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Give it more.

The goddess’s voice wailed from inside the storm, echoing from all corners.

Give it everything.

And Taly obeyed. She had no choice. Her head tipped back in offering as she tunneled further into that awesome power.

Your hands are mine now.

The storm churned and twisted, wind laced with golden fire, lightning streaking through the darkness like veins of molten aether.

You are my fury made flesh.

The words wrapped around her like chains, and the strength of them flooded every inch of her.

She was fury, nothing else.

It was what she’d been made for.

Faces surfaced within the chaos—warped, contorted, caught between past and present. A deluge of death that should never have been allowed to happen.

Twenty-seven dead in the fire that took Vale. Sacrificed to get to her.

Her mother’s laughter. Silenced.

Aimee and Aiden’s father. Gone.

And the others—those who had fallen today, nameless but no less hers to carry.

The storm swallowed their screams, folding them into the winds like a chorus of the lost.

Taly saw it now—what she had cost them. She saw the lives that might’ve unfolded, futures stretching forward, whole and unbroken, if only she had never been there to blot them out.

No more.

The words rose up in her. The defiance. The single-minded rapture of being pointed at something andunleashed.

Not everything could be undone. Not yet. But today was hers.

This time, she chose where the blade would fall.

Azura had always said it was impossible to resurrect a person once their soul had already set sail across the Neither. You had 30 seconds at best before they left the Black Dock and set sail for Moriah.

Taly had never attempted a resurrection. Much less tried to cheat Death of his quarry. But she was beyond rules. Beyond the natural order.

She wasfury—and she would tear the world apart with it.

She could feel each soul as it departed. High above the city—somehow lifted from her body—she saw their anima rising, threads of light stretching skyward until they snapped.

It was decided.

As the storm howled and the city continued to flicker through the ages, reality forming and re-forming with her at its epicenter, Taly reached beyond herself.

She pushed past the Weave—into the void outside it.

Into the inky black of the Neither, where she found the felled souls crowded on Charon’s ferry.

She pulled them back. Boat and all.