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“WHAT THE F—”

“Shut up.”

“Why—”

One of Sel’s hands shoves me back against a dirt wall and the other claps down over my mouth. Hard . When I make a muffled noise, that hand presses even harder. “Shh!”

A loud snuffling noise reaches us from no more than two feet above my head. I suck in a breath, heart pounding so loud that I’m certain Sel can hear it. The question is, can the hellfox above us? I pray that it can’t, because if Sel has chosen to hide rather than fight, it means he doesn’t think he can beat these creatures. The other two foxes join the first. We freeze in the darkness while the three demons try to sniff us out. Their paws are silent, but the weight of their aether bodies sends soil showering down over my hair, down the back of my T-shirt. I shut my eyes and let the pebbles rain over my cheeks and Sel’s fingers, still covering my mouth. What if they start digging? My mind races, questions coming faster. Do they know the hidden door is here? Can they sense the aether that hid it, just like Sel can sense the aether that makes them solid? Wait. Why didn’t Sel notice the foxes approaching in the first place?

I must make some sound, or maybe my breathing changes against his knuckles, because he leans against me as if in warning. My eyes snap open—and meet his glowing yellow ones in the dark. Definitely a warning. One I can read clear as day: Don’t. Move.

After a minute, the sounds of their snouts grow distant as the hellfoxes move on. Sel waits a beat for good measure, then a second, and releases me. He snaps his fingers, and a small blue flame appears over his palm, illuminating the cave he’s put us in. No, not a cave. A tunnel.

“Let’s move.” He walks forward, the blue mage flame casting eerie shadows against wide exposed roots, crumbling dirt walls, and ancient beams holding the earth up above us.

“Did you just cast a tunnel?”

He doesn’t wait for me to follow, so I have to clamber after him to keep up.

“I revealed a tunnel. The tree trunk is the illusion, and an old one. The founders knew that the university would need to be a public front, so they dug tunnels for easy movement and caves for storage before the campus was built.”

“They dug all these to get around more easily?”

“These are fail-safes. Escape routes. The original Merlins warded them to mask aether so that Shadowborn cannot follow, even above ground.”

I tug my phone out of my pocket, but there’s no cell signal. The battery’s half-dead, so I could use the flashlight, but why drain it when Sel’s lighting the way plenty himself? “Why are we here and not the Lodge? You could have run us back there—”

He stops and fixes me with a glare. “I don’t know why those things attacked us or where they came from, and neither, it seems, do you. I’m not going to lead them right to Nicholas, even with the Lodge’s wards in place. If they’re anything like the hounds, they’ve caught our scent and will be on the hunt for us and no one else. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Why didn’t you sense them?”

His eyes drop and he keeps walking, pulling the only light source with him. “I’m not sure.” Something in his voice sounds off, like he’s holding back an answer he doesn’t want to say out loud.

“How did they steal your aether?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does that mean you’ve never seen a hellfox before?”

He turns around abruptly, and I almost stumble into him. “What are you?”

“I—”

“The truth,” he demands. “How did you generate that aether at your fingertips?”

I blink. “I didn’t generate anything—”

He regards me through narrow eyes. “This explains why you distracted me that night at the Quarry when I was hunting the isel. I detected a flare of your aether, then incorrectly assumed my senses had led me astray.” He leans closer with his flame fingers and points at my chest with his other hand. “But just a few minutes ago you were cooking aether like a furnace, right here .”

“Back off!” I push his hand away and cross my arms over my chest. The scent of even Sel’s small casting is filling the tunnel and clinging to my nose.

“You don’t know how to navigate these tunnels, and even if you could, you can’t open any of the doors to the surface,” he says, raising a brow, “so you may as well be honest. How did you do that?”

I want desperately to stomp off, but he’s right. I have no idea where to go. He watches me come to this conclusion as if dealing with a small, stubborn child who wants to protest their way out of bedtime. I resent everything about his face, from his ridiculous hair to his cambion eyes to the irritating smirk tugging at the side of his goddamn mouth. “I don’t know.” I can hear the petulance in my own voice, and I hate that, too.

Sel narrows his golden eyes to calculating slits while he inspects my face. A beat passes. “You’re telling the truth, at least about what you are and where your power comes from.”

“Yes! I am!” That much is true. I don’t know what I am and neither does Patricia. That I know about root, that my mother was a practitioner—I’ll never tell him those things.

