A certainty snapped into place. Seconds and I would be gone.
I saw death standing there, waiting. I’ve been expecting you for so long, it whispered. Are you finally here?
Not this time, I replied.
I opened my second eyelids.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Tisaanah
My knuckles were white. I saw the whole Scar light up with crimson light, as if it were a wound split open, and my heart stopped.
I knew what I was seeing. And beyond that, I could feel it — Max’s deepest magic, the strange kind that called to the foreign powers that lived within me, too.
Sammerin hissed a curse beneath his breath. “I told him not to.”
“He had to,” I murmured.
Yet, a part of me was relieved. I know how powerful Max’s magic was. Nura was good, but she wasn’t that good. If Max had resorted to this, it meant he was desperate, yes. But it also meant he would win. He’d have to win.
But then, I felt something in the air shift.
There was no other way to describe it — it was like a sound I couldn’t hear was scratching the insides of my ears, vibrating and roiling within my bones. Every hair on my arms stood up. The contents of my stomach all soured at once, and I staggered back from the rail, pressing the back of my hand to my mouth.
Beneath it all, there was something more. A certain sick, slithering familiarity.
Sammerin gave me an odd look. “What’s wrong?”
The Syrizen’s stances went weak, then rigid. Even Anserra stumbled, her hands tightening around her spear. “What is that?” she muttered.
Ariadnea turned her face to me. “You feel it too,” she said, and I nodded.
Dread clenched in my stomach.
I rushed to the railing and peered over. I couldn’t see anything but flickering orange light and the mist of the Scar’s magic. But a dark pressure was building, building, building in the back of my mind.
“Something is wrong,” I muttered. “I’m going down—”
I turned to Sammerin and froze.
He was looking past me, a strange expression on his face.
“Ariadnea,” he said, quietly.
I turned.
The Syrizen were standing crooked, like marionettes held by weak strings — so different than their perpetual rigid grace. It took me a moment to see what Sammerin did: that the delicate veins beneath their skin, clustering around the scars in their eye sockets, had become a familiar shade of black.
I noticed this only for a split second, before Ariadnea’s spear lit up, and she lunged for Sammerin.
Chapter Eighty
Max
I had made a terrible mistake.
I didn’t notice, at first, overwhelmed by the power that stormed through me. My body unraveled. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. The flames around us roared and billowed, the heat cracking the ground beneath us.
The force of it was enough to make Nura let out a gasp and leap backwards. Her magic was severed, like a string sliced with a rusty blade. I tried to rein in the power of it, but it was so much more than I had anticipated. Another burst, and Nura was slammed against the rock wall. She dropped to her knees, then fell to the ground in a heap, unmoving.
Dread.
One thought cut through my mind: I didn’t want to kill her.
I didn’t know if I had. I barely thought about my victory. I had won, after all. She had stopped fighting.
This realization didn’t even have time to settle.
I felt raw power tear through me, yes. I felt fire and magic and strength. But I felt something else, too. A presence that had been lurking, waiting for its opportunity to step inside.
And I had just opened the door.
Something in the air shifted violently, all at once, like the world was suddenly inverted. I felt sick. I felt wrong.
I tried to close my eyelids — close myself off from this soured piece of magic — but it was running too hot, too fast. Something beyond me, stronger than me, was pushing it forward. If the magic was water, then this felt like a monster had reached up from the murky depths, grabbed my ankle, and yanked me under.
One second, I was about to declare victory. The next, I was drowning.
There you are, a voice whispered, just as I lost my grip on the world.
Chapter Eighty-One
Tisaanah
Ariadnea charged towards Sammerin. Her movements were odd and choppy, but just as skilled. A split second, and that spear would have been buried in Sammerin’s chest. But he was fast, too. His hands went up, and Ariadnea’s body locked, twitching and fighting against his magic.
“Ariadnea…” The tone of his voice alone said everything we were both thinking — what the hell is wrong with you?
Neither of us had time to ruminate on that question.
The others lunged for us.
Sammerin reacted fast. But there were five of them, too many for his magic alone to stop all at once. Two dove for me. Sammerin flung his magic out to them, made them stumble just long enough for me to evade.
On instinct, I tried to use my own magic, but it sputtered weakly at my fingertips. Useless.
The tip of Anserra’s spear sliced my arm. I dodged clumsily, then grabbed Ariadnea’s weapon, which she still clutched with hands locked-up from Sammerin’s paralysis.
Sammerin’s attention faltered as another Syrizen struck him.
Shit.
I dodged another blow and gave the spear a powerful tug. Ariadnea released it just in time for me to swing it back around, use it to block Anserra’s strike. But I was off-balance. I stumbled. My back hit the ground. Anserra fell over me, blocked only by the spear braced in my hands.
She was so close now that I could see in vivid detail the dark veins around her eyes. Gods, had they spread further even in these last seconds?
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Because I knew, implicitly, that this was not Anserra. Not anymore.
She did not answer. Her face remained blank. Instead her
