Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
SOREIA
The creature dies mid-lunge, its body crashing into blighted earth before it can complete its attack.
I anchor the ending without thinking. My magic flows outward, silent and absolute, and the divine spark that animated the construct simply ceases. No shimmer of regeneration. No desperate attempt to reform. The death takes hold like roots sinking into stone.
Kaster doesn’t pause to verify the kill. He’s already moving toward the next target, blood streaking his forearms, heat radiating off his skin in visible waves. Three more constructs emerge from a collapsed barn fifty meters ahead, and he accelerates to meet them.
I follow at my own pace. No need to rush. No need to conserve power for the frantic retreat that used to define my existence.
We’re not fleeing anymore.
We’re eliminating.
The corrupted terrain spreads around us like a wound that forgot how to heal.
The monsters built this place to intimidate. To display their dominance over mortal flesh.
Now it’s becoming their graveyard.
I count seventeen kills since dawn. Eighteen, as Kaster finishes the trio from the barn with concentrated force. He breaks the first with raw force, tears the second apart before it can bring its talons to bear, catches the third trying to flee and ends it with a precision that borders on surgical.
The whole engagement takes less than a minute.
I step forward, magic rippling outward to claim the bodies. Three separate anchors, three endings locked into place. My power responds like an extension of my own heartbeat—steady, rhythmic, inevitable.
No cost. No burning in my veins. No sensation of years peeling away from my lifespan.
This is what Anchor magic was meant to be. This is what I was meant to be.
The thought carries weight I haven’t fully processed yet.
“East,” Kaster says, his voice carrying across the distance between us. He indicates a cluster of ruined structures with a blood-streaked hand. “More activity. Larger forms.”
I move to his side, close enough that his body warmth bleeds through the air between us. The closeness is automatic now—not because the bond compels me toward him, but because his presence has carved a space in my existence that nothing else fits.
“Failed God-Beast variants?” The constructs we eliminated yesterday still haunt the edges of my awareness. Massive, unstable, burning themselves apart in their desperation to end us.
“Possible.” His attention stays fixed on the eastern structures. “The variants look rushed. Incomplete designs, like they were shoved into existence before they were ready.”
“Good.”
He glances at me. A brief flicker of attention, though his focus never fully leaves the threat assessment.
“You sound pleased.”
“I am pleased.” I study the terrain ahead, marking potential ambush points and defensive positions out of long habit. “Rushed defenses leave gaps. Careful preparation doesn’t.”
His mouth curves—not a smile, not quite, but close enough to register. “Pragmatic as always.”
“One of us needs to be.”
The eastern structures contain seven constructs. Three standard scouts, two executors, and two variants that defy easy classification—twisted masses of divine flesh that look hastily assembled, like the god couldn’t decide what form would be most effective and combined several at once.
Kaster handles the heavy threats. The executors engage him with the frenzy of creatures that know they’re outmatched, their massive bodies moving with speed that contradicts their bulk. He adapts mid-combat, adjusting his approach to counter their tactics before they fully form.
I watch him work.
Not with fear anymore. Not with the anxious hope that he’ll survive long enough to protect me. The dynamics have shifted in ways I’m still mapping, but one thing has clarified with absolute certainty:
He’s magnificent.
It’s an observation, clinical and precise. He moves through violence like water through a channel—adapting, flowing, finding the path of least resistance while delivering maximum force. Every strike is purposeful. Every movement serves a function.
He doesn’t fight to prove dominance. He fights to end threats.
And right now, I’m watching him end seven of them.
My part comes after. When the constructs fall, broken and bleeding divine ichor into corrupted soil, I move among them like a harvester claiming crops. My magic reaches into each body and declares the ending permanent.
The world agrees with my judgment.
One by one, the shimmers of regeneration that should be rebuilding these creatures simply... don’t materialize. The divine power that animated them has nowhere to go. My anchoring has closed every door, sealed every escape route, made death absolute in ways even gods apparently didn’t plan for.
Seven kills. Seven endings. Seven fewer threats standing between us and the source.
I finish the last anchor and look up to find Kaster watching me.
His eyes track my movements with an intensity that has nothing to do with combat analysis. Heat flickers behind the focus—hunger barely leashed, want that he’s been directing into violence but can’t entirely suppress.
I hold his gaze without flinching.
Recognition passes between us in that moment. Understanding of what we’ve become, what we’re capable of when we stop fighting separately and start fighting together.
The bond hums in the back of my awareness, but it’s not the bond that makes me cross the distance between us. That’s my own decision.
I reach him and press my palm flat against his blood-streaked chest. Feel his heat pulsing beneath my hand, the steady rhythm of a heart that’s been beating for centuries and will beat for centuries more.
My heart will match that rhythm now. That’s what the mating means. What it guarantees.
“Soreia.” My name in his mouth carries weight. Significance beyond the syllables.
“I could walk away.”
The words emerge without planning. A statement of fact I’ve been circling since we left the cave where everything changed.
His expression doesn’t shift. “You could.”
“The bond doesn’t chain me to your side. The magic functions regardless of proximity. If I wanted to establish distance, find my own path, build an existence that doesn’t involve constant violence—” I pause, watching his face for any reaction. “—nothing would stop me.”
Silence holds between us. The tainted terrain offers no distraction, the remaining constructs too distant or too wary to interrupt.
“Why tell me this?” His voice has gone still. Controlled in a way that suggests effort.
“Because I need you to understand. I’m not here because I have to be. I’m not fighting beside you because the alternative is worse. I’m not staying because I lack options.”
“Then why?”
The question lands between us like a blade. Direct. Unflinching.
I don’t soften my answer.
“Because watching you tear those things apart is the most satisfying experience of my entire existence.”
He stares at me.
I let him stare. Let the words settle into the space between us, uncomfortable and raw and entirely true.
“You...” He stops. Regroups. “That’s what keeps you here?”
“Part of it.” I let my hand fall, but I don’t step back.
“You make the world safer when you kill. Not theoretically, not philosophically—literally, measurably safer. Every construct you eliminate is one less threat to innocent people. One less weapon the gods can point at targets who can’t defend themselves. ”
“I don’t kill for altruism.”
“I know. You kill because you’re a predator and they’re prey.
The morality is incidental to you.” I shrug.
“It’s not incidental to me. I spent years watching Anchor witches burn themselves out trying to make deaths stick against creatures that should have stayed dead.
Watched the world keep getting worse because nothing we did made a difference that lasted. ”
“And now?”
“Now I watch you tear apart divine constructs, and I anchor the endings, and they stay ended.” The satisfaction in my voice surprises me with its depth. “That’s not nothing. That’s exactly what I was supposed to do with this bloodline, before the cost made it unsustainable.”
His grip closes on my hip. Drags me closer with pressure that’s become familiar—proprietary, unapologetic, certain of its welcome.
“You said part of it.”
“What?”
“You said watching me kill is part of what keeps you here.” His grip tightens fractionally. “What’s the rest?”
I consider the question. Consider the multiple answers I could offer, each true in its own way, none entirely complete.
“I like the way you touch me.”
His eyes darken. The hunger that’s been simmering beneath the surface rises closer to visibility.
“And I like the way you move through a fight.” I continue, voice steady despite the heat building between us. “And I like the way you don’t treat me like I’m fragile, even when I was dying. And I like the way you look at me when you think I’m not paying attention.”
“You’re always paying attention.”
“Yes.” I press closer. Feel the hard length of his body against mine, the barely-contained fire threatening to escape his control. “That’s how I know you look.”