His face takes on a considering expression. “My mother was a Merlin and an aether scholar. She studied demonology, Gate aether, runes, ancient texts, you name it. I was a precocious child, so I often snuck into her office to read her gramarye and those of Merlins before us.”

I grit my teeth, unnerved that he has brought up his own mother. Can he see that I was thinking about mine? “Is this story going somewhere?”

Sel ignores me. “With that upbringing, I, more than most, understand that our magic, if you will, is at its core and in its very fundamentals, a type of physics.” He extends his arm in the dim light. The tattoo claiming most of his forearm is a bold black circle divided by five lines into five equal segments. “Earth, air, water, fire, and aether, or what medieval alchemists called ‘quintessence.’ Every Merlin is taught that aether cannot be created or destroyed, only infused into a body or manipulated into temporary mass. So”—he looks directly into my eyes—“how is it that you, Briana Matthews, defy every law of aether that thousands of Merlins have followed for the past fifteen centuries?”

I stare back, scared of what he’s saying but refusing to show him that. “Maybe the Order doesn’t know everything about magic in the world.”

He hums and steps back. “There are a lot of things the Order does not know.” He walks ahead again without adding a word to that enigmatic comment, and I have no choice but to follow.

The deeper we go, the more the scent of rotting things overwhelms me. I tug my T-shirt up over my nose for relief, then pull it down again because it’s freezing here.

After a while I ask him the question that needs to be asked. “Are you going to turn me over to the Regents?”

He answers without looking back. “I haven’t decided. Why are you really joining our Order?”

He’s a Merlin. I can’t trust him with the real answer, and doing so would go against everything Nick’s specifically warned me about.

“You must be thinking up a lie,” he muses, “because you’re taking too long for the truth.” He stops again and gives me an expectant look.

I pull together the best possible, truest answer I can and look him right in the eyes while I say it. “I asked Nick to help me join because I need to understand the things I’ve seen, and I need to know why I see them.”

“What does Nicholas think of your ability to generate aether?”

“I… he doesn’t know about that. It’s only happened once before. Randomly, the night of the initiation. I thought it might be a reaction to the Oath. I didn’t know…”

He searches my face for a moment; then his lips curl back in disgust. “You truly have no idea what you are, and Nicholas, ever the hero, offered to help you find out by bringing you into an ancient secret society for which you had no background knowledge or training?”

I shift under his gaze. “Well, no, I sort of… pushed him to sponsor me. It was more my idea than his.”

He looks completely appalled. “You’re both fools, then.” He grimaces. “And so am I for believing you could be anything other than a silly little Unanedig girl.” He whirls away and stalks down the dirt corridor, muttering under his breath.

My jaw drops. “I thought you just said I defy ‘every law of aether’!”

“I did”—he sneers over his shoulder—“but I’ve been watching you closely all week, and apparently you can defy our laws while still being a silly little Unanedig girl. Congratulations.”

It’s our first meeting at the Quarry cliffside all over again—as soon as he’d found the isel, he’d dismissed me wholesale, because if you’re not Sel’s prey, you’re not worth his time. “Aren’t you supposed to… to… investigate anomalies?” I say, hurrying behind him, half-indignant and half-relieved.

“I investigate threats . Whatever aether ability you have, you can’t control it. You can barely kill a hellboar construct without the assistance of the planet’s gravity.” He huffs a low laugh, like he’s been laughing at me about that trial ever since it happened.

I’m so confused by Sel’s comments—and by how much he’s actually talking to me—that I stop walking right then and there. Had I misjudged him? Had Nick? Or is Sel operating just as he always has—treating any and everyone as a threat until his own eyes and facts prove otherwise? Up until an hour ago I qualified, but now… I don’t? I don’t expect to be so insulted, but after all this time and all those menacing glares suggesting bodily harm, I absolutely am. I’m insulted and annoyed. How dare he—

“Are you going to stand there gawking in the dark?” Sel snaps his left fingers to produce a new mage flame, and rotates his other wrist to extinguish the first so he can use that hand to steady himself against a low support beam. I follow his gaze ahead where there’s a rise of dirt that we’ll need to climb over to pass. “Or is there something else you’d like to add?”

“But—but what about all that talk of enthralling Nick?” I sputter. “And me making a fool of him? And… and… how I don’t belong? Were you just saying all of that to be an ass?”

