Chapter 30 Amelia #2
The sigil ring still trying to contain me shatters outward under the surge of my power. The roots beneath the chamber respond instantly, recognizing heir-blood and bond-magic fused together. Stone splits. The entire structure groans as living Wildspont veins answer my call.
Malrend’s eyes sharpen, not surprised, but pleased.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “There it is.”
The Wildspont energy floods through me, amplified by the Vrakken bond. It is too much. It is beautiful and catastrophic and unfiltered. I feel every root beneath Nytheria, every wounded ley-line, every broken pulse of the dying coven.
And I understand exactly what I could do. If I let it collapse. If I direct it downward instead of outward. If I end it now. The chamber would fall. The blight would burn. Malrend would lose his leverage. And I would not survive the release.
The realization is calm. Terrifyingly calm.
Zeidan struggles to his feet across the chamber, blood dark against the stone where his wing hangs torn and smoking from void corruption.
Through the bond I feel his fear, not for himself. For me.
“Amelia,” he says, and his voice is rough, breaking at the edges. “Do not.”
Malrend senses the shift in my magic and spreads his hands wider, feeding the instability. “Yes,” he says softly. “Do it! End the Wildspont. Save yourself!”
The Wildspont surges higher inside me.
I can see it, how to thread the collapse. How to take the entire corrupted network and detonate it into cleansing rupture. It would destroy his trafficking lines, his root siphons, his market leverage.
It would destroy me.
Zeidan’s terror slams through the bond so violently it nearly knocks me sideways. He is moving before I finish forming the intention.
He crosses the chamber in a blur of shadow and blood, ignoring the void-fire still burning through his wing. Malrend attempts to intercept, but Ron slams into him from the side, tackling the Dark Elf hard enough to fracture the stone dais.
“NOW!” Ron roars.
Zeidan reaches me just as I begin to release. He grabs me. Not gently. He seizes my face in both hands, forcing me to look at him while the Wildspont roars through my veins.
“You do not get to leave me,” he says, voice breaking with fury and something deeper. “You do not get to decide that your life is expendable.”
The power howls, begging for direction.
“I can end it,” I whisper, tears burning my vision.
“And end yourself with it,” he snaps.
Behind him, the chamber collapses further. Purna mages hold crumbling wards. Vrakken warriors clash with summoned void-constructs tearing through the walls.
Malrend rises again, blood at the corner of his mouth but smiling.
“Love,” he says almost mockingly. “How inefficient.”
Zeidan turns his head slightly, and something changes in him. Not rage. Something colder. Ancient...
“You wanted bond magic dismantled,” he says quietly.
His shadow expands, not outward, but downward, into the stone itself. The Vrakken lineage sigils along his arms ignite fully, answering not just him but the bond.
“You miscalculated,” he continues.
Then he drives his hand into the fractured floor. Shadow and root collide. Instead of collapsing the Wildspont, we redirect it.
Together.
I understand instantly. He is not stopping me from releasing the power. He is anchoring it, like he always did with my magic. The bond becomes conduit instead of fuse.
Wildspont energy surges through us both, but instead of imploding, it lashes outward into Malrend’s siphon lines. The artifact channels beneath the chamber ignite in reverse polarity.
The trafficking conduits. The blight feeders. They burn. Malrend’s expression shifts for the first time. His composure cracks.
The siphon network destabilizes violently. Void-fire flickers erratically as the root-system rejects foreign control. The chamber ceiling splits open, daylight spearing down through ruptured stone.
“You will regret this,” Malrend snarls as the floor gives way beneath him.
Zeidan does not hesitate. He lunges. They collide mid-fall as the central dais collapses into the burning root-chasm below. The impact disappears into dust and shadow.
For a heartbeat, I cannot feel him. The bond goes quiet.
Then… It flares back to life, violent and alive.
Zeidan erupts upward from the collapsing pit, wings shredded but functional, dragging Malrend by the throat. He slams the Dark Elf into a collapsing pillar and drives shadow through the sigils carved into his armor.
Malrend screams in fury. The siphon conduits detonate. The entire understructure caves. Ron grabs me just as the outer walls give way, hauling me toward the breach.
“We have to go!” he shouts.
I twist back in time to see Zeidan tear the final sigil free from Malrend’s chest. The Dark Elf falls into the collapsing root-fire below. Whether he dies or vanishes, I cannot tell.
