I reach for my magic.
It’s not there. Not in any meaningful sense. I’ve given everything to the soldiers—every drop of power I had, every reserve I’d built over years of channeling the dead. My body is a husk. My consciousness flickers at the edges, threatening to collapse into the darkness that crowds my vision.
It doesn’t matter. Get up anyway.
“He doesn’t have to.”
The words scrape out of me like rust and broken glass. Barely audible. But they stop the King mid-sentence, its formless attention swiveling toward the witch who should be too broken to speak.
“I do.”
I drag myself to my feet. One hand presses against my sternum, against the mark that burns beneath my blood-stained clothes. Drokhar’s location pulses in my awareness—three feet away, struggling against bonds that are slowly squeezing the life from him. I don’t need to look at him. I know exactly where he is.
That’s the point. That’s always been the point.
I reach for the King—not with my hands, not with the magic I’ve already spent. With the guardian’s power—the one beneaththe whispers. The ability to command endings, to drag truth from souls that refuse to release it.
The same force that gave a hundred thousand soldiers their final peace.
I wrap it around the King’s formless essence.
And squeeze.
“You wanted to speak through me.” My voice strengthens as I find the thread of magic that has been hiding beneath everything else. Not the whispers—those are gone. Not the channeling—that’s drained. The core. The guardian. The part of me that decides which dead deserve closure and which must remain silent. “You wanted to use my voice to reach the living world.”
The King thrashes against my grip. Tendrils pull away from Drokhar, reforming around its own mass as it tries to escape what I’m doing. But I’m not letting go. Not this time.
“Here’s your chance.”
I pull the magic tighter. Feel the King’s resistance—three centuries of accumulated rage, three centuries of convinced righteousness, all of it fighting against the closure I’m forcing upon it.
“SPEAK YOUR TRUTH.”
FORTY-FOUR
DROKHAR
The King screams.
But it’s not a scream of rage.
I’ve heard the dead scream before—revenants rising from mass graves, soldiers tearing themselves free of the earth to demand vengeance for forgotten deaths. Those screams are hunger. Hatred. The fury of those who have been denied too long.
This is different. This is release.
Aradya’s magic wraps around the King like chains of light, invisible but irrefutable. She’s forcing it to do what she forced the soldiers to do—acknowledge the grief that created it, say the words it’s been holding onto for three centuries. Her nose is bleeding freely now, her eyes streaming red tears, her entire body trembling with the effort of commanding power that should be beyond any mourning witch’s reach.
She’s tearing herself apart.
The King’s voice fractures.
“I WAS AFRAID.”
The words emerge from the formless mass in a thousand tones—individual soldiers, individual voices, speakingsimultaneously for the first time since they fused into this monstrous whole. Not the King anymore. The dead that form it.
“I WAS ALONE. I DIED BEFORE I COULD?—”
More voices. Overlapping. Tumbling over each other in an uncontrolled flood.