Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
SOREIA
The shrine rises from the dead landscape like a broken tooth.
Vaulted ceilings, partially collapsed. Stone walls carved with symbols no one remembers how to read.
A central altar sits at the heart of the main chamber, cracked down the middle and stained with residue that might be old blood or might be old worship.
Hard to tell the difference in places like this.
“Someone’s here.”
Kaster’s voice carries no inflection. Statement of fact. His attention fixes on a shadow moving near the altar—human-shaped, hunched, too small to be a threat.
The informant.
We’ve been tracking rumors for three days. Whispers of someone who trades in dangerous knowledge, someone who might know why the gods have unleashed their monsters specifically on us. The trail led here, to this abandoned god-site where faith went to die.
The figure straightens as we approach. Male, middle-aged, wearing the kind of layered clothing that marks extended time on the road. His eyes dart between us with the calculating awareness of prey assessing new predators.
“You’re the ones.” Certain. “The dragon and the Anchor witch.”
“You have information.” I step forward, putting myself between Kaster’s intensity and the informant’s obvious nerves. “About why we’re being hunted.”
“I have theories.” The man’s gaze flicks to the entrance we came through, then to the partially collapsed eastern wall, then back to us. Mapping escape routes. Smart. “Dangerous theories. The kind that get people killed for knowing them.”
“We’re already being killed.” I keep my voice steady. Unhurried. “Slowly. Systematically. Anything you know might change that.”
The informant’s eyes narrow. He takes in my appearance—the lean frame, the shadows beneath my eyes, the careful way I hold myself to conserve energy. Then he looks at Kaster, who hasn’t moved from his position near the entrance.
His expression shifts. Fear, yes. But also curiosity. And beneath that, a flicker of hope that might be more dangerous than either.
“You really don’t know, do you?” His voice drops. “What you are. What you could become.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
The informant studies me for a long moment. Whatever he sees in my face makes a decision for him.
“The Veiled One.” He says the name like it burns his tongue. “That’s what the old texts call it. A god that doesn’t rule, doesn’t demand worship, doesn’t care about temples or prayers. It designs things. Creates monsters to eliminate problems before they become threats.”
He glances again at the eastern wall—a quick, practiced check, the reflex of someone who knows that saying certain words in certain places has a cost. “They monitor sites like this. Old god-places where the information was stored. I’ve had twenty minutes in shrines before something comes through the wall. ”
“We’re threats?”
“You’re potential.” His laugh carries no humor.
“Anchor witches make death permanent. Predator dragons can kill anything they can reach. Separately, you’re manageable.
Inconvenient at worst. But when an Anchor bonds with a Predator—” He shakes his head.
“There are stories. Old stories. About what happens when those two bloodlines merge. The gods remember those stories, even if mortals have forgotten.”
“What happens?”
His gaze locks with mine. The weight of knowledge that has kept him running for years shows in the tension around his mouth, the hollows beneath his eyes. Knowledge that will kill him eventually, one way or another.
“Divine regeneration fails.” His voice drops to barely a whisper.
“Permanently. The things gods make to protect themselves—the monsters, the shields, the endless armies that reform no matter how many times you kill them—they stop coming back. An Anchored Predator can kill gods themselves. Make them stay dead.”
The words hang in the air between us.
“That’s why—”
He stops. His head turns toward the eastern wall.
I hear it a heartbeat later. Heavy footsteps. The scrape of armored bulk against stone.
Executor.
The wall explodes inward.
Stone shrapnel tears through the air. I throw myself sideways, rolling behind the altar as debris rains down around me. The impact drives breath from my lungs, sends pain lancing through my shoulder where a chunk of masonry clips me.
The Executor doesn’t pause.
It crashes through the rubble pile that used to be a wall, massive and armored and moving with purpose that has nothing to do with random violence. Its obsidian eyes scan the chamber once, twice—
And lock onto the informant.
They knew. The gods knew he was talking to us.
The man tries to run. Makes it three steps before the Executor’s talons close around his torso.
The scream that follows is the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
Not quick. Not merciful. The creature tears him apart piece by piece, methodical and patient, like it’s making a point. Like it’s sending a message written in viscera and agony.
I can’t look away.
The informant’s mouth opens and closes, words trying to form around the blood filling his throat. His eyes find mine across the chamber. Desperate. Terrified. Pleading for an ending I can’t give him.
My magic stirs, reaching toward him instinctively. Wanting to anchor the death. Wanting to make it stop.
Too far. Too weak. I can’t—
Kaster hits the Executor like a force of nature.
I’ve seen him fight before. In the ravine. On the mountain pass. Calculated violence designed to end threats as quickly as possible.
This is fury made flesh.
