Page 81 of The Midnight Death Match

Memories play before my eyes. They’re mine and also not mine. Echoes of battles long past. Of hunters walking into fire. Of wolves howling to mourn what they could never understand. Rage, desperation, and hope twisted into weapons.

And beneath it all—him. Einar’s strength. His sacrifice. The moment he stepped into my blade not because he gave up on life, but because he believed in mine.

The light pulses one final time then bursts skyward, a column of silver and flame stretching to the stars.

Silence fills the air.

Magic crackles across my skin. My hands tremble, not with grief now, but with new power. Balanced and tempered.

I don’t shift or burn. But something has changed.

The ground is still trembling beneath my knees when the air shifts. Not the sharp, violent tremor of the curse breaking. Something softer, like the ground itself is sighing, releasing tension it’s held for centuries. Dust motes dance in the dying light of the sanctuary’s magic, settling on the bloodstained stones like snow.

Far off wolves howl. But it isn’t the same as before. There’s no bloodlust in it. No blind hunger driving them to hunt, to kill, to feed the endless appetite of the curse. The sound carries on the wind like a question half-formed, like creatures waking from a dream they can’t quite remember.

It sounds… confused. Lost. I know the feeling.

I rise slowly, leaving the sword buried in the dirt beside Einar’s body. My legs shake beneath me like a newborn colt’s, but I don’t fall. Not this time.

The moonlight glances off my skin, and from the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection in a broken shard of sanctuary glass. The image wavers, fractured across multiple pieces, showing me in fragments—an eye that’s more amber than brown, skin that seems to shimmer between human pale and something wilder, fingers that end in nails just slightly too sharp.

Hunter, wolf, and Secret Keeper. For all the good any of that does me.

I’m now an orphan. But also something whole the curse couldn’t break, claim, or destroy. Something new.

The thought should comfort me. Instead, it feels like another kind of prison—being the only one of my kind, carrying the weight of what I’ve become alone.

The scent of burnt magic rises like ash as the black sigils along the ruins begin to fray and disappear. They peel away from the stone like old paint, dissolving into nothing more than memory and shadow. Ripple effects spread out—wards destabilize across Mirendel, ancient barriers fail, the very foundations of the old world crumble. I feel them like spider-silk threads snapping in the distance, each one a tiny death, a small ending that adds up to something enormous.

The movement’s hold is fracturing.

All those people—all those families torn apart by the curse, all those lives shaped by its hunger—they’re waking up to a world where the rules have changed. Where the thing that defined them, that drove them, that gave their pain meaning, simply doesn’t exist anymore.

Will they thank me for it? Or will they hate me for taking away the only purpose they’ve ever known?

Footsteps sound behind me.

The noise jolts through me like lightning. The particular rhythm of someone who’s been running hard and trying not to show it, the way Harek always did when he was worried about appearing weak.

I turn just as he crests the ridge, and the sight of him nearly brings me to my knees again.

He’s breathless, his chest heaving beneath his torn shirt. Blood stains his sleeve—not his own, from the way he’s moving, but fresh enough that whatever fight he came from isn’t long past. His hair is wild, eyes wide with something between reliefand devastation, and there’s ash covering his skin that speaks of fires and battles and desperate dragon rides through the night.

He looks like he’s aged years in the hours since I saw him last. “Eira!”

My name breaks on his lips like a prayer answered and a curse fulfilled all at once. His gaze sweeps over me—over the blood, the torn clothes, and the way I’m standing like I’m not quite sure I’m real.

Then he sees Einar on the ground.

His stance stiffens.

The knowledge hits him like a physical blow. His face goes through a dozen expressions in the space of a heartbeat—shock, grief, understanding, and something that might be guilt. His hands clench into fists at his sides, and I can see him fighting the urge to demand answers, to ache for my loss, to gather Einar up and somehow will him back to life.

But Harek has always been the steady one. The one who holds the pieces together when everything else falls apart. He just… absorbs it.

For a long time, neither of us speaks.

Silence stretches between us like a chasm, filled with all the things we can’t say. The weight of what’s been lost, what’s been gained, what’s been changed forever. I can hear his breathing, still ragged from his run, and the distant sound of settling stone as the sanctuary continues its slow collapse.

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