The silence where Lysara's mind had been was a deafening, psychic scream.
Our resonance network, our collective consciousness, hadn't just been fractured; it had been shattered. The hub, the processor, the brilliant, analytical mind that held us all together… was dark. I could feel the others, but not as a unified whole. They were now just five distinct, frantic, and terrified sparks in the chaotic darkness, and I was no longer an anchor for them. I was just another spark, trying not to be extinguished.
The battle for Verdwood had devolved from a coordinated defense into a brutal, street-to-street brawl. The cult forces, sensing the collapse of our magic, surged. They poured through the breach that Lysara had died—no, not dead, not dead, just... down—to seal. Her golden ward was gone, and the void entities, the real ones, the massive, building-sized horrors, were pushing their way in.
We had been pushed back from the northern wall entirely. It was lost. We were in a frantic, fighting retreat, falling back to the central courtyard, the last defensible position before the Great Hall itself. The air was so thick with corrupted energy that it felt like breathing in static. Every sound was amplified and distorted—the shriek of void-spawn, the clash of steel, the wet, percussive thud of cult sorcery hitting flesh, and the screams. Gods, the screams.
"Back! Back to the fountain!" Kaela's voice, raw and shredded, cut through the din. She was no longer a precise warrior. She was an executioner. Her face was a mask of tears and void-ichor, and she was fighting with a cold, terrifying fury that I'd never seen. She was not defending. She was avenging.
We formed a ragged perimeter around the courtyard's stone fountain. This was it. Our backs were, quite literally, against the wall of the Great Hall.
"Torren! Zara! Watch the alley!" I yelled, my voice cracking. "Elara, Mira, with me! We hold the main approach!"
The cult knew this was the end. They pressed, a tide of black armor and writhing shadow. And they brought their siege weapons.
A colossal void-juggernaut, the same type of creature that had taken out Lysara, rounded the corner. It wasn't a living thing; it was a construct, a twenty-foot-tall horror of black iron and corrupted stone, and it was swinging a massive, tree-trunk-sized limb.
It wasn't aiming for me. It was aiming for the building.
It slammed its appendage into the side of the armory, right where Torren and Zara were holding their position. The stone didn't just break; it exploded.
A rain of shrapnel and heavy support beams came crashing down.
"Torren!" Zara screamed, her voice a high-pitched spike of pure terror.
A scream pierced the chaos. Not Zara's. A boy's. Torren.
"No!"
I abandoned my position, a suicidal move. I didn't care. I moved, letting the curse flood my legs, a blur of motion. I found him. He was pinned. A massive, splintered oak beam, one of the hall's main supports, lay across his legs. His left leg... it was... it wasn't a leg anymore. It was a ruin of splintered bone, armor, and blood. So much blood, a dark, fast-moving pool that was already mixing with the void-tinged dust.
"Ren..." he gasped, his face ashen, his eyes wide with shock and a pain I couldn't even imagine.
I dropped to my knees, my sword coming up to block a lashing tentacle from a nearby creature. I was trying to apply pressure to the stump, my hands shaking. "Stay with me, Torren. Just... stay with me. We're going to get you out."
"I... I'm scared, Ren," he whispered, his teeth gritted, his small body trembling. "I'm... I'm not ready..."
"You're not alone," I said, the words feeling thin, a hollow echo of the comfort I used to be able to give. "Hold on. Just... hold on to that."
It was the perfect trap.
The cult's tactical commander, whoever they were, was brilliant. They had seen me break formation. They had seen the network's 'First Anchor' abandon his post, kneeling, vulnerable, trying to save one of his own.
And that's when they sent them.
They didn't come with the horde. They emerged from the horde, parting the sea of lesser entities like royalty. There were three of them. They moved with the same impossible, synchronized grace that we did. Their shadows were solid, their eyes glowed with a sick, violet-black light, and the psychic pressure that rolled off them was suffocating.
They were the cult's network. The anti-Verdwood.
And the one in the lead... I knew him.
"Zerran," I breathed. His name had been a ghost story among our network, a whisper from Mira. A boy from a western settlement, marked at the same time as me. A child Master Dren had tried—and failed—to rescue two years ago. He was the cult's first and greatest "success."
He looked at me, his face a perfect, beautiful mask of serene corruption. He was, like me, thirteen. But his power... it was vast. Cold. Empty.
"The First Anchor," he said, and his voice was a layered, echoing thing, as if a dozen voices were speaking at once. "The little broken toy who still fights it. Look at you. Kneeling in the mud, trying to save a broken piece. All this... struggle."
He was in front of me before I could even stand. My sword came up, but I wasn't just fighting him. I was fighting the void. The psychic pressure was immense, a direct, targeted assault on my integration. He wasn't just trying to kill me. He was trying to turn me.
