35. Chapter 35 #2
Violence became our rhythm.Rhythm became our devotion.
And we were the prayer.
They call her a Rupture, his thought bled through the tether. But they don't see it. She is the deliverance forged in steel.”
I faltered. Just for a heartbeat.
He covered me. Seamlessly. Like he'd been doing it his whole life.
Stop, I screamed at the bond. Stop showing me that.
But we were already spinning again, already killing, already moving in perfect terrible unity—
I noticed it mid-strike.
The soldier I’d killed three moves ago didn’t lie where he fell anymore.
His body was coming apart.
Flesh broke down to pale grit. Armor collapsed inward. Bone dulled, then went soft, then dispersed—carried outward in a low, drifting cloud that settled over the stone.
Nothing fae remained.
From the powder at the center, something caught the light.
Crystal pushed up through the residue, slow and deliberate. A stem first. Then petals—gold and shadow, sharp-edged and bright—unfurling where his heart had been.
I spun. Another body. Another bloom. And another.
Every soldier we'd cut down was transforming. Flesh to glass. Blood to stem. Death to impossible, terrible beauty.
We're doing this.
Not the Void. Not some outside force.
Us.
Our harmony was turning corpses into gardens.
Horror clawed at my throat.
For three heartbeats, the fighting thinned around us—a pocket of stillness in the carnage, nothing but Eryndor's breathing behind me and the soft, crystalline sound of petals still forming. Growing from the dead like they had all the time in the world.
This is what we make together.
And I didn't know if that was a promise or a warning.
But the dance didn't stop. Couldn't stop. The Hunter was still out there, and soldiers kept coming, and if I broke the rhythm now—
Reinforcements. An archer. On the ridge.
I saw him too late. My free hand was already at the vambrace—two stars loosed wild, off-line, snapping back to my forearm as the archer nocked. I was mid-strike, my back exposed, no time to turn—
Eryndor moved.
He threw himself between me and the arrow. The impact tore through the tether—a spike of searing pain that made my vision flash.
The shaft punched through his shoulder. He sucked in a breath through clenched teeth.
He kept fighting. One-armed, bleeding, he kept fighting.
His pain hit me through the bond—every heartbeat sending fresh agony through his shoulder, every movement tearing the wound wider. He didn't slow down. Didn't falter. Just kept killing, kept protecting, kept putting himself between me and anything that tried to get close.
She's still standing, his thoughts bled through. She's still standing. She's still standing.
I wanted to scream at him. Wanted to grab him and shake him and demand to know what he thought he was doing, throwing himself in front of arrows that were meant for me.
Then the Hunter appeared in front of me, his blade raised for a strike that would take my head.
I parried. He pressed forward. Our weapons locked.
One thought. That's all it would take.
The void hummed at the edges of my fingertips. Hungry but patient. Ready to swallow him whole if I asked it to.
But the canyon. The way his blade had struck stone. The war behind his mask—fighting us with one hand and fighting himself with the other.
And the command rune.
But, If he couldn't pull back—if the King's leash was too tight, if the thing controlling him wouldn't let him leave—
Then I would do what had to be done. Quick, clean and even merciful.
But he would not touch my family. That was the line.
Cross it, and I would unmake him before he drew his next breath.
His mask was solid metal. Seamless and unbroken.
But I felt his eyes on mine.
The space between us compressed and something happened.
His body jerked and shuddered.
"Little—" The word came out broken. Like it was being dragged from somewhere deep inside him.
I drove my boot into his chest. He flew backward, hit a tree, and was gone—vanishing into the forest like smoke, leaving his remaining soldiers behind—statues of crystallized flowers rising from the earth.
I stood in the center of destruction.
"Gods above."
Maxx's voice. Distant. Awed. His eyes shot between me and Eryndor, like he was trying to decide whether he'd just witnessed a miracle or a disaster.
"I've never seen anything like it. It was like you were sharing one mind."
He shook his head slowly, still cataloguing. Then his eyes snagged on the soldier behind me—the one I'd taken down without my hands. The one in pieces at the edge of the bloom field.
"And that." He pointed with his flail. "That thing you did.
With the—" he gestured at his own elbow, knee, shoulder, a full-body shrug of a motion.
"Every hinge a weapon. I said it on the road from the mill and I'm saying it again.
That move is officially called the Silver Spiral, Flameheart.
I'm naming it. It's named. You can’t fight it. "
I didn't have it in me to argue but I did smirk at him.
Serenya had come down from the oak. She stood at the edge of the crystal field, her mirror still clutched in white-knuckled fingers, and I saw her reach toward one of the blooms—then pull back, as though afraid of what she'd read in it.
Dreadscale noticed. He walked to the nearest flower, knelt, and touched it first. Tested it.
Then looked up at her and gave the smallest nod—safe.
"Fire can forge or it can devour. It doesn't care which." Dreadscale ran a finger along one crystallized petal, thoughtful. "That instinct to create? Feed it. Starve it, and your power will only know how to unmake."
Eryndor was leaning against a tree at the edge of the destruction, the arrow still lodged in his shoulder, his face pale with blood loss. His eyes found mine.
I crossed to him.
"You stupid, reckless—" I grabbed the shaft. "That was meant for me."
Stop it. Stop making me owe you things.
Every time he bled for me, it filed down one more edge of the rage, and I couldn't afford that.
The rage was the only thing standing between me and the girl who'd knelt beside his bed in the dark and wanted to trace his jaw with her mouth.
That girl would forgive him. That girl would let the braid and the fever and the arrow outweigh a thousand children in the mines. I wasn't going to be that girl.
He didn't answer. His hands—shaking, blood-slicked—reached for me instead. Frantic. Checking my ribs, my arms, my stomach.
"What are you—stop. Stop." I shoved his hands away. "You have an arrow in your shoulder and you're checking me for scratches?"
"Did it graze you?" He ground out.
"No."
His face relaxed—just slightly.
I wanted to hit him.
"Good," he murmured.
I punched him in the face.
His head snapped sideways. Blood from his split lip joined the blood from his shoulder and he looked offended, which made me want to hit him again.
"You don’t get to do that!" I grabbed the arrow in his shoulder. "Don't you dare do that again."
I will do it every time, the tether whispered. I will throw myself in front of every arrow, every blade, every apocalypse. I will do it until there's nothing left of me to throw.
His thought. Not mine. Pushing through before he could stop it.
I yanked the arrow out.
He made a sound like dying. His eyes stayed on my face the whole time.
"Stop looking at me like that," I hissed.
"I can't."
I dropped the arrow and walked away. Left him bleeding against the tree.
The tether pulled taut between us.
“Secure his hands, Dreadscale,” I called over my shoulder.