Then the chamber implodes.
We barely make it out before the temple collapses into itself in a roar of stone and screaming roots. When the dust clears, Nytheria is burning. Not just the temple. The coven grounds.
The blight backlash tears through weakened wards. Buildings collapse. Sacred groves fracture. The Wildspont pulses violently, unstable but no longer siphoned.
We stopped Malrend’s network. But we did not save the coven. I drop to my knees in the ash and stare at the ruins of everything I was born to protect.
Zeidan lands beside me, bleeding, shaking, wings half-shredded but still standing.
“I failed,” I whisper.
He kneels in front of me, gripping my shoulders.
“You are alive,” he says.
The words are not comfort. They are relief. I let myself break, because I can’t take it anymore.
The silence after the battle is the worst part.
It presses in where noise and chaos used to be, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the crackle of dying fires and the distant collapse of stone.
The coven grounds lie in ruin behind us, pillars shattered, sacred trees scorched down to blackened stumps, wards torn apart so completely I can still feel their absence like missing teeth in my skull.
I am alive.
The realization comes slowly, in pieces.
My hands shake where they clutch the front of Zeidan’s armor.
My lungs burn each time I breathe. My magic feels scraped raw, as if I’ve bled it down to the marrow.
But my heart is still beating. His is too.
I can feel it through the bond, steady and fierce, anchored to mine like a promise that refused to break.
Then the grief hits.
It is not a single blow. It is a collapse.
I turn my face into his chest and the sound that leaves me is not dignified.
It is not controlled. It is the sound of a woman who has just watched her world burn and lived when others did not.
I sob for the elders who stood their ground.
For the Purnas who were taken before we could reach them.
For the Wildspont, still wounded and trembling beneath the land.
For the coven that raised me, fractured beyond recognition.
Zeidan does not tell me to be strong. He simply holds me.
His arms come around me fully now, shielding, solid, his chin resting against the crown of my head as if anchoring me to something real while everything else falls away.
I feel his breath hitch once, just once, and I know he is carrying his own losses too, his warriors, his people, the title torn from him like a limb and thrown aside by those who feared what he represented.
“We can’t stay,” he says quietly, not to rush me, but because he knows I need truth more than comfort. “Not here.”
I lift my head enough to look at him. There is blood dried along his jaw, shadow still clinging to him like a second skin, wings half-manifested as if his power hasn’t decided whether it is safe to rest yet. His eyes search mine, fierce and worried and achingly human.
“Is Malrend—” My voice breaks.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I felt him retreat. Not fall. If he’s alive, he’ll disappear into the underworld until the ground cools. We won’t find him now.”
The words should terrify me more than they do. Instead, I feel a strange, hollow clarity settle in.
“Then we survive,” I say. “For now.”
Something shifts in his expression, not relief, exactly, but respect. Acceptance. He nods once.
“There is a place,” he says. “Hidden. Old. Beyond Velcryn influence and beyond the coven’s broken reach. A sanctuary guarded by those who stepped away from power when it became poison. Arvyn and Evalie lead it now.”
The names stir something faintly hopeful in me. A reformed coven. Not untouched by loss, but not ruled by it either.
“Will they take us?” I ask.
“They already have,” he replies softly. “I sent word the moment you disappeared."
“Let's go,” I say.
Zeidan doesn't need to be told twice.
We pass through narrow passes and folded wards that feel less like barriers and more like gentle refusals, magic that asks intention rather than demanding proof.
The land here feels quieter, not deadened, but resting.
When we finally arrive, the buildings are small, stone and wood entwined, lanternlight warm against the encroaching dusk.
They give us a room without ceremony. It is simple. Clean. A bed large enough for two. A basin of water already warming by the hearth. No questions. No demands.
The door closes behind us and I feel my knees give.
Zeidan catches me instantly, easing me down onto the bed as if he has rehearsed this moment a thousand times in his head.
He kneels in front of me, hands gentle as he cleans the blood from my arms, my shoulders, my throat.
The touch is reverent, not because I am fragile, but because he knows exactly how close I came to breaking.
“I thought I lost you,” he says quietly, not looking up.
“I’m here,” I answer. “So are you.”
That seems to undo something in him. His hands still. He presses his forehead briefly against my knee, breathing as if grounding himself in the fact of me.