Page 335 of Scarlet Wars
Trapped.
His chest heaved with ragged breaths, his face pale beneath the blood and ash staining his skin. He slammed his fists uselessly against the golden-red haze of the bubble, again and again, the impacts leaving no mark, no cracks.
I watched him through the barrier, and in his eyes, I saw it: not just anger, but mostly disbelief.
As if he still couldn't comprehend it wasmestanding here, it wasmewho had undonehim.
He threw back his head and bellowed, the sound a hoarse, broken roar that barely carried through the Metasphere.
“This is not the end!” he screamed. “I will not?—”
But he broke off mid-sentence, his body stilling.
I felt it even before I saw it, the sudden, reckless pull of translation gathering at his core, the ripple of desperate power as he tried to do the one thing he had left: escape.
He was going to translate.
Inside my bubble.
Across the square, Caden shouted something—maybe a warning, maybe a curse—but it was already too late.
The High Chief moved, haze flaring at his fingertips, twisting the very air into a spiral of light…
The translation hit the walls of the bubble, and instead of breaking through, it recoiled.
The energy turned inward in a violent implosion, ripping the magic back into itself, snapping through his body with the force of a star collapsing.
There was no grand explosion.
No screams.
No spectacle.
One moment the High Chief was there, every line of his body straining against the impossible.
And the next… He simply wasn't.
A smear of light hung for a heartbeat where he'd been, like a dying ember caught on the wind.
Then even that faded.
The bubble collapsed in on itself, folding into nothingness, leaving only silence, and the burned imprint of a man who had fought for no more than his own survival.
Slowly, I straightened, my entire body vibrating with exhaustion and triumph and something heavier I didn’t dare name yet. Around me, the others began to stir: their facesstunned, their weapons lowering, their gazes locked on the spot where the High Chief had stood.
It was over.
The Chiefs had fallen.
The battle was over.
And somehow, impossibly, we were still standing.
SEVENTY-TWO
JAMES
It took only a few hours to clear the blood and rubble from Cyclos’s town square.