“Oh no, I meant every word. Because I thought you were Shadowborn, I hoped to provoke you into an emotional response—the more negative the better, as that’s what demons are drawn to, even within themselves. It worked, in a way, albeit not how I’d imagined.” He sighs and turns around, a bored expression on his face. “As for Nicholas, if you cause a problem or distract him from his path to the throne, I won’t hesitate to turn you in to the Regents and tell their Merlins exactly how to trigger you so they can throw you in a lab somewhere and investigate you for themselves.”

A chill runs through me at his words. Is that what would happen? Nick never said—

“If you continue through initiation as you are, you’ll undoubtedly fail the combat trial, which means I only need to wait a few weeks to be rid of you. Something tells me that with Nicholas’s obnoxiously earnest assistance, you’ll find some loophole out of your Page status and the chapter as a whole. Maybe he’ll use your non-Vassal background to call for an exception to lifelong membership, claiming you were a failed experiment. Or perhaps he’ll call in a favor with his father, who will grant it out of guilt and appreciation that his son has finally accepted his birthright. Then, when you leave us, you won’t break the Code of Secrecy to expose the Order since you genuinely care for Nicholas, and doing so would make our once and future king’s life that much harder, hindering our mission. Do I have the right of it?”

My jaw almost hits the dirt floor.

“Thought as much. In short, right now I have far greater concerns than the ‘mystery of you,’ not the least of which is the likely imminence of Camlann. Such concerns also include the truly active threats to both Nicholas’s life and the chapter I am Oathbound to protect.” The type of threats that I will be punished for—painfully—if I don’t pursue them. He doesn’t add that next bit, but I hear it anyway, remembering what Lord Davis said about Sel’s Kingsmage Oath burning a hole through his throat.

“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head, “I just can’t get over the fact that you have definitely, definitely made violent threats on my life and now you’re just… not.”

“Don’t think for a second that I didn’t mean those violent threats, because I absolutely did. Still do, to be quite honest, should you force my hand. At the moment, however, I’m reconsidering how I described you,” he murmurs, climbing gracefully over the small hill. “I should have called you both silly and self-centered.”

I’m fuming, but I follow behind him in silence. I don’t want to give him any more verbal ammunition.

Sel seems to know where he’s going, because we stop at a small round cave about ten minutes later and he points up at an opening between the petrified beams. “This door will bring us to the surface on the far side of campus. There’s an illusioned lockbox of metal weapons in the woods if the foxes have found us somehow, but they’d have to possess more than the average demon’s sense of smell to track us here. I’ll go first, give the clear, and then I’ll pull you up.”

I nod and watch as he begins murmuring again. The Welsh sounds similar to the sounds of the swyns William says when he’s healing. Sel’s fingers create shapes in the air above our heads; then, in a reverse of the last time, he punches up with an open palm. A door above bangs open.

Sel crouches, leaps the vertical equivalent of twice his own height, and then lands on the grass beside the door. After a moment, he whispers that we’re clear and reaches down to pull me to the surface.

We emerge right where Sel said we would: a low stone wall marking the campus perimeter and beyond that, the thick forests that belong to the town of Chapel Hill. Sel’s back is turned to the base of the wide oak we’ve emerged from, twisting his palms to hide its aether door again, when the hairs on the nape of my neck rise in warning.

When Sel shouts, “Get down!” my body doesn’t argue. I throw myself to the ground in time to see a hellfox sailing overhead, its skull colliding with the side of the mighty oak with a loud, ground-shaking crack.

While it recovers, a second fox screeches, tackling Sel. It’s heavy paws and weight knock him to the ground. Like with the uchel, Sel and the fox are tumbling, rolling on the grass in a blur of black clothes and smoky-green scales.

Sel must glance my way, because he shouts in warning just as the third fox lunges toward where I’ve landed on the ground. His warning gives me just enough time to roll. Jaws snap by my right ear—where my face had been a split second earlier.

There’s an awful tearing sound, and a high-pitched yowl cuts the air.

Sel tore something off his opponent.

The fox beside me runs to its brethren’s aid, and then Sel is screaming, trying to wrestle both at once without calling any aether.

He needs weapons.

I scramble to my feet, jump over the wall, and sprint toward the woods and the illusioned lockbox. Between one blink and the next, a hellfox appears in front of me. Its head is split open in the middle, glowing-green aether oozing from the jagged crack: the fox that hit the tree.