Why do you resist? his voice echoed in my mind, not my ears. This power... it's so beautiful. Why... why do you suffer? Let go. Let go, and be whole. Like me.
"Get out of my head!" I roared, pushing back, my own curse flaring, a violent violet against his pure, dark-purple. Our shadows clashed, not as weapons, but as concepts. My Integration versus his Corruption.
His two lieutenants moved to flank me, to end the fight.
"No, you don't!" Kaela was there, a blur of steel. She wasn't a part of my psychic duel. She was pure, physical reality. She slammed into them, her twin blades a whirlwind. She couldn't beat them—they were marked, they were fast—but she could hold them. She had become my shield, my guardian, buying me the seconds I needed to fight this... this thing.
"You're protecting a corpse," Zerran hissed, his shadow-construct pressing against mine, the force of it cracking the stone beneath my feet. "This... this is the price of your 'humanity,' Ren. Failure. Loss. This... this grief. Surrender, and you'll never feel it again. You'll just be power."
He was winning. The appeal... the promise of no more pain... it was so strong. The memory of Lysara's fall, the sight of Torren's leg... it was an avalanche of grief.
Let... go...
But as the darkness pressed in, as Takeshi's old, familiar regret rose up, a new, hotter, angrier thought rose with it. No. Takeshi failed. Ren... Ren holds the line.
"This... isn't... power," I grunted, forcing my shadow-steel blade, inch by agonizing inch, toward him. "It's slavery. You're a puppet."
I broke his psychic hold, just for a second, and slammed my blade forward. He hissed, recoiling, his perfect face twisting in a snarl of surprise.
And that's when the cult warlock made his move.
He wasn't targeting us. He was targeting the courtyard. He raised his staff, and the ground around the fountain erupted, not in normal fire, but in a sickly, purple-black voidflame. It leaped from body to body, from rubble to building, spreading with unnatural, hungry speed.
The courtyard had become a burning, inescapable deathtrap.
Zerran smiled, a slow, terrible expression. "Checkmate, Anchor."
He was right. We were pinned. Zerran's elite team in front, a horde of entities behind, a wall of voidflame on all sides, and I was still kneeling next to a critically wounded child.
We were going to die here.
I had to make the choice. The one I'd been avoiding. The one Takeshi never had to. The leader's choice.
"Kaela!" I roared. "The inner sanctum! Get Torren! Get him now!"
"What about Zerran?" she yelled, parrying a blow from one of the lieutenants.
"He's my problem! Retreat! Everyone! Inner sanctum! That's an order!"
It was a rout. A full, desperate, panicked retreat. Kaela didn't hesitate. She disengaged, scooped up Torren's broken body as if he weighed nothing, and sprinted for the Great Hall's main doors.
"Zara! Mira! Cover her!" I yelled.
Zerran just watched, amused. "Running? Always running. You can't escape, Ren. The void is..."
I didn't let him finish. I lunged, not to win, but to distract. To buy them the seconds they needed to cross the twenty yards of burning courtyard.
And that's when Elara broke.
The stress... it was too much. The fire. The screams. The psychic scream from Zerran. The sight of Torren, so pale and broken, being carried like a sack. Her guilt from Riverholt, the guilt I'd tried to help her with, it just... detonated.
I hurt them. I'm a monster. I'm hurting them again. It's happening again. No. No. NO.
I felt her terror through the broken, static-filled remains of our resonance. Her control didn't just snap. It disintegrated.
Her shadow, her 91-percent-integrated, terrifyingly powerful shadow, exploded outward. It wasn't a weapon. It was a bomb of pure, unadulterated, traumatized panic. It lashed out, a solid, black whip, not at the cult... but at us.
It struck a young Verdwood scout, a boy named Finn, who was running beside her. It hit him square in the chest. It didn't cut him; it threw him, sending him flying ten feet into the advancing voidflame.
He screamed. A high, thin, terrible sound that was cut short.
"Elara!" I roared, but it was too late. She was gone. She was screaming, too, her hands over her face, her power raging around her like a wild storm. She was now as dangerous to us as the cult.
"Zara! Get her! Get her now!" I yelled, abandoning my fight with Zerran and throwing myself backward, toward the door.
Zara, her face a mask of pure terror, did the unthinkable. She tackled Elara. Not with her shadow. With her body. She slammed into the older girl, and the two of them went down in a tangle of limbs, Elara's shadow-construct flickering and collapsing as her concentration broke.
We tumbled through the doors of the Great Hall.
"Bar the door!" I screamed, my voice raw. "Barricade it! Now!"
