Frost cracked beneath Darius’s boots as he advanced. Devotion burned white in his grip, steady as a star, its gre biting into the storm at the roof’s crown. Malcolm stood loose and smiling, no guard, no stance, as if awaiting entertainment rather than a fight.

  Darius struck first. The bde hissed, a clean arc meant to cleave shoulder to hip. Malcolm slipped aside like smoke, brushing Darius’s wrist in passing, almost pyful.

  “You’ve got form,” Malcolm said, tone light, mocking. “Precise. Disciplined. A soldier’s rhythm.” His eyes lingered on the white fire licking Devotion’s edge. “But you don’t understand that sword. If you did, I wouldn’t even be able to stand near you.”

  Darius pressed harder. His cuts flowed in a relentless drill, textbook-perfect. Malcolm bent and twisted, robes snapping in the wind, each deflection nding with a metallic jolt despite his soft, muscleless frame.

  Malcolm’s fingers sketched in the air, jagged lines sparking into a glyph. Darius sshed, Devotion’s bze ripping it apart. The geometry fizzled into nothing, fkes of ash drifting harmlessly away.

  The witch only grinned and spun another, faster this time. Devotion tore through it—but this one broke badly. Shards of the glyph fred out in a burst of frost, exploding across the rooftop in jagged sheets. Darius gritted his teeth as ice crackled up his greaves, forcing him to stamp free before Malcolm pressed in with a wild kick. The strike hammered his thigh, ugly and untrained, but heavy as stone.

  “Upsetting, isn’t it?” Malcolm taunted. “No training. No muscle. And still I break you. I carved myself into something better.” His hands carved more symbols, reckless and raw.

  Devotion shredded them one after another. Some guttered out as harmless sparks. Others left wreckage—sudden gusts that staggered Darius sideways, bursts of frost that spat against his gauntlet, needles of ice hissing into his cloak. Every csh was a gamble: sometimes clean, sometimes chaos.

  “You’re not even a Knight,” Darius spat, fury grinding his words. “You’re a witch pying at battle.”

  “And still I’m here,” Malcolm sneered, weaving faster. Darius lunged, cutting through a half-made ward that exploded into a thundercp, deafening and bright. The storm itself reeled around them, and Malcolm’s ughter carried above it.

  “Even with your anger,” he goaded, darting back, “you don’t make it sing. You can’t. Until you learn…” Another glyph splintered under Devotion’s light, bursting into sparks that stung Darius’s cheek. “…you’ll never cut me down.”

  ----------

  The ruined hall shook with shrieks and spellfire. What had seemed a handful of Kindred in the wreckage was far more—shadows uncoiling from shattered tanks, pale bodies dragging themselves free, half-formed things crawling on broken limbs.

  Isolde’s voice cracked like a whip. “Left fnk, bind them!” Frost bloomed in glyphs as she drove one pack back. Eryndor answered with a rolling wall of fire, his jaw set. But the creatures would not die properly. They ughed as they bled, crooned like children even as they lunged, staggering forward on ruined bodies.

  The doors burst open in a bst of cold air, and Selene strode through. Her staff whirled, Vaylora bzing. The first sweep burned three Kindred into drifting ash, saving Eryndor’s fnk. A second gesture caused part of the ceiling to colpse onto another knot of bodies.

  “Your control is wasteful,” she snapped at Isolde. “Stop scattering them. Cut through their cores.”

  Isolde adjusted, and her next glyph scythed cleaner.

  “And you—” Selene’s eyes flicked to Eryndor as she thrust her staff forward, a nce of light punching through a Kindred’s chest—“wards first, then fire. You’re exposed.”

  Even as she barked orders, she pnted herself in front of the dissecting table. The girl chained there whimpered, eyes gzed with pain, still alive. Kindred swarmed toward the scent of blood, cwing over benches to reach her. Selene became a pivot of fire and light: a ward raised to shield the sb, a burst of fme that seared three at once, a thrust of her staff that shattered ribs like gss.

