The Duke’s Reborn Daughter Sometimes Chooses Violence.

Brilliant red light snuffed out the white. The switch in my mind moved so fast it stopped being a switch at all. Gift. Blade. Gift. Blade.

The world split and reformed dozens of times a second. In one fraction, I saw everything -the black aura, the dragon and the positions of every surviving expeditioner across the cratered battlefield. In the next fraction, I felt nothing, saw little, and my body moved with a force and speed that did not belong to me.

I leapt from what remained of the shelf. In a Vaelin-fraction, the impact meant nothing. In the Gift-fraction that followed, the pain came. I couldn’t turn it off now, not after I was already flickering. It didn’t matter.

The dragon tracked me -its one working eye locked on as I closed the distance. It knew. It had known from the start. An ice shard the size of my torso hurtled toward me. In a Gift-fraction, I saw it coming, and mapped its trajectory. In the Vaelin-fraction that followed, I cut through it. The shard split cleanly, the two halves spinning past me and shattering against the stone behind.

I reached the dragon’s forelimb and slashed. The Godblade bit through scale and muscle as though they were parchment. It was a shallow cut, but it was still a wound. The first wound any blade had opened on this creature since Estovan went down. The dragon screamed in a wailing sound. The corruption aura pulsed.

It caught me during a Gift-fraction. I felt something inside me rot on contact. The Flicker stuttered, the rhythm lurching as the switch jammed. Pain lanced behind my eyes so sharply that my vision whited out. For one instant, I was neither Gift nor Blade. I was just a girl.

My body kept moving on momentum alone. The dragon’s claw swiped where I had been half a second before. I wrenched the Flicker back.

My nose was bleeding, warm and wet down my lip. My skull felt like it was splitting from the inside. I made two more cuts -one along the dragon’s shoulder joint, another across the scales above its ribs. They were both shallow cuts. I had to go for the throat. I knew it. The dragon knew it. It wasn’t letting me. The wound Estovan had carved -that deep gash- the dragon had it pressed against the ground with its chin tucked.

Damn it. I was running out of time. Eventually, the Flicker would jam again. Eventually, I wouldn’t get lucky. Eventually, I would die.

A roar came from behind me. Violet hit the beast’s flank at a full sprint, her warhammer swung in a rising arc that connected with the sound of thunder. I heard and saw scales cracked -the dragon’s massive body actually lurched sideways from the force of it, black blood spraying from the point of impact. For one glorious second, it looked like a good idea. The aura pulsed.

Violet’s mana died. I saw it through a Gift-fraction -the glow around her body almost winked out. The warhammer became heavier in an instant. Her arms buckled. She tried to swing again and could barely raise the head off the ground. The dragon’s tail caught her across the ribs.

She flew. Hit the stone and rolled, the warhammer clattering away from her. She lay on her back, gasping. I saw her try to channel mana. It was weak. Like a sun reduced to little more than a candle.

I wanted to scream at her to run. I knew she wouldn’t. I wanted to do it anyway. Violet lay there. I could see it on her face. Something I’d never seen on her face, but could recognize from my own. Helplessness.

Then something shifted in her expression. She turned her head, slowly. She stared at all of the blood around her. Violet’s jaw tightened. She drew a knife from her side, set the edge against her palm and cut. My breath caught as I stared at her. She hated this Gift. I had never asked her why.

There was a connection. I saw it happen through my Gift -a web of dark red lines spreading outward from Violet’s bleeding hand, latching onto every pool and rivulet of black blood across the field.

I understood almost immediately. That dark aura could dispel projected mana -it could unmake wind and fire. It couldn’t unmake the physical blood, neither the blood pouring from Violet’s hands, nor all the dark blood already around us. Her eyes went wide, as if she herself was surprised this worked. I knew then that this could work.

We moved together. Violet raised her bleeding hand and pulled. The dragon blood obeyed. Every steaming rivulet reversed course and flowed back toward the wounds it had come from. The dragon roared in pain.

I was already moving. I closed the distance to the beast’s shoulder and drove the Godblade into the gash I’d opened seconds before. The blade sank deeper this time -the scales around the wound were buckling outward from the pressure of the blood inside. I twisted, pulled free, struck again.

From somewhere behind and above, arrows fell. Three imbued shafts struck the dragon’s haunch in quick succession -fire trailing in bright lines. Damian was still holding the last platform. The surviving archers were still fighting. I spared a single Gift-fraction to find the platform. It was shaking, cracked in three places, but ot was still holding.

