“No,” Seraphine said, stepping forward through fire that didn’t burn her anymore. Her voice was low. Steady. Certain. “But I can end you.”
She raised the Heartblade. And it answered.
The blade pulsed, humming with purpose. Its fire wasn’t red. It wasn’t blue. It was every color of storm and flame and memory and war. It burned like what came after grief. What came after love and sacrifice and ruin. It was vengeance. It was salvation.
Mirael lunged. Her mouth a maw of black fangs, her shadow form unraveling with speed and fury, her claws inches from Seraphine’s throat.
Seraphine slashed. One, clean arc.
The blade carved through Mirael’s chest and time hiccuped.
Mirael screamed—not from pain, but from unraveling.
The magic inside her exploded outward, not in flame or shadow, but inlight—a thousand fractured pieces of stolen souls breaking free in a flood. Her limbs cracked open like broken glass sculptures, and from within her, white-hot tendrils of spirit and starlight poured into the air, screaming with the voices of the dead who had been trapped for too long.
“No—NO!” Mirael howled, falling backward, hands clawing at her face as her body crumbled like ash caught in the wind.
Her form thencollapsed.
A howl tore through the Hollow, and every corrupted creature still fighting beyond the sanctum screamed in unison. The Hollowborn jerked violently as though yanked by unseen strings. Some clawed at their own flesh, others howled to the sky. One by one, they dropped. Some bursting into motes of dust, others curling in on themselves and turning into ash.
The Veil didn’t just fracture. It shuddered.
Seraphine took the final step forward anddrovethe Heartblade into the center of the Hollow sanctum. Into the heart of the wound in the world.
The stone beneath her feet split open. A violent quake rolled through the temple, sending splinters of obsidian into the air. The blade sank until only its hilt remained above ground, glowing, humming. And then the world exhaled.
The Veil slammed shut—like a door sealed with blood and fire and fate.
Mirael’s scream was cut off mid-syllable. And the silence that followed wasn’t just absence.
It waspeace.
Heavy. Trembling. Final.
The Hollowborn were gone.
The sky was cracked and smoldering, but the light that now filtered through was clean. The wind that gusted through the shattered archways was cold, but no longer laced with rot.
Seraphine stood there, chest heaving, fire still crawling across her skin, her bones screaming with the effort of what she’d done.
But she didn’t fall.
Because behind her, Cassian still breathed.
She had won.
Not because she had fire. Not because she had power. But because she hadsomething worth saving.
Mirael? The woman who had devoured kingdoms, corrupted kings, twisted fate?
She was gone.
Not killed.
Erased.
Wiped from the world the way a nightmare disappears at dawn.
