The access shaft shuddered, dust raining down as Elara clawed through the debris. Somewhere above, the Spire groaned, its bones bending under the weight of its decay.

  Elara’s thoughts screamed at her as she felt another desperate scream tear from her throat. ‘Too much time lost. Too many obstacles.’

  Her gloves tore on jagged metal. Her blood mingling with rust as she welcomed the pain—it anchored her to the now, to the mission. To find Seraphina.

  “Seraphina!” she shouted, voice raw from the dust and desperation. No answer. However, the silence wasn’t empty. It hissed with memories: Seraphina’s laughter in the palace gardens, the way she’d once tucked a stray bloom behind Elara’s ear.

  Elara shook her head, trying desperately to clear the memories. "Alive. She has to be alive."

  Lyra hovered behind her, clutching a flickering lumen rod, while the two guards scanned the shifting shadows. Their eyes darted not to the threats ahead, but to Elara’s back.

  “She’s not here,” one guard muttered. “We need to retreat—”

  Elara whirled, her blade at his throat before he could blink. The edge kissed his skin, a bead of blood welling. His fear smelled sharp, familiar. Elara breathed it in. ‘Good.’ She thought. ‘Let them fear me. More than the dying Spire.’

  “We. Keep. Moving.” She growled.

  The guard froze, throat bobbing. The weight of her stare pinned him in place. She wanted to push harder for a heartbeat—to make him understand the cost of doubt. But Seraphina’s face flickered in her mind, pleading, and she withdrew.

  Lyra stepped forward, trembling. “Elara, please. It’s been 30 minutes already—the Spire’s not stable. If we don’t—”

  A scream nearby caught Elara’s attention, blocking out Lyra’s voice. She listened, hoping as her heart raced. Her mind automatically processed the scream. ‘It was not Seraphina’s. Too shrill, too young.’

  Elara sheathed her blade and sprinted toward the sound without hesitation. The others scrambled to follow, but she didn’t look back. Would they follow? Flee? Let them. She’d rip this place apart. Alone. If needed. She couldn’t fail again.

  The lower levels were a maze of carnage. Survivors huddled in alcoves, their faces hollow with terror. A child sobbed into a mother’s torn sleeve. Blood slicked the floor. Elara’s boot slipped into it. Her thoughts jumped. ‘Focus. You can’t save them. You never could.’

  Seraphina could be among them. Buried. Broken. I should never have left her in that corridor alone.’ She cursed herself. The child reached for her, tiny fingers brushing her calf. Elara ignored it as she kept moving. The touch burned as her instinct told her to move.

  Every turn led to another blocked corridor, and every fork in the path had a collapsed gangway blocking her way forward. It frayed her nerves further, the edges of her composure peeling away like the paint on the crumbling walls around her. Then they turned a corner—and froze.

  Eight rebels barred the path, weapons crude but lethal. One grinned, teeth filed to points.

  “Well, well, well, boys. Look what we found. Little Lyra and her new lapdogs.”

  Elara’s blade hand twitched. Her mind was already processing that they were not worth the effort. ‘Distractions. All of them.’

  Lyra stiffened. “Wait—I don’t know you. Where are you from?”

  The rebel leader spat. “You don’t remember us? Ha. We remember you, Lyra. The way you knelt for the ministers. Licked their boots clean while they burned our homes.” His voice cracked, raw with a grief older than Lyra’s apparent betrayal. “Traitor.”

  Elara stepped forward. “Let us pass.”

  The leader laughed. “Or what?”

  Elara let out a slow, deep breath as she looked at Lyra. She tried to smile, but it turned out wrong, thin, joyless. ‘They are in my way.’

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  A second later, her mask cracked.

  It happened too fast to track—a blur of motion. The first man barely had time to raise his weapon before Elara drove her knife through his throat.

  He choked. His hands fluttered weakly at the wound. His eyes locked onto hers—pleading, desperate, afraid.

  Elara should have felt something. Pity. Disgust. The ghost of a kinder instinct.

  She felt nothing as she smiled.

  Elara’s blade carved out sideways through the first rebel’s throat. His shock lingered on his face until his head hit the floor.