The dragon’s great body convulsed. One of the gashes along the beast’s ribs tore wider, the scales peeling back. I struck there. The Godblade punched through into something softer beneath. The dragon lurched, its tail sweeping the ground behind it with enough force to shatter stone.

I spared a glance for my friend. Violet was bleeding steadily. Her sliced palm dripped into the snow, and I could see -even through the chaos of the Flicker- that she was getting paler. It almost made me drop the Flicker. Almost.

It was working. Estovan’s work -the deep gash along the dragon’s throat- was tearing wider. The punctures bled and merged as Violet pressured them from the inside. The dragon’s chin rose, almost involuntarily.

Its mouth opened. The beast must have understood. It turned on Violet. I saw the mana condense in its chest. The attack was something smaller and more focused -from up close, I could see even this. I did not think.

In a Vaelinfraction, I threw myself between Violet and the dragon. The Godblade came up. The frost struck the flat of the blade and the world turned white. For a second, the blade held and cut through frost. The second ended.

The impact hurled me sideways - my back hit stone, and the air was driven from my lungs. The Flicker shattered.

Gift and Godblade both went silent, leaving me gasping and heaving on my hands and knees. My hands were shaking and my ears were ringing. I couldn’t feel the switch at all. Blood leaked out of my nose and mouth alike. It might have been leaking from my eyes too.

Something was snaking inside of me, I could feel it as a thousand tiny insects just beneath the skin. I could also feel something inside of me pushing back, burning the corruption.

Sever.Vaelin whsipered, and the thousand tendrils died. I felt my power come back to me.

It took two seconds for me to find the lever again. I found it buried under pain. I found it, and I threw it. The Flicker came back. It came back wrong. No, my focus was wrong. I couldn’t find the right rhythm. More pain came, made me cough out blood onto the snow. I stopped reaching for the Flicker. The Godblade was dead in my hands even as I heaved. The throat was open.

There were pinpricks on my skin. Somewhere behind me, the Scrylens worked. Dorothy was alive. On this accursed mountaintop, a woman with barely any mana was still alive. I didn’t have the focus to wonder why.

Violet was on her knees. Almost as white as the snow beneath her. She raised both of her hands now. Her lips were moving. I didn’t think she was speaking. The dragon screamed. I saw the wound in its throat open wider. Somehow, I knew she had opened it as far as it would go. As far as she could make it go.

Blood geysered upward -a column of black that steamed where it met the frozen air. Through the spray, I could see the raw, open flesh beneath. The wound went deep -past scale and muscle. I stopped trying the Flicker. I looked at Violet. She was pale. Even from here, and even without my Gift, I could tell that she was shaking.

Vaelin burst crimson in my palm again. Some of the pain dulled. Enough that I slowly rose back into my feet. My sight blurred. The world became vague shapes and noise. I only saw three things. The stain of the blood, the blue mass of the dragon, the white of the snow.

I could not see the corruption aura and could not track the mana building in the dragon’s chest. I trusted Violet to hold. I trusted the archers to keep firing. I trusted Damian to keep the platform standing. I trusted Sere, wherever she was, to survive. I trusted, and I leapt.

Vaelin sang in my hand. The blade burned red -a deep red. The same color as my eyes. I drove the Godblade into the open throat of the dragon and the world disappeared.

Visions came and they did not come gently gently. A red sky stretched over a battlefield that had no horizon. The earth beneath was black and cracked, and across its endless span, shapes fought and died in numbers too vast for any mind to hold.

Demons.

The word was not mine. The horde was vast and numberless, and the armies arrayed against them were breaking.

Then the sky changed to the deep blue of a winter sky. Across it, I saw a dragon in flight, its scales the color of the sky behind it. Its wings beat slowly, each stroke sending cascades of frost downward like so many beautiful crystals. On its back, was a woman.

She had white hair, whipping in the wind and she was singing. I knew that song -had found myself humming it just hours ago. It was beautiful. Where the voice carried, ice rose in towering walls, and the horde that had been surging forward broke.

Eira.

The battlefield was gone. There was darkness all around me. I was in a cave. All around me was dark stone. I knew without knowing, that I was deep inside a mountain -Everfrost Peak. I knew it the way you know a place in a dream, without needing to be told.

Eira -the Goddess of Frost- lay on the stone. The black was creeping over her. It crept slowly, so slowly -the way it had crept over Sere’s shoulder, but spanning years instead of seconds. It crawled along her arms and up her neck in branching patterns. Her eyes were open.