  “Quiet,” Selene murmured as the girl shivered, shielding her with her own body. “I’ll keep them off.”

  While her hands and staff dealt death, her mind reached elsewhere. Vaylora streamed from her like invisible threads, tugging at every corner of the b. Drawers rattled open, false panels cracked, and benches shifted. Files tore free of hidden slots and hovered around her in glowing circles; vials lifted from compartments she’d sensed beneath rubble, their bck fluids trembling in the air.

  A Kindred lunged; Selene’s staff fred, incinerating it, the hovering documents never wavering from their orbit. Another crashed into her barrier, shattering against it in sparks of light; Selene’s mind did not falter. More compartments yielded their secrets—some empty, some packed with notes stained by blood, diagrams of organs, failures marked Kindred.

  Ash fell across the sb as she swept another corpse into dust. Selene pulled the papers into her cloak without looking, eyes still burning over the girl’s trembling form. “Livestock for refinement,” she muttered.

  The Saints caught glimpses of her—sying, commanding, protecting, while a storm of stolen knowledge spun in her orbit. To them, it looked impossible: a witch fighting like three people at once.

  -------

  The storm howled harder as Malcolm shifted tactics. His fingers no longer sketched glyphs in the air—Darius had cut too many apart. Instead, he spread his arms wide, palms raw and glowing. The snow itself convulsed as if alive.

  Ice leapt up in jagged spears, cutting across the roof in vicious lines. Winds tore into Darius like bdes, each gust sshing his cloak to ribbons. Malcolm’s ughter carried over the gale. “Glyphs are elegant—yes—but Vaylora doesn’t care about elegance. It cares about will.”

  The rooftop became a battlefield of raw force. Ice walls reared up, closing Darius in. The wind knocked him sideways, cutting lines of blood across his cheek and throat. He struck back, Devotion’s white fire cleaving through barriers, but for each he destroyed, Malcolm raised three more.

  Darius fought like a soldier, feet digging for purchase on stone gone slick with frost. His lungs burned, breath torn away by the gale. Each step forward bled for him—ankle deep in snow, shoulder wrenched from a gncing shard, his sword arm aching from constant recoil. Malcolm’s spells were crude, yes, but unrelenting, the sheer volume of force battering him back inch by inch.

  Then Malcolm smiled, teeth sharp, eyes glinting. “You were watching my hands, weren’t you? Clever boy. But while you were watching, I was writing.”

  Darius’s stomach dropped. He looked down—sigils.

  The snow at his feet, the cracks in the stone, even the scuffs of Malcolm’s cws—all of it had been carved into a sprawling web of glyphs during their shuffle. Circles etched by sliding boots. Lines gouged into stone. Shapes stamped into frost. An entire array had been written under his feet.

  Malcolm stomped once, and the rooftop fred. The glyphs roared to life.

  Chains of ice snapped upward, wrapping Darius’s arms, his chest, his legs. Wind condensed into shrieking funnels that whipped toward him. Spires of jagged ice hurtled like javelins, converging to pierce him from every side.

  Devotion screamed.

  The white fmes fred violently, brighter than any strike that had come before. They shed outward without restraint, consuming chains, spears, glyphs—everything. The rooftop cracked beneath him, stone vaporizing as the bze carved raw circles into it. The bindings shattered, the storm itself howled backward, and Malcolm stumbled, raising an arm against the sudden onsught.

  But the sword did not stop.

  The fmes burned uncontrolled, geysers of white fire shing skyward, outward, ripping the roof apart. Darius staggered, panic tightening in his throat. His grip shook as the sword raged against his hands, wild, feral. He knew—if it kept on—it would consume everything. Even him.

  “Stop,” he gasped, his voice drowned by the roar. “Stop!”