Scouts, villagers, all of us, slammed the massive oak and iron doors shut. The sound of the bar dropping into place was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard. For a second... for one, single, beautiful second... there was silence. Just the sound of our own ragged, sobbing breaths.
"Barricade it! Use the tables! The benches! Now!"
Master Dren's voice. He was there, leaning against the far wall, a massive, bloody gash across his chest, his left arm hanging useless in a makeshift sling. But he was alive. And he was, as always, in command.
His presence, his iron authority, was the only thing that stopped the full-blown panic.
The Great Hall... it was the inner sanctum. It was also, I now realized, our makeshift infirmary. It was a sea of wounded, of dying. The air smelled of blood and fear.
Elara was in the corner, catatonic. She was just... rocking back and forth, her head in her hands. "I... I hurt him," she was whispering, over and over. "I did it again. I... I hurt him..."
I was torn. Zerran was right outside. The cult was pounding on the doors. And my network... my family... was shattered.
"Zara," I said, my voice rough. "Stay with her. Hold her hand. Don't... don't let her believe it. She's one of us. You understand? She's one of us."
Zara, her own eyes wide with a trauma she'd never asked for, just nodded, her face grim. She sat down next to Elara, and, her own hand trembling, she took the older girl's.
I ran to Torren. Kaela had laid him on a table. Miren was already there, her face a pale, grim mask.
"Miren. How bad?"
She didn't look up. Her hands were a blur, cutting away the ruined armor, applying a tourniquet. "He's alive," she said, her voice clipped. "He'll... he'll live. But the leg... Ren, it's... it's crushed. Beyond... beyond splinting. Beyond anything I can do here. He'll... he'll never walk on it again."
The words hit me. Never. This bright, brave, scared kid... who I'd pulled from a mine... he was crippled. For life. Because of me. Because he'd followed me.
My failure.
"Do... do what you can," I whispered.
I looked for the others. Mira. She was propped against a wall, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. Her wound from Serra had torn open in the retreat. She was bleeding out, slowly. I saw Miren's apprentice shake her head. Not enough healers. Not enough time.
And... Lysara.
She was on a cot, in the corner. She looked... small. And so, so still. Miren had clearly worked on her first, but now she was... I walked over, my legs feeling like lead.
"Ren..." Miren's voice was quiet. She'd followed me.
"Is she...?"
"She... she's alive. Barely." Miren's voice was clinical, but it was shaking. "She... she did what you or Elara might do, Ren. She channeled... she channeled too much. She wasn't built for it. Her own magical channels... they're... they're burned. Fused. From the inside out. She... she's in a coma. I... I don't know if she'll wake up. And if she does... I don't know... I don't know who will be there."
I just... stared. My brain... Takeshi's brain... Ren's brain... it just... stopped.
Lysara. My Lyss. My first friend. The brain. The... the certainty. Gone.
The cult's attack... it hadn't stopped. It had just... receded. The pounding on the door lessened. They were regrouping. Zerran. The juggernaut. They were... they were preparing for the next wave.
This... this was just the beginning.
I walked through the hall, through the sea of wounded, the crying, the dying. I saw the mother of the scout who'd died in the first siege. The one who told me to "be worth it." She was holding the hand of her other son, who was missing an arm. She just looked at me as I passed, her eyes empty.
I wasn't worth it. I'd failed them. I'd failed them all.
I found myself in a small alcove, just... staring at a tapestry. I couldn't breathe. I'd failed. Takeshi had failed three. I... I was failing hundreds.
A hand touched my arm. Kaela.
She wasn't just "bruised and bloody." She was covered in it. I don't know how much of it was hers. Her eyes... they were hollow. She looked... she looked like I felt. She'd seen Lysara. She knew.
"We lost... so much," she whispered, her voice a dead, rough thing.
"But we're still here," I said. The hollow, stupid words of a leader who had no answers.
"Barely," she said, her voice flat. "They'll be back, Ren. With more. That... that thing... Zerran... they were just testing us."
I nodded, the motion feeling heavy. "Then we... we have to be stronger. We have to..."
"How?" she asked, her voice finally breaking. "How, Ren? Lyss... Lyss is gone. Torren... Mira... Elara... Look at us! We're... we're broken."
I looked at her. At this girl who I'd known my entire life. My warrior. My shield. And I saw that she was right.
But I also saw Takeshi's students, raising a glass. Legacy. Trying matters more.
I reached out, and I took her hand. Her bloody, calloused, trembling hand. Her grip was fierce, desperate.
"No matter what," she said, her voice a low, vicious promise. "We fight. Together. Until the end. You and me."
"Together," I whispered, holding on to her, the only solid thing in a world that was burning down around us. "Until the very end."