Page 197 of The Blood Rites

I grab his ruined arm with both hands and push as hard as I can. The pain is immediate, the flesh of my hands searing, but I refuse to let go.

“You talk about Crowns and chaos,” I spit, voice slurred from blood pooling in my mouth. “But all you do is kill children and call it birthright.”

He laughs, genuinely amused. “We’re all monsters here, Luceris.”

“So finish it.”

He cocks his head. Then he presses fiery fingertips into my chest, hard. I can smell my own skin cooking.

“How noble.”

I lock eyes with him. “You’re just afraid,” I say. “But you’ll die here. Kael will end you, and you’ll be forgotten.”

The words land—something shifting behind his eyes, gone too quickly to name.

A voice cuts through the dark.

“Don’t you dare lay another hand on him.”

Kael is back. The words hang in the air, heavier than the fire, heavier than blood.

A promise of violence.

Atheron turns to Kael’s voice, and his grin is so wide it might as well be a mask—a performance of fearlessness, the false virtue of his overlong life.

“Fool boy,” he calls out, “you cannot both survive. Better I do it for you.”

Kael walks into the firelight, soaked to the bone, hair streaming with salt and blood. Shadows leak from him with every step, pouring from his arms and shoulders in slow, deliberate coils. No performance, just his presence.

His voice is even, as flat as a blade. “Your head will hit the sand before your hand even reaches him.”

Atheron laughs, as if he has heard this joke a thousand times. “Be reasonable, Prince. I’d be saving you the misery of doing it yourself.”

Kael cocks his head, mouth flattening with disinterest. “I have no intention of doing anything myself.”

Atheron’s smile flickers. He glances at me, calculating how quickly he can kill me and whether Kael’s threat is a bluff.

“Pity,” he says, and moves.

He lunges for me, faster than thought, his good hand igniting in a pure white ring of fire. He closes the distance and seizes my throat, flame coiling around my neck, hotter than anything I have ever felt. I feel the skin crack, the blood in my veins boil, the bone flex to the point of shattering.

I scream, but only once. Then time breaks apart.

It is not a shield that forms. It barely feels like Mana. The fire simply forgets what it is—it dims, losing its appetite, and recedes. The world around me rearranges itself in a single shuddering moment. The air warps, the sand shifting as though the Mana of the world refuses to acknowledge the flames.

Atheron’s hand is still on my throat, just a hand now, but still a weapon. He blinks, and for the first time he looks afraid.

He tries to crush my windpipe with brute strength, but his body is failing him—the tendons in his arm twitch, the muscles spasming, every movement slows like it’s weighed down by a thousand invisible hands.

Atheron’s face is caught between fury and terror. He starts to back away—

But Kael is behind him.

There is no warning. No monologue. Just a blur of shadow, a flicker of darkness so thin it might have been a trick of the light.

Atheron’s expression slips. He tries to say something, but blood is already trickling down his neck. His head wobbles, tips forward, then slips clean off, rolling across the sand. The rest of his body staggers, trying to remember how to stand before collapsing in a heap, staining the sand a colour I cannot name.

A stream of golden-red light tears out of Atheron’s body, so bright I have to shield my eyes. It spirals up, and the Mother Shard takes it without pause.