I stumble. Trip over my own feet. My back hits the ground. Hard. The breath is knocked out of me.

I’m writhing in the grass, choking for air, my brain screaming for it, but I can’t scream. Not even when the hellfox lowers its head, pinning me with beady black eyes—and leaps.

It’s going to land claws out. Right on top of me.

I’m going to die.

I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for its heavy weight and razor-sharp teeth. In a desperate, untrained move, I swing one fist up in a wild punch.

There’s a howling scream, a deep squelching sound, a hot, burning weight on my chest, then blackness swells up to take me.

Something hot and thick is pulsing rapidly against my fingers.

I open my eyes, but I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing or feeling. My brain spins up, knits images together bit by bit:

I am alive.

The fox is on top of me.

My face is not between its teeth, because its jaws hang slack.

Its front two legs are limp in the dirt on either side of my body.

My left arm is a mess of green ooze. It runs in thick rivers down my skin and into the grass.

My right shoulder is twisted painfully. Because my fist and forearm have disappeared up to the elbow inside the fox’s chest.

And that arm is covered in red flames.

There are screams. Mine.

My vision swims. I yank my hand back, but something catches my wrist—a sharp-ended broken rib. Vomit rises, burns at the back of my throat. The screams start again. I’m wailing as I try to extract my fist from another creature’s body. Green, viscous ichor spills down its stomach. I pull too hard, and that’s worse. Its wound pours onto my chest, putrid and rotting, while its tongue lolls to the side.

Angry chittering, and a hellfox scream rends the air, but I’m on my back, and the dead demon on my chest is so very heavy. I watch upside down as another fox runs toward me with frightening speed. I push at the carcass, grunting and panting.

But before it can reach me, the sharp, pointy end of a black metal spear pierces its throat.

The fox makes a gurgling sound and hits the ground. Sel appears at its side and pulls the spear out, then uses all his strength to slam his weapon through the creature’s skull. It stops moving. Sel leans heavily on the end of the staff, breathing hard.

My eyes burn. The carcass is steaming aether now. A raspy groan escapes me, and Sel’s head jerks up. He’s at my side in half a second, his hands going to the creature’s shoulders.

“The other one—” I say, searching frantically.

“Dead. Hold on.” His dark eyebrows draw together as he assesses the dead fox and me. “It can’t dust with something living inside it. I need to pull it off you.”

My eyes are watering now, and I can’t tell if it’s from the aether or tears. I think it’s both. I have to cough twice before I can speak, and even then my voice is hoarse from screaming. “I can’t get my hand out… I can’t…”

He kneels low until his head is level with mine, pushing up at the shoulder so he can see where I’m connected to the fox. This close I can see he’s bleeding from a deep bite to his collarbone, barely visible under the black T-shirt now sticking to the wound. His magic—cinnamon-whiskey-smoke—flows over my face. I am so thankful for his scent that I moan, inhaling again so that it masks the hellfox’s stench.

“The hole is the exact size of your fist. You’ve got to close your hand,” Sel murmurs. He heaves upward until the creature’s chest lifts off me, and I gasp at the immediate relief. “Close your hand.”

I don’t move. I want to, but I just… don’t. I whimper and shake my head.

Sel’s golden eyes find mine. “Close your hand, Bree.” His voice is shockingly soft. “I’ll do the rest.”

I hold his gaze for a moment. Whether it’s because of his oddly kind tone or the fact that he called me “Bree” for the first time, I nod and close my right hand, crying out as my fingernails scrape past the still-warm heart. Sel stands and pulls the fox by the shoulders until my flaming fist emerges from the steaming hole between its ribs. When my hand comes free, there’s a wet, sucking sound and a fresh blob of dark green ichor falls down between my legs. I crabwalk backward, bringing my shaking left hand to my mouth.

Sel drops the carcass, and a second after it hits the ground, it explodes with a ripping sound into a fox-shaped cloud of green dust. Behind me, the other fox explodes too, like the aether has torn it open from the inside out.

The world is shaking again, and again I realize it’s me. Just me. I’m trembling uncontrollably. My pulse won’t slow down. My chest feels like it’s going to explode right along with the foxes.

I wrench over onto my hands and knees and vomit, heaving until burning bile eats at my throat and tongue.

