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Nothing .

The raven shrieks, one last piercing cry that seems to carry the weight of entire worlds, before dissolving into black mist, scattered like ashes on the wind.

Silence falls.

Absolute. Consuming.

He’s gone. A man who survived twenty-seven years of isolation. Who carved meaning from captivity. Who held me last night as if I were something precious, not just a means to an end.

My heart seizes in my chest, skipping several beats before slamming back to life with painful force. Time stretches, elastic and unreal. Too slow. Too brittle. I can’t breathe. Can’t swallow. Can’t believe what I’ve just seen.

The space where Sacha stood isn’t just empty. It’s wrong . A blackened circle in the middle of green, as if the world recoiled and folded in on itself. Like reality can’t bear to touch the place where he had existed.

The Authority soldiers hesitate, then surge forward, blades drawn. Searching. Hunting. Moving as though they expect him to reappear at any moment.

But that can’t be. Isn’t that what Sereven wanted?

My eyes move to the High Commander.

He hasn’t moved. Still standing at the edge of the circle. But the light from the crystal makes his face look inhuman—gaunt, distorted, shadowed in a way that doesn’t follow the shape of his skull.

I cannot move.

I cannot breathe.

Sacha is gone.

Gone. Destroyed. Erased.

The words tumble through my mind like broken glass, cutting deeper with each repetition. My mind refuses to accept what my eyes have witnessed. The more I think them, the less I can survive them.

This is wrong.

The Veinwardens need him .

I need him.

The truth crashes through me, brutal in its arrival. Too late to matter. Too late to change anything. After resisting what he’s become to me, the realization lands at the exact moment I can’t tell him.

This can’t be happening.

Not after the tower. The desert. The mountains.

Not after last night.

His hands on my skin. The shadows curling around silver light.

The moment we stopped hiding from each other, if only for a night.

I can still feel him—a phantom presence in my arms. The way he whispered my name.

The way his fingers traced the veins beneath the silver.

The way his mouth curved, ever so slightly, when I surprised him.

It was just beginning.

All those moments. All that trust. That fragile, stubborn, inevitable thing taking shape between us.

Gone.

Just gone.

As though he never existed at all.

His name burns in my throat. The memory of his voice. The arguments that became understanding. The stillness of him beside me in sleep. The shadows that danced when he let go.

Every heartbeat. Every moment. Ripped from me in a single instant.

My body is vibrating with an energy that threatens to tear me apart.

A strange pressure builds in the air around me.

My stomach twists. Nausea rolls through me in thick, suffocating waves.

I reach out blindly, gripping the damp earth beneath me as though I might fall without its anchor.

Something unseen, something vast, presses against my skin. It seeps into my bones.

It’s not just inside me anymore. It’s everywhere. Leaking from marrow to air.

Building. Growing. Demanding.

My breath stutters, trapped between a sob and a scream that would never end if I allowed it to start.

The sky darkens overhead, clouds thickening where moments ago there was only fading twilight.

Wind rises, sudden and sharp, rustling the trees in violent shivers.

The change feels connected to me—tied to my pulse, to the fracture splitting me open from within.

Lightning flickers inside the clouds, illuminating their depths with brief, merciless splendor.

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.

It doesn’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. Not through . Into. Shadow turns fluid, sliding across my chest and vanishing beneath my skin. And in that moment, I feel him.

Determination. Purpose. Unyielding control, even in death.

And rage .

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 am consumed .

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.

Barely mine.

The sound of something breaking apart and reforming simultaneously.

I am being unmade.

I am being remade .

The shadows that were once Sacha’s familiar merge with the silver light that’s been growing inside me.

The power swells, feeding on my grief, my rage, my refusal to let what happened be the end.

His essence, or what remains of it, floods through me, amplifying everything, transforming it beyond understanding, until even the storm knows my name.

Rain crashes down. Sheets of water that feel alive with purpose, with will. The storm doesn’t just reflect my fury. It is my fury. My loss. My vow.

I fall to my knees. The earth trembles beneath me, small stones bouncing with the vibration.

A sound emerges.

