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The pain was like fire, blazing at the end of her wrist, and Thea’s remaining hand shook so badly that she dropped her dagger as she scrambled back from the shadow chasm, dragging herself through her own blood.

The vine blight hissed and sputtered, coiling around itself, her severed hand still in its writhing tendrils.

Tasting bitter bile at the back of her throat, Thea nearly slipped in a puddle of crimson as she stood, swaying as she clutched the bloodied stump of her wrist to her chest. The warmth of her own blood seeped through her clothes as she panted through the pain and fought the urge to retch again. Spots swam in her vision, but she stayed upright.

She had made one unimaginable choice after the other. Storm wielder or Warsword. Her lover or her friends. Her hand or her life… And now she stared at several more.

Wilder or Wren or Cal or Kipp or Malik.

Her magic was gone. Her sword was gone. Malik’s dagger was gone. All that she had left was Audra’s jewelled ceremonial dagger, a letter opener against the monsters before her.

Pain was a constant now, so prominent that she could hardly tell where one wound ended and another began. Her clotheswere in tatters, crusted with blood, her braid half undone and equally matted. Her ankle threatened to give out beneath her, while blood still pulsed from the stump of her wrist.

Althea Embervale was in pieces, and yet… And yet she stood, clutching the tiny blade in her one remaining hand.

A spark of energy teased her fingertips, a whisper of what once was.

It should have been impossible, but there was no denying that sputter of power from within. She knew its song better than she knew herself.

Tilting her head to the sky, she embraced it all. The love, the pain, the reforging of herself amid the chaos. And there, barely able to stand, blood still flowing from her wounds, Thea decided that she would sacrifice no more.

She would not choose. She had been made to choose her whole life. No longer.

She had proven to within an inch of her life that she was strong of body, strong of mind, and at long last, strong of heart.

Thea gripped the dagger and raised her chin in defiance, ready to meet her fate.

‘Even the smallest blade can make a difference,’ she murmured.

She tasted rain in the wind. And then, the air crackled.

Thea breathed her first easy breath, recognising the call of the storm, recognising the surge as her own power, of which she had barely scratched the surface.

Until now.

I am the storm. The words echoed in her mind like a mantra.

Thea took hold of that kernel of magic inside and let it bloom, let it unfurl into something fierce and unforgiving.

Searing agony lanced through her as lightning cauterised her wounds, her flesh burning into newly formed scars. Thea let out a warrior cry as her magic charged through her, through thefrozen lake beneath her. Brilliant white bolts danced across her skin and erupted into the air around her.

Ready to unleash herself upon the world, Thea drew upon her magic and used it as the extension of herself that it was, calling bolts of lightning into being and taking aim at the remaining reapers.

Their shrieks became the melody of her storm, only serving to enrapture her thunder and lightning further, the snow swirling around her, around the entire lake just as she commanded.

Her lightning cleaved the chains holding her friends apart, and she let the storm rage on, refusing to contain it or herself for anyone or anything. She forged the chaos in the sky and the thundersnow that now swarmed, engulfing the frozen lake.

With one hand, Thea summoned the might of ancient storms, everything around her crackling and churning with dark clouds, swelling with unimaginable energy, energy that she alone could master. Bolts of blue-white lightning exploded in countless forks, spearing the ground below, illuminating the frozen wasteland and banishing the shadow portals across the lake’s surface in a near-blinding blaze.

‘I am the storm.’

Finally, she speared the screaming reapers with her lightning, burning their hearts with storm magic from the inside out.

One. Two. Three.

She conjured and wielded the storm, chasing the wisps of darkness with a torrent of snow and lightning, brilliant flakes careening across the land in a deadly gale.

Thea stood at the heart of it all, splitting the sky open, inviting the blizzard to dance with her storm, charging each flake of snow with her magic, causing them to glow with a vibrant iridescence, before drawing them together in a halo of brilliantlightning. The force of it swallowed everything, an electrifying crown of her own making.