Her tiny hand—so small, so impossibly fragile—reached up and touched the cord. Power flared. The cord didn't need to be cut. It dissolved, the energy within it flowing into the child like the last drops from a bottle, then dissipating into nothing. The separation was instantaneous, surgical, complete.
Jasmine went limp in Althander's arms, her breathing shallow, her skin too pale, her heartbeat irregular. She'd given everything—not just energy, but her very life force—to bring this child into the world.
"Jasmine," Althander choked out, laying the infant gently on the ground so he could focus on his wife. "Jasmine, stay with me. Please."
But the Council hadn't stopped. They'd watched the birth with a mixture of horror and awe, but their resolve hadn't wavered. If anything, seeing the child's power firsthand had only confirmed their worst fears.
"It's done," Garrett said, his voice flat and final. "The child lives. Which means she must be contained."
One of the mages stepped forward, hands already weaving patterns in the air. A binding spell, ancient and powerful, designed to lock away supernatural abilities until a child was old enough to control them. It would cripple her. Make her no different than a human infant, helpless and ordinary.
The baby, still lying on the ground where Althander had placed her, turned those golden eyes toward the approaching mage. And she pushed.
Not physically. Energetically. She expelled power in a focused blast that caught the mage square in the chest and launched him backward into a tree twenty feet away. The impact made a sound like thunder. The mage didn't get up.
As the echo of the impact faded, something shifted in the infant. Her golden eyes—those molten, otherworldly eyes that had glowed with such fierce power—began to change. The transformation rippled across her irises like water disturbing still glass, the brilliant gold fading, softening, settling into hazel brown. A warm brown, flecked with green and gold, as if traces of what she'd been still lingered beneath the surface. The change took only seconds, but everyone who witnessed it felt the significance of what they'd just seen.
"Restrain the child!" Garrett roared, shifting into his wolf form. "Now, before she—"
But two things happened simultaneously.
First, Jasmine opened her eyes. They were different now—drained of the silver-green luminescence they'd carried throughout her pregnancy, faded to ordinary brown. The reservoir was gone. Empty. Her daughter had consumed every drop of power that had resided within her mother for thirty years, used it all in a desperate bid for survival. And the effort of that transfer, combined with the trauma of the accelerated birth, had broken something fundamental inside Jasmine's body.
She was dying. Althander could see it in the way her breathing stuttered, in the blood seeping from places it shouldn't, in the light fading from her eyes.
"Take her," Jasmine whispered, so quiet he almost missed it beneath the storm. "Althander, take our daughter and run."
"I won't leave you—"
"You have to." Her hand found his, squeezed with the last of her strength. "She needs you. Needs someone who can teach her, guide her, protect her. I'm done. But you're not. Promise me. Promise me you'll keep her safe."
The second thing that happened was that the infant began to cry.
Not the thin wail of a normal newborn. This was deeper, resonant, carrying frequencies that made everyone within earshot stagger. The sound had weight, had presence, had power woven through every note. And where her voice touched, reality responded.
The ground beneath the Council members turned to quicksand. The air became thick as honey. Gravity reversed itself in a sphere around the baby, lifting rocks and debris into a slow, rotating orbit. The storm above them intensified tenfold, lightning striking in a continuous barrage that turned night into day.
She was terrified. Confused. Cold. Alone. And she was responding to those feelings with abilities she couldn't control, couldn't understand, could barely even recognize as her own.
"She's going to tear the island apart," one of the Council members shouted over the chaos. "We need to suppress her now or we all die!"
The three remaining mages joined hands, their combined power creating a net of dark energy that descended toward the crying infant like a shroud. She saw it coming—those silver eyes tracked its approach with devastating awareness—and she screamed louder, power radiating from her in waves that made the air shimmer.
But she was still just a baby. Still mortal, despite the power. Still vulnerable to coordinated supernatural assault.
The net fell over her, and her crying cut off abruptly. The sudden silence was worse than the sound had been. All her defensive manifestations—the altered gravity, the quicksand, the lightning—collapsed in an instant. She lay there on the ground, wrapped in suppression magic, eyes wide and panicked, chest heaving with silent sobs.
Althander moved without thinking. He shifted mid-leap, his wolf form clearing the distance to his daughter in a single bound. He planted himself over her prone body, teeth bared, a growl building in his chest that promised violence and death to anyone who came closer.