Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
SOREIA
The dream comes that night.
Not death this time. Not the usual visions of endings and silence.
I wake gasping, the Anchor crackling at my fingertips, reaching for a threat that isn’t there.
Kaster crouches beside me. Close. His hand hovers near my shoulder—not touching, but ready.
“Nightmare?”
“Different.” I force my breathing to slow. Force the magic to subside. “Not warning. Pressure.”
“Pressure toward what?”
I don’t answer. Don’t know how to explain the sensation of being pushed toward a cliff I can’t see.
His hand lands on my shoulder. Brief. Steadying.
The contact sends heat racing through my nervous system. Not sexual. Not exactly. More like recognition—my body acknowledging his presence as significant in ways my mind hasn’t fully processed.
“The dreams are changing.” I say it quietly, a confession meant for darkness. “They used to show me death. Now they show me...” I trail off.
“Show you what?”
You. The word almost escapes. I catch it at the last moment.
“An ending I don’t understand yet.”
He accepts this without pressing further. His hand remains on my shoulder a moment longer—steadying, stabilizing—before withdrawing.
“Sleep. I’ll watch.”
“You watched last night.”
“And I’ll watch tonight. And tomorrow.” His eyes gleam in the darkness, reflecting light that shouldn’t exist. “Until the dreams show you their meaning, I’ll make sure nothing interrupts them.”
The declaration shouldn’t comfort me. Shouldn’t make the pressure behind my eyes ease slightly.
It does anyway.
I close my eyes and let the darkness take me.
Dawn arrives gray and cold, ice groaning its greeting to another day of dissolution.
We move before full light. The terrain ahead shows more evidence of the freeze’s collapse—crevasses splitting the landscape, old structures scattered like toys, the remnants of a world that existed before the ice swallowed it whole.
The Executors find us two hours after sunrise.
Three of them. Emerging from behind an ice formation that should have been too small to hide creatures their size. They’ve been waiting. Tracking. Using the terrain’s instability to mask their approach.
Kaster moves before I fully register the threat.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t warn me. Doesn’t need to.
We’ve fought beside each other enough now that words are unnecessary.
The first Executor dies fast.
Kaster takes it apart with focused violence—claws extended, dragonfire flaring, the whole thing compressed into seconds rather than minutes. The creature’s regeneration activates immediately, divine power knitting flesh back together even as it falls.
I’m already moving.
My magic stutters in the unstable field, catching and releasing in unpredictable bursts. But I know this working. Know it in my blood and bone. The low hum builds in my throat—almost subsonic, more sensation than sound.
The interference fights me. My power wants to scatter, disperse, lose cohesion in the corrupted magical field. I force it to hold. Force it to obey.
Stay dead.
The command carries through my power, wrapping around the Executor’s essence, binding the death in place. The knitting stops. The creature stays down.
One kill. Permanent.
The exertion costs me. My vision goes grainy at the margins, pressure building behind my eyes. But I don’t have time to recover.
The second Executor lunges for me.
Kaster intercepts before I can react. His body slams into the creature’s midsection, driving it sideways, away from my position. They tumble across the ice—dragon and Executor, locked in combat that shakes the ground and cracks the unstable surface beneath them.
I turn to face the third.
This one is smarter than the others.
It doesn’t charge directly. Doesn’t give me a clear target. It circles, obsidian eyes tracking my movements, waiting for an opening.
I’ve seen this behavior before. Hunters used similar tactics in the ravine. But the Executor adds inhuman patience to the strategy—the willingness to wait indefinitely for the perfect moment to strike.
My magic builds slowly in this corrupted field. The hum that should flow easily catches in my throat. I have seconds, maybe less, before I can anchor anything.
The Executor seems to sense my vulnerability. Its circling tightens. Closer. Closer.
The ice cracks beneath us. A warning that neither of us heeds.
It lunges.
I dodge left. Barely. Its claws slice air where my throat was a heartbeat ago. The momentum carries it past me, and I use the second of separation to push more power into my building working.
Not enough. Not yet.
