Page 292 of Scarlet Wars
Not consciously.
Stopped like the universe itself had pulled a wire tight inside her.
Her head lifted.
The scream she’d been releasing ripped into silence cut off so sharply it felt like the world held its breath.
And then I felt it.
The shift.
The pressure.
The gathering of something enormous, as if the air thickened around her spine.
Emma’s body trembled, no,vibrated. Red light spiderwebbed beneath her skin, thin cracks of brilliance leaking through her like she wasn’t built to contain what lived inside her.
“Emma…” I whispered, even though she couldn’t hear me, even though this was a memory of a future, because everything in me recognized what was coming.
She wasn’t breaking.
She wasigniting.
The ground under her splintered in a wide ring, soil and stone lifting as if gravity itself recoiled from her grief.
And then she released.
It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a blast.
It wasannihilation.
A silent, obliterating wave tore through the battlefield: crimson, blinding, and absolute. Every soldier, every magus, every creature caught in the future war was reduced to nothing in a fraction of a heartbeat.
No bodies.
No blood.
No sound.
Only erasure.
The earth cracked outward in violent fractures, rippling with impossible force. The sky itself flickered—dimmed—fought to stay whole.
When the light finally collapsed back into her, when the dust settled and the world steadied… She was alone.
Emma knelt in the center of a dead, empty battlefield.
Everyone gone.
Everything gone.
Except her.
Breathing.
Broken.
Alive.
