Page 28

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

All I feel is Einar. His weight heavy against me, his blood soaking into my clothes, still warm, as if some part of him hasn’t realized he’s gone.

“Please,” I whisper, fingers curled into the fabric of his cloak. “Come back to me. Please, not like this.”

But it is like this. It always was. Our predecessors before never could break this curse. What made me think I could?

Light erupts again—brighter this time, flooding the sanctuary with searing warmth. Silver tendrils spiral into the air, curling through the broken columns, etching ancient runes across the walls. Orange fire swirls in their wake, not consuming, but cleansing.

The curse is unbinding itself.

I can feel it unraveling deep inside me like a second heartbeat being pulled apart thread by thread.

It hurts. So much. Not in my body, but in my soul.

Memories play before my eyes. They’re mine and also not mine. Echoes of battles long past. Of hunters walking into fire. Of wolves howling to mourn what they could never understand. Rage, desperation, and hope twisted into weapons.

And beneath it all—him. Einar’s strength. His sacrifice. The moment he stepped into my blade not because he gave up on life, but because he believed in mine.

The light pulses one final time then bursts skyward, a column of silver and flame stretching to the stars.

Silence fills the air.

Magic crackles across my skin. My hands tremble, not with grief now, but with new power. Balanced and tempered.

I don’t shift or burn. But something has changed.

The ground is still trembling beneath my knees when the air shifts.

Not the sharp, violent tremor of the curse breaking.

Something softer, like the ground itself is sighing, releasing tension it’s held for centuries.

Dust motes dance in the dying light of the sanctuary’s magic, settling on the bloodstained stones like snow.

Far off wolves howl. But it isn’t the same as before. There’s no bloodlust in it. No blind hunger driving them to hunt, to kill, to feed the endless appetite of the curse. The sound carries on the wind like a question half-formed, like creatures waking from a dream they can’t quite remember.

It sounds… confused. Lost. I know the feeling.

I rise slowly, leaving the sword buried in the dirt beside Einar’s body. My legs shake beneath me like a newborn colt’s, but I don’t fall. Not this time.

The moonlight glances off my skin, and from the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection in a broken shard of sanctuary glass.

The image wavers, fractured across multiple pieces, showing me in fragments—an eye that’s more amber than brown, skin that seems to shimmer between human pale and something wilder, fingers that end in nails just slightly too sharp.

Hunter, wolf, and Secret Keeper. For all the good any of that does me.

I’m now an orphan. But also something whole the curse couldn’t break, claim, or destroy. Something new.

The thought should comfort me. Instead, it feels like another kind of prison—being the only one of my kind, carrying the weight of what I’ve become alone.

The scent of burnt magic rises like ash as the black sigils along the ruins begin to fray and disappear.

They peel away from the stone like old paint, dissolving into nothing more than memory and shadow.

Ripple effects spread out—wards destabilize across Mirendel, ancient barriers fail, the very foundations of the old world crumble.

I feel them like spider-silk threads snapping in the distance, each one a tiny death, a small ending that adds up to something enormous.

The movement’s hold is fracturing.

All those people—all those families torn apart by the curse, all those lives shaped by its hunger—they’re waking up to a world where the rules have changed. Where the thing that defined them, that drove them, that gave their pain meaning, simply doesn’t exist anymore.

Will they thank me for it? Or will they hate me for taking away the only purpose they’ve ever known?

Footsteps sound behind me.

The noise jolts through me like lightning. The particular rhythm of someone who’s been running hard and trying not to show it, the way Harek always did when he was worried about appearing weak.

I turn just as he crests the ridge, and the sight of him nearly brings me to my knees again.

He’s breathless, his chest heaving beneath his torn shirt.

Blood stains his sleeve—not his own, from the way he’s moving, but fresh enough that whatever fight he came from isn’t long past. His hair is wild, eyes wide with something between relief and devastation, and there’s ash covering his skin that speaks of fires and battles and desperate dragon rides through the night.

He looks like he’s aged years in the hours since I saw him last. “Eira!”

My name breaks on his lips like a prayer answered and a curse fulfilled all at once. His gaze sweeps over me—over the blood, the torn clothes, and the way I’m standing like I’m not quite sure I’m real.

