Page 156 of Labyrinthine
His elbow cracks into my jaw. My head snaps sideways. Pain detonates behind my eyes, and the sword slips from my grasp. My knees hit stone. Fire blazes above me—too fast.
I roll.
His blade punches into the ground where my chest had been, molten sparks spraying my side.
“Power doesn’t belong to you,” he says, voice raw now, broken by rage. “It belongs to those who claim it. It belongs to me.”
He snarls and lunges, blade high.
I lift mine to meet it. Our swords lock, and I hold—for a breath. Another. Then my knees buckle. He shoves harder as fire pours down his blade, scorching the steel and searing the skin of my hands.
My grip slips.
My sword clatters to the ground, and fire slams into me.
I scream.
It’s not just heat. It’s pain—raw, endless,hungry. It claws through my chest, ripping flesh from bone. I fall, but I don’t feel myself hit the ground. I’m unraveling—not dying, but liquefying into flame. A girl dissolving into cinders. The fire of death consumed by another flame.
My body stops obeying. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
This is it.
He steps over me, sword gleaming.
“You should have died before you were born,” he whispers.
He raises his blade for the final strike.
And then?—
I hear a scream that’s not mine. Not in this room.
Mallen.
Not in flesh—but in soul. It breaks through me like a symphony—his anguish, his devotion, sharp as glass and soft as a prayer. I feel it through the tether forged between us, blood-sworn and sealed with devotion. A shatter made of love.
His voice tears through my skull like lightning. I don’t know what he sees. I don’t know if he feels my pain or the way I’m slipping—out of this world, out of this war. But the bond between us thrums like a struck chord, a live wire between ourhearts. Wherever he is, the world gives way beneath him—and it sends an echo through my bones.
“Don’t,” he says, and I hear it not in words but in pleading.
He kneels like he’s lost the sun, and his hand reaches mine through the dark.
And the night answers.
The fire dims—not around me, but within. The pain doesn’t vanish, but it withdraws. Like it’s being drawn from me—siphoned into him. A thread pulls taut, neither rope nor chain, but a current that cannot be stopped. His pain rushes in like tidewater into an open wound, and mine recedes. He takes the fire, and in its place, the dark expands—ripe, ravenous, and ready for the kill.
I take a breath. My lungs catch. My chest burns. But I’m breathing.
My father’s sword hovers, inches from my face.
And then I look up.
Not with my eyes.
With death’s.
Shadows pour from beneath the throne, from the scorched banners, from every crack and corner of the room. They seep from every crevice like spilled ink, thick and sentient. And—gods—they crown me.