Behind me, Kaster roars. The sound shakes ice from nearby formations, sends cracks racing through sheets that were barely stable to begin with. His second Executor is down—not dead, regenerating, but out of the fight temporarily.
The third Executor pivots, tracking my new position. I’m running out of terrain. Running out of time.
Come on. Come on.
My power finally releases. The low hum becomes a vibration in my bones. The interference parts, momentarily, like clouds revealing sun.
The Executor lunges again.
I don’t dodge this time. I stand my ground and let the magic pour through me.
Stay dead.
The creature’s momentum carries it forward. Its claws reach for my throat.
Kaster’s hand closes around its skull from behind.
The Executor dies in the space between one heartbeat and the next—his violence and my anchor combining into a single, decisive ending. The creature crumples. Doesn’t regenerate. Doesn’t rise.
Two down. Permanent.
The third—Kaster’s second target, the one that was reforming—tries to flee.
We don’t let it.
He cuts off its escape route. I force my depleted power into one final working. The combined assault takes the creature apart in seconds. My anchor binds the death before the body can even begin to heal.
Three. All permanent.
Afterward, we stand in a field of permanent death.
Three Executors. Gone. Not temporarily defeated—truly ended. Their essence dispersed, their forms destroyed beyond recovery.
The anchoring cost me. The unstable field made it harder. Blood drips from my nose—not much, but enough to notice.
Kaster’s wounds are worse. Cuts across his torso, his arms. One deep gash along his ribs that bleeds freely. He ignores them.
“That needs attention.”
“I’ll heal.” He surveys the bodies. The permanent death we made between us. “Three kills. All of them stuck.”
“The magic here made it harder. I had to force the anchoring.” I wipe blood from my upper lip. “In stable territory, I could have done it cleaner.”
“But you did it.”
An acknowledgment, not a question.
I look at the bodies. Three weapons sent to end me.
They failed.
Not because of me alone. Not because of Kaster alone.
Because of us. Working in concert. Moving without discussion. Fighting as a single unit.
“Partnership,” I say quietly.
Kaster’s gaze finds mine. The same recognition I’m experiencing reflected back. The same understanding of what we’ve become.
“Partnership.” He agrees without inflection.
The word sits between us. Inadequate for what it describes. Accurate, nonetheless.
We turn southeast and keep moving.
The ice groans beneath our feet. The sky threatens weather that may or may not come. The gods have lost three more pieces.
Good.
Let them send more.
We’ll kill them all. And they’ll stay dead.
We make camp as darkness falls.
The terrain has shifted again—less ice, more exposed earth. Gray ground that’s starting to remember color. The freeze is losing its grip on this territory.
So are the gods.
I position myself against a rocky outcropping, pulling my cloak tighter against the evening chill. The temperature has dropped again—the wild fluctuations of this unstable zone following no pattern I can predict.
Kaster builds a fire. Small. Controlled. Enough heat to take the edge off the cold without announcing our position to every monster within miles.
The flames dance. Shadows shift.
I watch him through the firelight. The way he moves. The economy of every action. The certainty that seems built into his bones.
“You’re staring.”
His voice carries amusement I didn’t expect.
“I’m observing. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
I don’t answer. Don’t trust myself to explain what I was actually seeing.
He lowers himself across the fire from me. Near enough that his heat adds to the flames. Near enough that I see the wounds on his torso beginning to close—dragon healing doing what medicine never could.
“The dreams,” he says after a long silence. “You said they’re showing you an ending you don’t understand.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to understand it?”
The question catches me off guard. I turn it over, examining its edges.
Do I want to know what the pressure is pushing me toward? Do I want to see clearly the point of convergence that the dreams keep obscuring?
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Part of me wants clarity. The rest...”
“The rest?”
“The rest suspects that understanding will require action. And action will change things that can’t be unchanged.”
He absorbs this without comment. The fire crackles between us.
“Whatever the dreams are showing you,” he says finally, “whatever ending they’re pointing toward—I will be here.”
The words are simple. Unadorned. No promises of protection or declarations of devotion.
And yet.
They mean more than flowery speeches ever could.