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Baltisse doesn’t pause to reply. She is already crawling to the blackened heap of Esra, and Ryon moves with her.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” Baltisse hisses.

“Can you–”

“I don’t know, Ryon,” she bites, pulling Esra’s head into her lap.

Ryon’s heart beats rapidly enough to burst. “Try.Now!”

“SHUT UP!” Baltisse yells and places her hands on Esra’s chest.

But Ryon sees how her hands shake, how ashen her cheeks have become. She’s expended so much power, too much power already.

And Esra looks… gone. Ryon barely recognises him. His face is burnt and mottled, his flesh gleaming pink in places and bleeding. There are terrible wounds to his body. Places where the fabric of his clothes has melted to his skin.

Esra. Never dull, dreary, or punishing. Never devoid of exuberance or colour. Consistent. Loyal. Everything the world around him so often isn’t.

Save him,he thinks desperately at the mage.Please.

He feels Dawsyn at his side, sees her hand reach out to take Esra’s.

Her fingers, dirtied and callused, intertwine with his, palm against palm.

Baltisse draws breath the way the moon draws the tide, and there is another blinding eruption of light.

Ryon’s eyes slam shut, but he hears the mage’s moans as she stretches whatever power remains to its thinnest extent. If she should stretch it too far, it will be Ryon who lives with the guilt of it. He is the one who has pushed Baltisse, after chastising her for pushing herself.

If she should die to save Esra, it will be no better.

Baltisse’s light burns on, harsher, hotter, and she is growling, shouting in spells, urging her power onward, onward, to its peak, and it sounds desperate, tenuous.

And it won’t work.

Esra won’t be saved.

Baltisse will die.

Ryon reaches blindly, his eyes unwilling to pry open. He means to shout for her to stop, but suddenly, impossibly, the light doubles.

He feels the force of it knock him onto his backside, hears the curses of Rivdan, perhaps Hector, too. But the light is scolding, prying through the slits of his lids, burying into his sockets. He cradles his face on the ground.

“BALTISSE!” he yells, sure that she will not, cannot, hear him. “STOP!”

And then the light is gone. The presence of magic lifts, and all that remains of it is distorted sight as Ryon blinks away the brightness. He hastens back to where Esra ought to be, crawling blindly. “Baltisse?”

One or both?His mind demands.One or both?

For it cannot be neither.

The glare blanketing his sight dulls in painful increments, but even after all becomes clear, it takes a while longer to understand what he sees.

Esra’s body lies still.

Baltisse slumps over his head, her hair obscuring him, shoulders trembling.

And upon Esra’s chest, stacked and still prickling with light, are the mage’s hands. And Dawsyn’s.