Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
SOREIA
The creature’s arm punches through the ice fall, and Kaster meets it with fire.
I watch from the ground where he left me—back against frozen stone, head throbbing from the gash at my temple. The cramped passage fills with dragonfire and the stench of burning flesh. The creature shrieks—a discordant howl from its fused throats—pulls back, reforms. Pushes through again.
Kaster doesn’t give ground. Every inch of space between the breach and where I lie is territory he refuses to surrender.
My magic gutters weakly in my palms. I try to gather it—try to shape an anchor working that might help—but my power slips through my fingers like water.
The exertion from earlier has depleted me beyond anything I’ve experienced.
My reserves are empty. My body is running on stubbornness and not much else.
Get up.
I push myself higher against the wall. The world tilts. Steadies. Tilts again.
The creature breaks through.
Ice explodes inward as the abomination forces its bulk through the collapsed passage. Its body has changed—narrower now, compressed to fit the gap it couldn’t breach before. Even trapped, even cornered, it adapted.
Kaster intercepts it before it can reach me. Fire and claws and the concentrated brutality I’ve witnessed a dozen times now. The passage is too narrow for the creature’s full mass, which gives him an advantage he exploits ruthlessly.
But the thing heals. Reforms. Keeps coming.
And Kaster is already damaged. I see it in the way he moves—favoring his left side, slower than he was hours ago. The wounds from the main canyon haven’t closed. Blood still seeps from the gash across his back. His body isn’t keeping pace with the damage.
Neither is mine.
I force myself to stand. Use the wall for support. My legs tremble beneath my weight, muscles that have carried me through countless miles of hunted territory now threatening to give out entirely.
“Stay back.” His voice carries over the sounds of combat. Not a request.
I stay back. Not because he told me to, but because I’m not certain I can take three steps without collapsing.
The fight compresses into the narrow space—dragon and abomination tearing at each other in a corridor barely wide enough for either. Stone cracks under the impact of bodies thrown against walls. Ice shatters and reforms and shatters again.
I watch with the clinical detachment of exhaustion. Counting wounds. Calculating odds. My mind runs the numbers automatically, the way it always has—survival mathematics that my bloodline carved into my consciousness before I was old enough to understand what survival would cost me.
Kaster is faster. Stronger. More vicious than anything this creature has faced.
The creature is endless. Patient. Willing to absorb any damage to achieve its goal.
Me.
The truth becomes undeniable as I watch the abomination’s overlapping faces track past Kaster toward where I stand. Every time he drives it back, its attention returns to me. Every opening it seeks, every gap it exploits—all of it angled toward my position.
This creature was built for me. The divine poison. The ability to counter dragon attacks. The relentless focus that ignores easier targets.
This creature was made to kill me. Kaster is collateral—a problem to solve before reaching the prize.
And obstacles can be removed.
The fight shifts.
Kaster catches the creature’s primary limb—the one that’s been reaching for me—and tears it free. The abomination screams. Ichor sprays across the walls, the floor, his face. He doesn’t stop. Drives deeper. Rips into the mass of stitched flesh with a fury that borders on mindless.
I need to help. Need to drag myself forward and use the dregs of magic I have left to anchor the thing’s pieces before they regenerate.
My legs won’t cooperate.
The cold has seeped too deep. The exhaustion has claimed too much. I’m a spectator in my own survival, watching the man who refuses to let me die fight a creature designed specifically to kill me.
Move, damn you.
My body doesn’t listen.
The creature feints.
Kaster reads it—I see him adjust, anticipate—but the feint isn’t meant to deceive him. It’s meant to create an opening. A fraction of a second where his body is committed to one direction while the abomination moves in another.
Its arm extends past him. Reaches for me.
I try to move. My legs refuse.
Talons rake across my shoulder. Tear through fabric and flesh and muscle, scraping against bone with a sound I’ll hear in my nightmares—if I live long enough to have them.
The pain is immediate. Blinding. White-hot agony that steals my breath and my balance in the same instant.
But beneath the pain—
Wrong.