Sel drops to his knees beside me. “You’re okay. They’re gone.”

They’re gone.

But I’m not okay.

I crawl away from the sick until I can twist to a seated position, resting my arms on bent knees. While I wipe my mouth with a clean bit of T-shirt, I watch Sel watching me.

His eyes trail over my head, my shoulders, my arms. “It’s fading.” I look down, and he’s right. The crimson light on my forearm and fist are dimming. The ichor caked on my knuckles breaks apart, cracking and crumbling between my fingers. After a moment, only a few black specks remain. “It… it’s acting like a shield,” Sel begins, his voice more filled with wonder than I’ve ever heard before. “Burning off the hellfox blood.”

He’s right. When the red glow goes, so does the rest of the liquid. I shake my head, disbelieving everything, everything that just happened to me.

Sel is in much the same boat, it seems. He stands up, his expression too confused to be accusatory. “What are you?” We stare at each other until we hear the shouts.

“Bree!”

“Sel!”

“Bree! Sel!”

I recognize the voices. Evan. Tor. “I found them!” Evan shouts.

I turn from my seated position to see the Squire jump over the wall and jog over to where we’re huddled together. A blond-haired figure streaks past him faster than the eye can track, and suddenly Tor is standing beside us.

Sel notices her speed too. “Are you—?”

“Awakened?” Evan finishes. “Yep. Tor went down about an hour ago. We took her back to the Lodge and called everyone in, but you two never showed up.”

“And you’re up and running already?”

“Accelerated metabolism, William thinks.” Tor grins, but then she notices what’s on the ground around us, sees me sitting there. “What the hell happened here?”

Evan notices the fading green piles too. “Is that Shadowborn dust?”

A new voice shouts to us from beyond the wall. “Did you find them?”

At the sound of Nick’s voice, Sel takes a step back, retreating. My eyes follow the movement, and Sel and I lock gazes. I watch his face shutter in real time from wonder and something I can only interpret as concern, to the grim neutrality of a soldier at war. And just like that, the Selwyn Kane from a few moments ago is buried under stone like a secret gone to the grave.

“Hey!” Nick jumps the wall and runs toward us, relief for both me and Sel plain on his face. Sarah follows close behind him. “Are you both okay? We didn’t know where the hell you were. Then Tor was Called, and—” Nick slows when he sees my bloodied arm. “No…” He’s at my side in a heartbeat. He reaches with gentle fingers for my left hand. When he rotates it, he hisses at the sight. The cuts are long and deep, running from elbow to wrist, and dirt and pebbles are sticking where my arm had pressed into the earth. I hadn’t noticed.

Tor curses under her breath, and she and Sarah share a brief look. I move to stand, but my knees aren’t cooperating. My entire body feels slow, heavy.

“I’m okay,” I rasp. Nick’s hand goes to my brow, his fingers pressing against my forehead, trailing down my neck and shoulder like touching me will give him the answers I can’t say out loud.

Evan toes at a pile of powder where one of the hellfoxes had dissolved. “There are three green piles. Sel’s hounds are blue.”

Nick leans around me to look at the pile himself. His blue eyes sharpen, and his jaw goes tight. “What happened here?”

No one looks at me. Everyone looks at Sel.

Selwyn Kane is an annoyed, slightly bored sorcerer for all that anyone can see. But I can see beneath that now. He’s nervous. Rattled. “Hellfoxes. Almost fully materialized.” He nods at the piles. “They stole the aether from my weapons. We went to ground, took the tunnels, but they found us somehow.”

Evan walks toward us, shaking his head. “But three? Working together in the same location at the same time? No Gate is big enough for three to pass at once. Where’d they come from?”

“They ambushed us at the graveyard.”

“Three Shadowborn ambushed you ?” Evan frowns. “You can sense a non-corp imp half a mile away. How did these demons catch you off guard?”

There’s a crack in Sel’s facade. When he doesn’t answer right away, I feel Nick tense beside me. “How did they surprise you, Sel?” he asks his Kingsmage.

Sel meets Nick’s eyes, and I know then why he didn’t fully answer my question in the tunnels. “I was… distracted.”

Tor’s anxious glance between Sel and Nick, Evan’s uncharacteristic silence, and the subtle clench of the fingers holding mine are all the warning we get.

Nick stands to face his Kingsmage. “Distracted? By what?”