He doesn’t fight the Executor. He destroys it. Talons tearing through armor plating that should be impervious. Teeth finding gaps in the creature’s defenses. Fire—actual dragonfire, the first I’ve seen him use—erupting from his hands in concentrated bursts that melt armored metal.
The Executor fights back. Lands strikes that would kill anything else. Opens wounds across Kaster’s arms, his sides, his back. The divine poison seeps into each injury, that wrongness I’ve learned to recognize burning through his flesh.
He doesn’t stop.
He tears the creature’s arm off at the shoulder. Drives his claws through its eye socket. Rips out chunks of flesh and throws them aside like garbage.
The Executor falls.
Kaster doesn’t stop.
He keeps tearing. Keeps destroying. Long past the point where the creature stopped moving, long past the point where any tactical purpose ended. His hands reduce the armor to shreds. His fire chars what remains.
Pulp. That’s what’s left. Pulp and silence and the wet sound of violence continuing past all reason.
Fear would be reasonable. Horror at what I’m witnessing—the capacity for destruction, the complete loss of control, the dragon unleashed without restraint.
I feel neither. What moves through me instead is something closer to recognition—a loosening in my chest, a settling of something that has been braced against the world for a long time.
An understanding that this—all of this—happened because the informant died.
Because we lost our chance at answers. Because the gods took another piece of the puzzle and ground it into dust.
His rage isn’t random. It isn’t mindless.
It’s grief expressed in the only language he knows.
The violence ends.
Kaster stands in the center of the destruction, breathing hard, covered in divine blood that steams against his skin. His wounds are closing slowly—the poison fighting his healing, but losing. His hands shake with residual fury.
The informant lies in pieces near the eastern wall. What’s left of him. The Executor is a ruin of melted armor and scattered flesh.
The silence in the shrine is absolute. Even the echoes have died.
I push myself up from behind the altar. My shoulder screams protest—the masonry hit did more damage than I initially registered—but I ignore it. Pain is familiar. Pain I can handle.
Kaster’s back is to me. His spine rigid. His hands opening and closing at his sides, talons extending and retracting in cycles that speak to control barely regained.
I should stay where I am. Give him space to process. Wait for the violence to recede and the man to return.
I move toward him instead.
My feet carry me across the shattered paving stones. Around the puddles of blood. Over the debris from the collapsed wall. Each step brings me closer to a creature who hasn’t fully returned from the violence.
Dangerous. Stupid. Necessary.
I stop within arm’s reach.
His breathing is ragged. Harsh. The sound of a body pushed past its limits and refusing to acknowledge the fact. Heat radiates off him in waves—dragonfire still burning beneath his skin, looking for outlet.
My hand moves before I give it permission.
Fingers wrap around his wrist. Not tight. Not demanding. A steady pressure against the pulse that hammers beneath his skin, rapid and erratic and wrong.
He goes absolutely still.
Time stretches.
I hold his wrist and wait for him to pull away. To snarl at me for approaching while the violence still runs hot in his veins.
He doesn’t.
His pulse beats against my fingertips. Fast at first—the rhythm of combat, of rage, of destruction without end. Then slower. Evening out by degrees as the seconds pass.
I’m anchoring him.
The realization surfaces with quiet certainty. The same way I anchor death, make endings stick—I’m anchoring him. Grounding him. Giving him something solid to return to.
The Anchor hums beneath my skin, reaching toward him without my direction. Not to hurt. Not to heal. To connect.
His free hand moves.
I expect him to push me away. Expect distance, rejection, the instinct reasserting boundaries the rest of him won’t acknowledge.
His fingers brush my injured shoulder instead.
Light. Barely there. Tracing the damage with a touch so gentle, it might be imagination. The contact sends heat through my body that has nothing to do with dragonfire.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s minor.” True enough. A bruise, maybe cracked bone. Nothing that will kill me.
“You should have stayed behind the altar.”
“You were tearing yourself apart.”
His head turns. Not fully—not enough to face me—but enough that I see his profile in the dim light filtering through the collapsed ceiling. His features are carved from tension. His eyes still carry the remnants of fury, banked but not extinguished.
“I was killing the thing that killed our only lead.”
“You were killing yourself.” My fingers tighten on his wrist. His pulse jumps beneath my touch. “The wounds, the poison, the fire burning you from inside—you would have destroyed yourself along with it.”
Silence.
His breathing steadies further. The heat radiating from him drops from scorching to merely uncomfortable. The violence recedes another degree.
“Would that matter?”
The question arrives stripped of inflection. Genuine curiosity masquerading as casual inquiry.
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate. Don’t soften. Don’t pretend uncertainty. “It would matter.”