  The second lunged forward in an awkward lurch. Elara grabbed his arm and shattered his wrist. The bone jutting white through the skin, just before she drove the splintered end into his chest. His body crumpled at her feet as she stepped forward.

  It was too easy. Far too easy. Her body moved without thought, without resistance. The blood, the weight of the bodies, the snap of bones—it should have meant something. She should have felt something.

  But she didn’t.

  And for the first time in ages… Since Seraphina had saved her. Elara felt like her old self. And she liked it..

  The third rebel sidestepped, slashing for her ribs. Elara caught his wrist, twisted—bone snapped like dry wood. His knife clattered free.

  She caught it mid-air and drove it into his eye. “Too slow,” she hissed, like scolding a trainee.

  Lyra retched as she watched Elara. The guards flinched with each strike as Elara became a storm. No words. No hesitation. Just the wet crunch of cartilage, the snick of parting muscle. Blood slicked the walls, pooled at her boots.

  The fourth and fifth tried to run. For little it was worth. It was too late to make any difference to their fate. Her dagger took one in the spine; her elbow crushed the other’s windpipe.

  The sixth screamed as he tried to back away. She silenced him with a palm to the chin, snapping his neck skyward with a sickening crunch.

  The seventh blinked as blood gurgled from his mouth. His hands were clutching at the now gaping ruin of his stomach as Elara pulled the knife she had plunged in free.

  Her blade arm ached. Her breathing was ragged. But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop.

  Even as her muscles screamed for rest and her vision blurred, she had carved through them like she had been taught to..

  The eighth rebel only stared, breath hitching as he stood frozen in a deep, primal terror. He tried to beg. Elara just smiled; she didn’t care. Her mercy had died with Seraphina’s vanishing smile.

  A final slash. The silence that followed was louder than the brief slaughter.

  Elara stood amidst the carnage, chest heaving. Blood dripped from her braid, her lashes, the curve of her lips, twisted into something between a snarl and a smile. She knew the monster she was becoming without Seraphina. The monster that she always kept leashed. Her training. Her instinct. Seraphina held all of it in check. Her hands trembled—not with fear, but with fury. Her memories clouded her mind. ‘It’s never enough. Never enough to bring them back.’

  Lyra whispered her name. Not in fear, but pity. Lyra knew what soldiers went through. Elara turned, her face was calm again, but her eyes—Lyra recoiled. They were hollow, ancient, like a creature that had tasted its extinction. Eyes that had forgotten daylight.

  ‘I let them see.’ Elara thought. ‘I let them know what I am.’ She hesitated for a brief second. A flicker of regret. Would Seraphina still recognise her? Would she still try to save her again?

  Elara bit her lip as she crushed the thought down. ‘This was the girl the Empire made me into. A perfect blade, honed to cut without hesitation.’

  Seraphina had dulled the edge once and blunted it with sunlight, laughter, and kindness. But the blade remembered how to cut.

  “Hurry,” Elara said softly, wiping her blade on a corpse’s tunic. The fabric was cheap, threadbare. Another life the ministers had ground to dust. “She’s waiting.”

  The path ahead split. One tunnel was choked with rubble, the other echoed with distant voices. Elara closed her eyes, listening. A whimper carried in the darkness. Barely there. Almost too faint. But it sounded human.

  “This way,” she ordered.

  Lyra grabbed her arm. “Elara, you’re shaking. This… This isn’t you…”

  Elara looked down. Her hands trembled wildly now, as if they no longer belonged to her. As if her body rejected what she had done. ‘Strange.’ She thought to herself. ‘It always comes after.’ Elara shook her head again as she growled. “It does not matter. I must find Lady Seraphina.”

  Behind them, the Spire let out a wail—a beam groaning as stone collapsed. The guards froze, but Elara didn’t slow. She welcomed the sounds ‘Let it bury me, if I fail her. Let it take me from this world’

  Turning, Elara walked further down the corridors. ‘Would she still want me to come?’ Elara questioned herself—the bodies of anyone who tried to stop her lay behind her.

  “She’s waiting.”