger than everything except—
His mouth finds mine.
And then there’s only fire.