  And then, through the inferno, her voice cut into his mind. Selene’s voice, the same words she had spat at him in fury:

  “You bound it. You didn’t earn it. You cmped chains on its mouth. You never asked it. You never listened. You only wrapped it until it stopped speaking. I’ve heard it cry since the moment you drew it. It hates you. It doesn’t belong to you. You don’t deserve it.”

  The words echoed inside him, searing deeper than the fmes. His knuckles whitened on the hilt. He clenched his teeth and shouted over the raging bze, to the sword itself:

  “Fine then—I’m listening now. So talk to me, you dumb lump of steel!”

  No answer came.

  Only the raging light, tearing the rooftop apart, scorching the air, the fmes devouring every glyph Malcolm had written.

  Malcolm stumbled back, his grin stripped away, eyes wide with something closer to fear than fury.

  His hands snapped into motion, cwing glyphs into the air, frantic now, jagged and crooked. Frost-ttices shuddered into being—walls, spears, circles of binding—all of them shattered the instant Devotion’s fire touched them. He spat curses as he wove more, smming his palms against the stone to raise ice thicker than a fortress wall. It melted before it finished forming, colpsing into steam.

  “Impossible,” he hissed. The heat singed his leathers, his breath caught in his throat. “No one—no thing—wields Vaylora like this.”

  And still the fire climbed higher. Devotion did not care for Darius’s words. It screamed on, unchecked, a fury without a master.

  ---------

  The rooftop split apart with a sound like the sky itself tearing. Pilrs of white fme roared downward through stone and snow, ripping through the fortress’s chambers. The b shook as jagged torrents of fire speared down through the ceiling, scorching everything they touched.

  Selene’s lip curled. “Of course.”

  She thrust her staff high, her voice sharp. “Gather to me—now!”

  Isolde and Eryndor did not hesitate. The Saints darted across the crumbling floor, hurling final spells to shove the Kindred back as they fell into pce at Selene’s side. Together, the three raised a shield of Vaylora that fred outward, translucent but unyielding, turning aside the worst of the bze. The barrier groaned under the onsught, its edges spider-webbing with light. Heat seared their skin even through the ward, the air thick with the smell of scorched stone. Outside, the remaining Kindred were swallowed whole, shrieking as they burned to ash.

  Eryndor shaded his eyes, staring at the endless fire. “What is happening?”

  Selene’s gaze stayed fixed on the roaring white light, her expression a mask of disdain. “A fool trying to wield powers he is unworthy of having.”

  --------

  From a distance, Aelun, the Inquisitors, and the surviving captives stared at the sky. The white pilrs of fire split the storm clouds, stretching to heaven itself. Confusion crackled among the men—murmurs of terror, disbelief, and prayer tangled together.

  But Aelun stood still, his face unreadable as the fmes painted the snow around him gold. Finally, he exhaled, his voice calm, almost reverent. “It’s time to see what path the boy will choose.”

  One of the Inquisitors called out to him, eyes wide with terror. “Lord Aelun—your command, what do we do?”

  Aelun did not look at him. His gaze stayed on the white pilrs ripping the sky apart.

  “We do nothing,” he said softly. “This is not a battle we can fight. We are witnesses—nothing more.”

  The words stilled the men more than orders would have. Their prayers faltered, leaving only silence and the distant roar of fire.

  -----------

  The fmes raged without care for him. Darius staggered backward, hair singed, skin bleeding where shards of stone had struck him. His breath came ragged, and his grip on Devotion trembled. He wanted to hurl the cursed sword from his hand—yet when he tried, the hilt would not leave his grasp.

  Rage boiled out of him. “Damn you!” His shout cracked against the roaring bze. He yanked, twisted, tried to fling it aside, but his hand might as well have been shackled to the hilt. The fmes answered only with more fury.

  A scream tore from his throat—raw, furious, exhausted. “You win!” His voice broke. “Just… talk to me…”

  For the first time, the word left his mouth, pulled up from memory and desperation alike:

  “Devotion!”

  The sword fred in his hand, the white fire shing skyward as if it had been waiting to hear its name.

  The rooftop was drowned in light.