FROM THE DEPTHS of the castle halls, Clea heard the door of the throne room break open with the snap of soldered metal. She'd thought that every passing stairway and hallway would make her decision easier as she left the castle. It was the opposite. There was a thread sown through her ribs, tightening with every step she took to leave. The feeling worsened with time, splitting her body in half as some deep and pressing question expanded inside her.

The medallion was sore and cold, tucked against her skin beneath the corset's tight bindings. This felt different than leaving her mother behind. When her mother had sacrificed herself in the woods, Clea had been panicked and frantic. Her mother had spoken often of her own death, telling Clea that death was a path to sainthood. Until this moment, Clea hadn't understood how in the wake of a lifetime of resenting such teachings, she'd come to see her mother's death as a fate her mother had somehow wanted.

All her life, it had almost seemed like her mother wanted to die—and wanted Clea to die too.

Clea wanted to exist.

The words resonated with such an internal surge of feeling that they stopped her in her tracks. The door to the outside world was just ahead, a murky shape down the torchlit halls. She'd descended multiple flights of stairs, and was close to earning her freedom. Daybreak would come in several hours and she'd have a day of safe traveling to get to the Northern Trade Route.

The path ahead was laid out for her.

So, why wouldn't she move?

Ryson had said it himself. Sacrifice. She had to make sacrifices. This was a repeat of what happened at the Kalex village, and he'd been right.

So, why wouldn't she move?

A rumbling sound reverberated faintly through the castle. Clea placed a hand against a nearby wall to steady herself both against the uneasiness of her circumstances and her thoughts. In the wake of her recent realizations, she didn't recognize herself.

Ryson had told her he hadn't planned to die at the hands of Venennin. There was a way he wanted to die—not in the woods, not like this.

He also wanted to exist.

He could have come with her. She was almost out of the castle before she'd heard the Venennin break through upstairs. It would have been much riskier, but there was no way it was impossible for both of them to escape together.

Instead, he'd stayed behind to increase her chances.

It hadn't been a necessary sacrifice. It hadn't even been a completely rational decision. It had been an emotional one.

"That hypocrite," she whispered, whipping around and racing back through the castle.

The journey back to the throne room passed in seconds compared to how long it had taken her to leave it. Just as her first entrance had been, the second was also preceded by silence.

Clea crept up to the broken wall, peering past the brick as she heard voices for the first time. Adrenaline coursed through her. The medallion reacted to the intensity of her ansra with a burning and intolerable cold, forcing her to peel it from her skin. Clea depended on this balance of cien and ansra between them to smother her presence.

The first words bounced through the room in a calm, sultry voice.

"Are the bodies still warm?" a woman asked. Clea leaned forward to catch a better view of the room as her heart throbbed in her chest.

The throne room was in shambles, pieces of scattered brick and broken stone giving her a clear view of what had for the briefest moment been a battlefield. Discarded torches still burned against buried glimpses of gold and silver. Freestanding columns now expanded through holes in the ceiling. Skylights were split wide open to an invasive moon that washed the room in silver light.

A beautiful woman sat with her legs crossed on a collapsed column. She rotated her ankle in rhythmic repetition, painting circles in the air with her scuffed boots as she leaned back on her hands and soaked in the light of the moon.

Her long, blonde hair cascaded back against the stone, bloodstained strands tracing paths to an open wound on her temple.

"Yes," another Venennin responded.

Clea noticed the rest of them, cloaked bodies gliding through the room like shadows. Ryson was kneeling near where fragments of the steps remained, a Venennin standing behind him with Ryson's scythe poised over his shoulder. Black, slithering bonds coiled around Ryson's wrists in front of him. His head was lowered and he looked completely still. Clea wondered if he was even conscious.

"Good," the Venennin woman said, rolling off the column in one smooth motion and landing on her heels with a light clack. Her illuminant blue eyes scanned the room as she walked through it, counting the bodies. Full red lips parted to reveal fangs, and her piercing eyes rested above high cheekbones. She moved with the grace of a feline, her arms and hips swinging with every step. Coat tails swayed down to her calves, the shape of her body further accentuated by a tight belt around her waist and the hand axes strapped to her upper thighs.

"Give them the souls," she said, and the other Venennin moved from body to body, putting small, black beads into each corpse's mouth.

Moments after, the bodies twitched and thrashed, a revolting cracking noise filling the room as creatures bulged and crawled from the bodies.

Clea flattened her back against the wall as she looked forward, holding her breath as she tried to stomach the sounds. Grateful for the darkness but lightheaded from the noises, she gripped the wall behind her until it was over. The sounds of forests beasts remained, their hissing and growling a foreshadowing before Clea leaned over and saw the horde. The main Venennin walked through them unharmed, inspecting each one.

"An awful practice. It still disgusts me," the Venennin woman said, "but it's a good way to make use of fresh corpses. I don't have to tell you that though, do I? It was the Insednians that invented the practice." The Venennin waved them off, and the beasts followed obediently, skulking back into the halls and waiting there out of the way, their eyes still aglow in the darkness, but Clea couldn't make out their distinct forms.

