17. Sakura
SEVENTEEN
SAKURA
Time stops.
The siphon explodes in a blaze of light, and Torin—my Torin, my stubborn, poetry-writing, self-sacrificing idiot of a bear—is thrown into the trees and crumples to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
He’s not moving.
He’s not moving, and his face is gray, and there’s blood trickling from his ears and his nose, and Valesh is screaming about twenty years of planning, and reaching for a weapon, and I—
I stop holding back.
Right now, I need to be exactly what I’ve always been told not to be.
I need to be a disaster.
The storm erupts from me like a living thing.
Wind screams through the clearing—not a breeze, not a gust, but a hurricane compressed into a single devastating force.
It tears at Valesh’s hair, her clothes, her outstretched hand still reaching for the knife she dropped.
She staggers backward, thrown off balance by the sheer violence of the air itself.
I don’t stop.
Rain comes next—sharp and hard, each drop charged with elemental fury. It drives into her face, blinding her, stinging like a thousand tiny needles. The water responds to my rage, becoming a weapon instead of weather.
Lightning crackles at my fingertips. Not the uncontrolled sparks I’ve spent years apologizing for—these are precise. Intentional. Each bolt strikes exactly where I want it, scorching the ground at Valesh’s feet, herding her away from Torin’s fallen body.
“You think I’m an abomination?” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It’s the thunder before the strike. The pressure drop before the storm. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
I unleash everything.
The Overgrowth becomes my weapon. Wind tears through the trees, sending branches flying like missiles.
Rain pools and floods, turning the ground to treacherous mud.
Lightning arcs in patterns that would be beautiful if they weren’t so deadly—a web of electricity that closes around Valesh like a cage.
She tries to fight. Throws spells at me, dark magic that should hurt, should wound, should stop this impossible assault.
My wind catches her attacks and throws them aside like they’re nothing.
Because right now, they are nothing.
Right now, I am not a witch who creates unfortunate weather. I am not a disaster waiting to happen. I am not a problem to be managed or a chaos to be contained.
I am an elemental force, and I am furious.
The storm answers my rage. A wall of wind slams into her with the force of a physical blow, lifting her off her feet and throwing her across the clearing. She crashes into a tree—the same kind of impact she meant for Torin, for me, for everyone she wanted to destroy.
She doesn’t get up.
The other Preservers—the ones Torin didn’t finish—try to flee. My lightning catches them before they make it three steps. Not killing blows—I’m not a murderer, no matter how much fury burns in my chest. But enough to drop them. Enough to end the threat.
And then, suddenly, there’s no one left to fight.
The clearing falls silent except for the rain—softer now, gentler, matching my emotions as they shift from fury to fear.
Torin.