Then he sees Einar on the ground.

His stance stiffens.

The knowledge hits him like a physical blow.

His face goes through a dozen expressions in the space of a heartbeat—shock, grief, understanding, and something that might be guilt.

His hands clench into fists at his sides, and I can see him fighting the urge to demand answers, to ache for my loss, to gather Einar up and somehow will him back to life.

But Harek has always been the steady one. The one who holds the pieces together when everything else falls apart. He just… absorbs it.

For a long time, neither of us speaks.

Silence stretches between us like a chasm, filled with all the things we can’t say.

The weight of what’s been lost, what’s been gained, what’s been changed forever.

I can hear his breathing, still ragged from his run, and the distant sound of settling stone as the sanctuary continues its slow collapse.

Somewhere in that silence, I realize I’m shaking. Not from cold or fear, but from the simple effort of still being here. Still standing. Still breathing when Einar isn’t.

Then Harek moves to my side, each step careful, like he’s approaching a wounded animal. He cups my face, and I flinch before I can stop myself—not from fear of him, but from fear of my own reaction. What if his touch breaks whatever fragile control I’m holding onto?

But his fingers are gentle when they brush the ash from my cheek, warm against skin that feels like it might never be warm again.

“Is it over?”

The question hangs in the air between us.

Such a simple thing to ask, yet such a complicated question to answer.

Is it over? The curse is broken—I can feel the absence of it like a missing tooth, a hollow space where something fundamental used to be.

The movement that followed it will crumble without the magic to sustain it.

The wolves will learn to be wild again instead of weapons.

But Einar is dead, the sanctuary is in ruins, and Mirendel is wounded. I’m something new and strange and alone, and the world we’ve made will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

How do you measure the end of something that’s cost so much?

I don’t have an answer to give him. I’m not even sure what to make of the broken curse. Is it really broken? Or just sleeping, waiting for the next hunter or huntress to be born? I shudder at the thought, never wanting to pass this onto my future children.

Instead, I step toward Harek, and he wraps his arms around me like he’s afraid I’ll vanish too. Like I might dissolve into the same light that took the curse, leaving him with nothing but memory and regret.

His embrace is comforting as always, warm with life and hope and all the things I thought I’d lost. It smells like leather and smoke and the particular scent that’s always been purely Harek—oak leaves and steel and something indefinably safe.

For the first time since I knelt beside Einar’s body, I let myself feel small, protected.

“It cost too much,” I whisper against his chest, and the words taste like blood and salt and bitter truth.

“I know.” His voice rumbles through his ribcage, and I feel one of his hands stroke down my hair, careful of the tangles and the debris. “I know it did.”

There’s no platitude in his tone. No attempt to tell me it was worth it, or that Einar would have wanted this, or any of the empty comfort people offer when loss is too big for words. He just knows. Accepts. Grieves with me.

I don’t pull away. Not this time, because this is what Einar died for—not just my freedom from the curse, but my freedom to choose. To stay when I want to stay. To let myself be held when I need holding. To accept that some battles can only be won by accepting help.

“He saved me,” I say, the words muffled against Harek’s vest. “He saved all of us, and I couldn’t save him.”

“You did save him.” Harek’s arms tighten around me, and I feel him press his face into my hair. “You gave him a choice. You let him choose how his story ended. That’s the most sacred thing you can give someone.”

I want to argue with him. Want to rage that choice means nothing when the outcome is death, that freedom is a poor trade for a life. But I’m too tired, and he’s too warm, and somewhere deep in my bones I know he’s right.

Einar didn’t die because of the curse.

He died in spite of it.

And maybe that makes all the difference.

We stand there in the ruins of the sanctuary, surrounded by the debris of an ancient evil and the first fragile promise of something better.

The moon sets behind the broken walls, and in the growing light of dawn, I can see smoke rising from distant villages—not the smoke of destruction, but of hearth fires.

Of people waking up to the first day of a world remade.

It’s not the ending I wanted. But it’s the ending we earned.

And for now, with Harek’s arms around me and if the curse finally, truly dead, it’s enough. I don’t want to think about the alternative. Not now, maybe not ever.