She tried to wrestle her mind into focus, arranging the scattered scene into a path of action. They were going to kill Ryson. She looked for an opportunity, but the entire room and everything in it was wrought with cien.

"It's Shiloh, by the way," the Venennin said as she stopped near the foot of the throne, her palms resting atop her axe handles as her eyes flashed across the room again, soaking up the devastation with little expression. She didn't seem to notice that her boot rested in a pool of blood. "You're the first Insednian I've fought. It's a shame you have no soul. I'd like to gloat about beating you, but you were killing yourself by channeling curses at all. I'll ask you again. What did you do with the cien object?"

Ryson didn't reply and so she walked closer, pulling his chin up with her hand.

"You act like you're just waiting to die," she said. "What's your name? Or can you still remember it?"

"I can't," he replied. "What does it matter to you?"

"It matters because you have an Insednian token," she said. "That weapon of yours. Did you take it from someone else? I bet you can't remember that either, can you?"

Shiloh straightened and walked back over to the column she'd been sitting on, her arms crossed as she gazed up at the moon. "No matter. It seems like The Decline is after everyone. Over the past century, I've watched it happen. Ancients like me wasting away into pieces. The last ancient I met—must have been a decade or so ago—he was trapped and killed outside of Loda last year by six Veilin. All of my heroes have just vanished from the map without anyone talking about them. Meridian Hart—the Veilin haven't even been spared. She was killed outside of Virday by a horde of reaping shades. It boggles my mind completely."

Clea's attention faltered as her mother's name was mentioned on the lips of a Venennin. Had her mother truly been so well-known in the woods?

The Venennin turned and eased back into her seat, leaning back and crossing her legs again. She inspected her fingertips under the light, her darkened fingers laden in an assortment of rings. "I hate to kill you even. If anything is symbolic of The Decline, it's the Insednians. Venennin used to shake in fear at the mere mention of you. Old as I was, I still remember what it was like."

She put her hands back by her sides and inspected Ryson again. He was watching her now with some level of interest, as if genuinely curious about what she was speaking of.

"I wish you did remember," Shiloh said, voice fading off with something akin to sympathy. "Your people, they were...magnificent. Terrifying. They ruled these woods. They were the very symbol of the Warlord of Shambelin, a force capable of bringing about the end of things, and instead it's—" She shook her hand as if frustrated with the available choice of words.

Clea forgot for a moment that she was a bystander to the scene, because even as the over Venennin and beasts lurked, this seemed like a private conversation between just Shiloh and Ryson, a discussion between two old friends.

"Now." Shiloh shook her head, showing her disappointment as her hand still hovered in the air, the pointed claw with its palm to the sky like something were going to fall into it. "It's not an epic battle that ends us all. It's not a great and final battle between Venennin and Veilin. It's not the dramatic and fierce bloodshed of will and passion and sacrifice. It's just...decline. I would take a savage death at the hands of something brutal over this—this undignified decay. Those silver eyes of yours that once knew power, Insednians that worship the warlord and all of the destruction he represented." Shiloh strained, and it occurred to Clea that Shiloh was almost disappointed to have defeated him. "You can't tell me you also don't feel this."

Details of this interaction, the mention of her mother's death, the discussion of The Decline, it all seemed strangely human and deceptively casual in the wake of such devastation.

"Oh well," Shiloh replied shortly after and hopped to her feet, legs locking as she bounded forward on a wide stride. "No point in dwelling on it, is there? Kill him."

The Venennin behind Ryson lifted the scythe for the swing. Clea's body acted without her, and before she could register the nature of the risks, she bounded from the cover of the alley and into the throne room.

With all of the force she could muster, she threw her hands down against the stones. The expulsion of power felt like it poured straight from her soul, and it immediately overwhelmed her. She became the energy, unable to differentiate where her being started and ended inside of it. An immense blast of light singed through the room, a brief warning of things to come. Heat filled the air in billowing waves as nearby Venennin shrieked and peeled back before disappearing into the brilliance of the energy. It covered everything, a sheer depth and power to her energy that had been restrained for so long.

She'd never acted with such uncontrollable force. Everything was washed in it, Ryson's bonds peeling free. He grabbed the scythe and rotated it full circle. He decapitated the Venennin behind him before the entire scene was awash with light.

The medallion pulsed, drawing her focus back to the present, and alerting her to an adverse reaction moments before she was blown backward with a shattering force. Her head and spine crashed back against a pillar, excruciating pain singing across her chest as the medallion was torn from around her throat by the repulsion of the energies. The wind howled. The entire world vibrated with an explosive combustion of saturated light and dark. The air grew stale around her, causing her lungs to tighten as the bricks rippled in a wave at her feet. The medallion hovered several feet away from her, and everything else was churning energy, dense like a howling storm.

