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And then something breaks through the canopy. A shape blacker than night, wings spread wide against the fractured sky.

Sacha’s raven.

“Look!” I point, voice thick with emotion.

Mira’s head snaps up, following the direction of my arm.

It flies toward us. Erratic, flickering, shedding fragments of itself as it comes. Its outline warps and wavers, each beat of its wings disintegrating at the edges. What remains of Sacha’s familiar seems to be unraveling mid-flight. Yet it flies with singular purpose, unerring in its approach.

And something about it feels like it’s Sacha’s last act of defiance against fate.

“That—” Mira chokes. “That’s not—” She doesn’t finish. Not disbelief. Shock.

Itdoesn’t slow.

It dives. Straight at me.

I flinch, raising my arms to shield myself.

But there’s no impact.

The raven passes into me. Notthrough. Into. Shadow turns fluid, sliding across my chest and vanishing beneath my skin. And in that moment, Ifeelhim.

Determination. Purpose. Unyielding control, even in death.

Andrage.

Then pain detonates inside me.

Blinding. Absolute.

A scream rips from my throat. My back arches. My vision whites out. Fire floods my veins, cold and burning both at once. Every nerve ignites, every cell fractures. Blood roars in my ears. The world vanishes, and images slam into my mind, disjointed and chaotic.

Shadow unraveling. Void swallowing form. The crystal’s flare. The net’s disruption. The scream of the raven.

And then?—

The moment when the power tore free of him and left nothing behind.

The complete and utter destruction of the Shadowvein Lord.

Something inside me breaks. Splinters apart with a sound that shouldn’t exist. And light erupts.

Power bursts outward in a shockwave of pure, unbridled energy. Mira is thrown backward, tumbling against the ground several yards away. Weapons scatter, knocked from hands by an invisible force.The ground trembles beneath us, rocks shifting, small fissures opening in the earth itself.

Thunder cracks the sky open, rolling like the voice of a vengeful god. Clouds boil into existence, swallowing the stars, transforming twilight into absolute darkness broken only by flashes of white fire.

Wind howls through the trees, bending trunks that have stood for aeons. Lightning forks across the sky, then slams down into the center of the clearing with a deafening crack. A second bolt strikes just behind Sereven. The shockwave sends soldiers sprawling, and for the first time, the High Commander stumbles. The hand holding the crystal dips. His mouth opens, perhaps to issue an order, but no sound comes. Instead, his head swings toward the hill.

His expression shifts into alarm. Confusion. The beginning of fear.

But I don’t care. The air around me grows thick with the pressure of an electrical storm. With something far more dangerous than the weather.

I am blind. I am deaf. I amconsumed.

My skin burns from within, cracking open along invisible seams. Silver light pours from the fissures, illuminating me from the inside out. A shriek tears from my lips.

Barely human.