Sel swipes his tongue over his lower lip, a nervous gesture that looks unnatural on his face. “We haven’t seen a Shadowborn uprising in two hundred years. If you were planning one, what would you do? Use a scout to disable us first? Knock us off-balance? What better time to disrupt our ranks than initiation? What better opportunity to break the Table before it’s gathered than to take out our king before he is Called?”

“Thinking like a demon now, Sel?”

Sel growls in frustration. “It’s my job to think like a demon.”

Nick’s brow furrows as he makes the connections. “What does this have to do with Bree?”

Sel meets his gaze head-on. “That first uchel wanted you , Nick. It called for the Pendragon. How did it know where to find you? A goruchel need simply to pose as a Page—act as a mole—to uncover that information, and it’s only a matter of time before a mole exposes themselves.” Sel swallows, and a shadow passes through his eyes, but he doesn’t look away from his future king. I give him points for that. “I decided to accelerate the process.”

Nick takes a step toward his Kingsmage. When he speaks, his voice is deadly quiet. “What did you do?”

The muscle in Sel’s jaw twitches, but he holds Nick’s gaze.

Another step. “ What did you do?”

Sel lifts his chin. “I could have called the hound off her at any moment—”

Using the momentum of his next step, Nick throws a fast, hard punch to Sel’s jaw. The hit knocks the sorcerer back into the same oak that stunned the fox. Nick must have put real power into his swing, because my ears ring with the crack of bone meeting bone. It all happens so fast—had to, to catch Sel off guard—that it takes a second for anyone else to react. Sarah yelps and Evan curses, but no one moves to step between them.

Sel is against the tree trunk, utterly still, his stunned expression warring with a visible urge to retaliate.

“Well, that wasn’t entirely fair, Nicholas,” he finally mutters. He pushes to standing and spits bright red blood onto the grass before dragging the back of his hand over his mouth. It leaves a crimson streak across his pale knuckles. “You know I can’t strike you in return.”

In a voice made of iron, Nick says, “Precisely.”

Sel’s eyes flash. His lips curl over bloodied teeth, then smooth over in the same breath. Fury, barely bottled.

My eyes dart between the two of them, king-to-be and his sworn protector. When they’d battled in the woods that first night, Sel had aimed for me, not Nick. The Kingsmage Oath means he can never intend to injure Nick without risking his own destruction, but it does nothing to prevent Nick from harming Sel. They’d grown up together with this power imbalance, but I’d never expect Nick to exploit it. Not like this…

Sel shrugs, like Nick’s violence is no matter, but tension radiates from his shoulders, the raised veins of his neck. He chuckles—then winces, bringing a hand to his chin. “Hm. You don’t have Arthur’s strength yet, but I think you almost broke my jaw. Imagine the damage you’ll do once you’re Awakened.”

“Is this why you wanted to be with Bree tonight? To threaten my Page with your constructs?” Nick’s fists shake at his sides. “To defy me?”

The Kingsmage scowls and looks away, and I see where the anger is truly directed: at himself. He slipped up and his abilities failed him—just like Lord Davis suggested that night in the woods. And here is Lord Davis’s son, bearing witness to that failure and punishing him for it.

I feel the urge to stand and defend him, but what would I say? I’m not a mole. I’m not an uchel. I don’t know what I am, but I’m not a threat to Nick. And yet… there’s something in me that recognizes something in him.

“Stay away from her,” Nick orders, his voice low. “Excalibur or not, Called or not, if you try anything like this again…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but consequences hang in the air where we can all imagine them. Nick raises his chin. “Do you understand me, Kingsmage ?”

“Yes.” Sel’s eyes darken until they go flat and unreadable. “My liege.”

Nick turns without another word and walks back to me. Everything about him is vibrating, with adrenaline or anger, I’m not sure, but when his eyes meet mine, they soften into the ocean I know. “Can you stand? We need to get you to William.”

I nod, but wave his hand away when he reaches to pick me up. “I can walk.” Still, he takes most of my weight easily with one arm wrapped about my ribs, and we turn in the direction of the Lodge. Tor and Sarah fall in on one side, and Evan on the other. Flanking us, I realize. For protection.

When we walk down the path, I’m the only one who looks back.

The Kingsmage and I lock eyes once more just as the three piles of Shadowborn dust swirl up in the air around him, then spark out of existence.