Blinding pain broke her vision into spots. Clea noticed the blood across her chest as the floor fell through. The gaping hole in the center of the room dragged the bodies of dead soldiers and wounded Venennin with it. Clea's head pounded as the world sang, her body aflush with pain and chaos.

The castle had been built by curses, and now it decayed from the inside out. Stone pieces fell to her left and right. The last remaining wall caved inward over her. A broken half-column beside her stopped the wall's descent. Some of it fell off and tumbled into the growing void to her right. Stone blocks slid from their places as if pushed from the inside. They tumbled down and crashed into the huts and tents camped around the castle base.

Blinding light continued to flash over the chaos in the room, her eyesight wavering as her head throbbed from the sheer vibrancy of it. She'd shattered everything.

The bricks beneath her collapsed, and Clea was in too much pain to protect herself. She fell into the decaying pit that swallowed the rest of the world.

She felt a pair of hands catch her and release, and then another, drop, grab, and drop until at last, she fell hard into the rubble, gasping for breath in the darkness only with the hope that once the silence settled, she'd still be alive.

When silence finally came, suffering convinced her that death was on its way.

She refused to move, resting against layers of brick and a tilted column behind her. Her chest, side, and back all throbbed. Clea's attention was drawn to the worst of it, blood on her chest pouring through the layer of brick dust that had settled over her body. She couldn't see where the wound was. It singed across her chest and neck, and she gasped for air, convinced that she was seeing figures when it was only rubble reflecting the light of nearby torches.

Hands had grabbed her in repetitive motions, but there were no hands here, no living ones, and she wondered if she'd hallucinated in her terror, mistaken brick that had broken her fall for hands that had saved her.

As she lay gasping in the now quiet darkness, nothing else seemed to exist.

She closed her eyes and started to cry from the pain, hissing through her teeth as she pressed her head back against the column. Every breath hurt. There was so much blood. Her body wasn't healing, and Veilin couldn't heal themselves.

She was going to die.

"Clea," a voice said.

She opened her eyes, and relief swept through her at the sight of Ryson kneeling in front of her. She gritted her teeth as he checked her neck, brushing the hair from her face as the blood on his hands marked a line across her cheek.

She tried to speak between each seizing breath, "It's not"—she gasped sharply—"healing."

"Breathe," he said with complete and soothing calm, looping his hand behind her neck. She listened, that single word the most settled and collected thing in all of the chaos. In the wake of what calamity had just taken place, the weight in his voice became an anchor. "There's cien in the wound," he said.

Clea choked on one breath, but managed another until her breathing was quick but even. She focused on the feeling of his hand, keeping her eyes closed.

"You triggered an explosive reaction," he said.

"Am I going to die?" she asked between breaths, unable to understand the severity of her own wounds. The pain was unlike anything she'd felt before.

"I can't heal you," he replied, and it bothered her that he hadn't addressed her question. "Look at me," he said.

She opened her eyes and there he was, still somewhat hidden in the darkness with eyes like the moon. Torchlight framed his face in flickering hues of red. She wondered in that brief moment how he seemed completely okay.

Where was Shiloh? Where were the other Venennin? The beasts?

"Cien can only act on malintent," he said, "just as your ansra was bolstered so powerfully by your intentions to save someone else. I cannot heal you, unless my intentions are to ultimately cause you harm as a result. Do you understand?"

She nodded, clutching his hand as she strained to breathe through her nose and gather herself. She hung on his words, his explanations an escape from the searing nature of the wounds.

"But it doesn't mean you have to die," he whispered.

Clea now noticed the medallion clutched in his other hand, and that there was something different in his disposition. Just as the abuses done to him had sent him into some other version of himself, the cataclysm had further resurrected those pieces.

The person in front of her was not Ryson.

He knelt before her, the medallion clutched in one hand, contained and controlled. He hadn't avoided the damage; he'd embraced it, and while the others had suffered, for him it had been transformative.

"How badly do you want to exist?" he asked. The question had a peculiar weight, like he'd asked it a thousand times before, to a thousand other people.

Her breathing steadied, the pain still blaring through her as her mind reached a strange sense of clarity, instilled in her by the calm in his eyes.

"You've asked people that before," she said, certain of that truth and yet unsure how she recognized it. She swallowed hard and wrestled her lungs down.

He didn't seem surprised, replying with a simple, "Never a Veilin."

The silence that lingered between them was filled with the presence of some dark gift, a bridge between their worlds. All she could think of were the bodies, torn open by the monsters.

"I don't want to be a monster," she shuddered.

"Never," he said, seeming to have some sense of what she referenced. "Those bodies were planted with tainted souls."

"I don't want a life full of suffering," she whispered back, thinking next of the life of a Venennin.

His expression softened.

"What is your life now?" he asked, his eyes flickering over her again.

All she could see was red; she resisted the urge to glance down at her body.

"Do you want to exist?" he asked again.

She nodded.

The silence that followed felt infinite.