The ice beneath me cracks as she sends a tremor through the ground, trying to throw me off balance. I stumble but manage to stay upright, my body aching from keeping my core balanced. I summon a shield to block her next attack, but the moment I do, I feel the sting of cold as one of her daggers grazes my arm. Blood wells up, staining the snow beneath me.
I focus, pulling all the moisture I can from the air, shaping it into a massive mist cloud. I slam it forward, aiming directly at her. Selene’s eyes widen for a split second just before it engulfs her, hindering her visibility, she starts spinning erratically on the ice, before the mist quickly condenses into hailstones that she pelts toward me.
With a clasp of my hand, I gather them into a huge snowball that I have barreling towards her.
She dodges it with a laugh. Fuck she’s fast. I need to slow her down.
From wisdom, power.
Rylan’s voice echoes in my mind, and I remember—this isn’t just about pure strength. I need to be smarter.
And then I know what to do.
Envisioning the brake tracks at the bottom of the sledding hill in Larilea, I throw my hands forward, pulling at the ground in front of Selene to raise into a million little bumps, the friction stopping her easy glide over the ice.
She screams out of sheer frustration as her board comes to a stop, and then, forgetting to move forward, instead lunges at me, a conjured blade aimed at my chest. I dodge, feinting to the side, and for a brief moment, I see it—the way she’s favouring her left, the injury from the Frostfang fight still slowing her down. She’s hiding it well, but not well enough.
That’sher weakness.
I dive under her next strike, feinting left again, making her overextend her injured right hip. She grits her teeth, her frustration mounting as she swings wildly. I duck under her blade and summon a wave of freezing water, slamming it directly into her side.
Her cry of pain is only satisfying in that I know my aim was true. Grabbing her waist, she stumbles back a few steps as the ice beneath her cracks. Panic flares in her eyes. She knows she’s losing control.
I press the attack, using every ounce of strength I have left. My body screams in protest, but I can’t stop now. I hurl another wave at her, aiming low this time, freezing the ice beneath her feet. She tries to summon more power, but her movements are slower now, her left side still weak.
She swings again, but her blade is sluggish, and I dodge easily. I send another blast of freezing water at her legs, and the ice rises to trap her. She’s stuck, unable to move.
She thrashes, but only her upper body flails. Her magic flickers, weaker and weaker, and she lets out another frustrated scream as she realises she’s been outplayed.
But she’s not done.
Selene’s gaze turns cold, calculating, and before I fully process it, I feel the ice shift beneath me, the faint shimmer I’d noticed too late crystallising into a deadly trap. The ground beneath me splits with a harsh, echoing crack, and a ring of ice collapses around me, the floor dropping out from under my feet. I gasp, reaching for anything solid, but I’m falling, a strangled cry caught in my throat as I plunge into the frigid darkness below.
The icy water engulfs me.
The freezing depths steal the breath from my lungs. The cold is all-consuming, wrapping around me, sapping my energy and draining the last of my magic. My limbs go numb,my body sinking deeper into the abyss, and when I look up, I see it—the faint shimmer of light through the ice above, quickly dimming as Selene seals the gap I fell through. She’s trapping me down here, cutting off my only route back to the surface, leaving me to drown.
My heart races, panic clawing at me, my heartbeat so hard it ripples the water around me. It’s the most surreal sensation to feel like I’m in this wide open space, but to feel trapped by the billions and billions of water molecules around me, moulding to my body, and… they’re squeezing me.
Reaching out with my hands and magic, I will my legs to kick, to take me back to the surface. But the more I try, the more the memories surge—Samfer’s cold, callous smile each time as he shoved me into the wardrobe, locking me in that tiny, suffocating space over and over, testing me, taunting me, cutting me, thrashing me, trying to force my magic to appear. All in the name of my own safety. The sting of his laughter, the taunts, the cruelty.
No.
No!
My eyes spring open, burning in the bitterness of the impossibly cold water.
Not this fucking time,I think, my fear hardening into anger, into defiance that blazes through my veins. Noteveragain.
Fuck you, Selene.
Fuck you, fear.
And fuck you, fucking Samfer!
I refuse to die here, in the water, in my own essence. I wield this magic, not the other way around.
And from this moment I will take back my power, and return my fear to the depths of Morath’s hell where it came from.