Vyranthos was curled outside the cave. I could see it as my vision split down the middle. One half the Goddess, the other her dragon. Vyranthos sat outside, shielding her from nothing. It was just as corrupted, had been for just as long. Black streaks ran inside it, curling, growing, always growing.

It had come home to find her and to die beside her. Vaelin’s grief hit me so completely that I could not tell where it ended and I began.

I was back. Back in front of that dragon, back in front of that fountain of blood. The throat was before me. The blade was already falling. I could not stop it. I would not have stopped it. Some part of me stopped thinking of this as a kill, and started to consider it a mercy.

The Godblade flared. I shoved myself forward. The blade bit through scale and flesh and bone and something underneath all three. The dragon shuddered and a tremor ran through its entire body, from the tip of its broken wing to the end of its massive tail. Then there was stillness. The dragon’s aura broke. I knew it even without my Gift.

I climbed the dragon’s neck. The Godblade was in my hand, raised above my head. It still glowed Crimson. The Crimson was starting to fade, bleed into pink The visions had not released me. A part of me could still see her face, could still hear the song. Eira’s open eyes stared at me from inside a cave just behind me.

I’m sorry, my friend. The Godblade whispered. I did not release it. Not yet.

I gasped and stumbled and nearly fell from the dragon’s neck. My nose was bleeding freely. My hands were shaking so hard the Godblade rattled in my grip. I could barely stand.

I wanted to rest. I turned, my eyes found the Scrylens, and found the mop of blond hair beside it. Something inside of me unclenched.

There was work to be done. The part of me that didn’t stop thinking, never could stop thinking…was thinking even now. I forced myself to keep standing. I raised the Godblade high.

The world swam. Violet couldn’t feel her hands anymore. That was probably bad. The snow beneath her knees was stained dark -some of it the dragon’s, too much of it her own. Her palm had stopped bleeding, which she knew was worse than if it hadn’t. She blinked, kept trying to focus. The mountain kept tilting sideways.

Violet forced her head up. Esra stood on the dragon’s neck. The bastard was dead.

She was small. That was the first stupid thought and it hit Violet so hard her chest ached. She was so damn small up there. The dragon’s body stretched below her like a fallen mountain, and Esra stood on it like a Hero out of a fairy tale. The Godblade pulsed above her.

Around Violet, the mountain stirred. Lieutenant Simone was the first. He sank to one knee in the blood-soaked snow and pressed a fist to his chest. His lips moved -whatever he said, Violet couldn’t hear. Others followed. Some dropped because their legs simply gave out. A few of the veterans bowed the way Violet had seen old fighters bow, one hand on their sword hilt, heads low.

Not everyone knelt. One man took a step backward, his face more pale than Violet’s. Four others simply stared, frozen in place. A woman, the one called Saffer, stood with her hands at her sides and tears cutting lines through the grime on her face. Count Vance stood perfectly still. His sword was at his side, his jaw was tight. His face kept switching expressions -fear one moment, respect the next. His eyes widened and narrowed. Even they couldn’t decide which way to lean.

Violet dimly felt a prickling on her skin. Even more dimly remembered what it was. The pricking of a Scrylens. She turned and saw the strange reporter. Something blurred next to her, though everything was blurring for her now. It was a blonde shape that wouldn’t sit still. Violet let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Good kid.

Damian sat in the rubble of his collapsed platform. He’d let it crumble the moment the dragon fell. His hands were on his knees, his head bowed, and his face was turned away. Violet couldn’t see his expression.

Violet turned away from all of them. She looked only at Esra.

She looked up at her -at the girl silhouetted against the pale sky, standing on the corpse of a dragon. For one heartbeat, Esra felt unreachable. The distance between them felt wider than the whole of the Everfrost. That whatever had just happened on this mountain had opened a gap that Violet’s fists could never close.

Then Esra looked down. Her eyes found Violet’s -not the kneeling or staring soldiers, nor Count Vance standing rigid. Violet.

The Godblade’s light faded as Violet watched. Slowly. The glow dimmed from red to pink to white to nothing. The blade dissolved into the air, and Esra’s arm stayed raised for a heartbeat longer. Esra smiled, and her hand lowered.

Violet’s fear died so fast it might as well have not existed in the first place. What replaced it was something sharper and warmer all the same. It hit Violet square in the center of her chest and stayed there. Something told her that no amount of furious pulling was ever going to yank it out.

Violet looked up at the sky. At the pale, endless white of it. It was, against all odds, a beautiful day.