Not human. Not animal. Something beyond both.

The pressure peaks.

Light pours from my eyes. My mouth. My skin. Coalescing beside me.

My power expands outward in a second, more powerful wave. Trees at the edge of the clearing where Sacha fell are uprooted, torn from the ground by forces beyond nature’s understanding.

Authority soldiers scream as the edge of the wave catches them, lifting them and flinging them like broken dolls across the landscape. Bodies tumble, broken and lifeless, across the ground.

Yet Mira and Mishak remain untouched, as though the destruction recognizes them as allies.

Severen staggers two steps backward, arm lifted to shield his face.

The glow from the crystal flickers, destabilized by the backlash as the storm lashes out in every direction.

His composure breaks. His grip no longer absolute .

And beside me, something monstrous, something beautiful is building.

A figure forms from storm and fury. Not conjured. Not imagined. Born of this moment. Elongated limbs. A head too large. Too strange. Eyes that glow like lightning trapped in glass, reflecting the storm tearing through me.

It towers over me where I kneel, unnatural and magnificent. A god in the shape of a nightmare.

Primordial. Hungry. Ancient beyond reckoning.

Its gaze locks onto mine, and recognition lances through me. As our eyes meet, something snaps into place with such force I gasp.

No words. No thoughts. Just knowing.

The creature from the Veil Mists. The mist stalker that haunted the valley. It wasn’t hunting us. It was waiting.

For this.

It was drawn to me. To the silver threaded through my blood. To the shadow Sacha gave me. To the storm I’ve become.

My awareness reaches outward. Past the boundaries of my body. Past sight. Beyond sound.

I feel the land. The wind. The roots in the soil. The charge in the air. The storm above and beneath.

All of it is mine.

No.

All of it is me .

My pulse thrums in time with thunder. With lightning that splits the sky in two. With rain that drowns the world in sheets of silver fire .

I am the storm, and the storm is me. A living force unbound by flesh, no longer merely human. No longer entirely mortal.

But beneath the fury, beneath the storm that could tear the world apart, there is grief.

Overwhelming. Inescapable.

Sacha is gone. And part of me was buried with him.

The part that was just beginning to trust. To hope. To believe that there might be something beyond survival.

The part that dared to reach. That dared to believe. That dared to … love.

My gaze moves over the hill, and stops on Mira. She and Mishak are kneeling to my left. Their faces are transformed. Not just by fear, but by awe.

Their hands are pressed to their hearts.

Reverence. Recognition. Protection.

“From the ashes of shadow …” Mira’s voice trembles, words spilling from her lips like a prayer. “The storm shall rise.”

Mishak, kneeling beside her, completes the phrase. “When shadows lengthen and dawn falters, the Vein shall flow once more.”

In my mind, another voice answers—one that’s not mine, but lives within me now.

Where shadow leads, storm will follow.

I feel him in the storm. In the darkness that’s merged with my light. In the fury still rising with every breath I take. As if part of him survived, woven into the current of power now burning through me.

And around me, the storm rages. It answers my chaos. It answers my loss. It answers the void left behind by Sacha’s destruction .

Lightning splits the sky, and strikes the clearing where Sereven stands again. Once. Twice. A third time. Each one forcing him to retreat as the elements bend to my will.

Mira lifts her head, her lips forming a word. A whisper.

But it carries through the howling wind like a sentence passed.

“Stormvein.”

It settles into me.

Becomes part of me.

I am no longer Ellie Bennett from Chicago. No longer just a woman pulled unwillingly into another world.

It’s not just a name.

It’s a prophecy.

A promise.

A threat .

I lift my hands, and the storm answers. Lightning bridging the gap between heaven and earth. Between what I was and what I’ve become.

Between the woman who entered the tower, and the fury that now stands on the hill.

Between the life I’ve lost.

And the vengeance I will claim.

Until I arrived in this world, I didn’t know magic existed.

Now it flows through me. Shadow and storm, memory and wrath. A living testament to the man they tried to erase from existence.

The Authority took Sacha from me.

And for that, they will pay with everything they have.

The End

Stormvein is coming.

Trust me.