My magic recoils. Twists inward. Screams in a register I’ve never heard, a frequency that bypasses my ears and resonates directly in my skull.
I hit the ground without remembering falling.
The wound burns.
Not the ordinary heat of injury—this is different. Chemical. Invasive. Hungry. The sensation spreads from my shoulder into my bloodstream, racing through my veins with a purpose that has nothing to do with natural infection.
Poison.
My bloodline recognizes it before my mind does. The power that has defined my existence—the Anchor blood that makes endings permanent—writhes beneath my skin. Fights an intrusion it can’t expel. Claws at the toxin like a trapped animal claws at cage bars.
Divine poison. Designed for witches. Designed for Anchors. Designed for me.
I’ve heard of this. Stories passed between covens in whispered warnings, tales of weapons the gods created to destroy specific bloodlines.
Toxins that don’t kill the body first—they kill the magic.
Unravel it at the source. Strip away the power that makes a witch dangerous, then let the flesh fail afterward.
The unraveling has already begun.
I feel it—threads of bloodline magic that have been woven into my cells since before I was born, now being pulled loose one by one. The anchor power that costs me years of life with every major working, that burns through my reserves like fire through dry wood—it’s dying.
And when it dies, so do I.
Kaster roars.
The sound shakes ice from the walls. Fills the cramped passage with fury that borders on physical force. Not the controlled violence I’ve grown used to.
This is anguish shaped into sound. The roar of a creature watching the thing he refuses to name slip away from him.
Through my dimming vision, I see him drive into the abomination with renewed savagery.
Fire pours from his wounds as much as his hands—his own body burning to fuel an assault that can’t be sustained.
The creature staggers under the onslaught, its adaptive defenses overwhelmed by sheer, devastating force.
He’s destroying himself to save me. Spending strength he doesn’t have. Fighting with a desperation I’ve never witnessed from him—not when the Executors cornered us, not when the canyon tried to crush us, not when any of the previous horrors threatened our survival.
Because I’m dying.
The thought arrives with strange clarity. No panic. No denial.
This is how it ends.
I’ve dreamed of this moment.
All those visions—claws in my ribs, power failing, the world going silent—they were leading here. Showing me the inevitable.
The dreams never revealed a way out because there was no way out.
I could have run in any direction. Could have sought any ally, any shelter, any alternative to this frozen canyon and the dragon who refuses to let me go.
The ending would have found me anyway.
This is the dream’s conclusion.
The Anchor gutters. Flickers. The power that has burned through my body for years—shortening my life, costing me more with every use—goes quiet. Not depleted. Not resting.
Dying.
It unwinds inside me. Threads of bloodline magic pulled loose with surgical precision. The toxin works methodically. Targeting the foundations of my power. Dismantling what makes me an Anchor with the same patient inevitability the abomination showed in hunting me.
Without it, I’m a human body. A fragile thing of flesh and bone that can’t survive what’s been done to it.
My heartbeat stutters. Skips. Resumes with an irregular rhythm that I recognize as the beginning of systemic failure.
The creature retreats.
I hear it—fire erupting, stone fracturing, the abomination screaming as Kaster drives it back toward the ice fall. He’s winning. Forcing it away from me, back toward the blocked passage, fighting for every foot of frozen ground.
Too late.
The poison doesn’t need the creature anymore. It’s already inside me, doing what it was designed to do. The abomination could die right now—could burn to ash and scatter to the wind—and it wouldn’t change what’s happening in my blood.
I’m past the point where killing the monster matters.
My vision narrows. Darkens at the edges. The cold that has been a constant companion in this frozen canyon seeps deeper now, past skin and muscle into the core of me, into places that should never be cold.
At least I killed some of them.
The thought surprises me. In my final moments, that’s what surfaces—satisfaction at the things I helped end. The Executors whose deaths became permanent because I anchored them. The divine regeneration that failed when I made it fail.
I did what I was made to do. Even if it’s ending now. Even if the gods built a weapon specifically to unmake me.
I still made some of them stay dead.