My right hand moved.
Only the right.
Everything else was wreckage—bones screaming, muscles torn beyond obedience—but that arm still answered. Fingers slammed shut around the giant's ankle, biting into hard leather, nails scraping uselessly against the rigid boot slick with blood and harbor filth.
The contact tore something open inside me.
Hunger.
White fire bled out of my hand, no longer delicate, no longer restrained, hardening as it moved. It wrapped around his massive body in a violent spiral—arms pinned, torso locked—until the flames cooled into a solid serpent, coils climbing his chest like living chains.
He staggered.
Restrained.
The fatal punch halted inches from my face, stopped mid-arc as the coils tightened. The dock groaned under his weight. Wood splintered beneath his boots.
Then the serpent bit.
With need.
It struck the neck, wrapping tight around the pulse point where life surged fastest.
Something invisible tore free from him and rushed into me—hot, searing, alive. His breath hitched. Veins darkened beneath his skin as if something vital were being dragged out through every pore at once.
Life.
Raw. Unfiltered.
It flooded me like pressure forced into shattered glass.
Pain detonated across my body as bones began to realign—not cleanly, not gently. Fractures grated back into place. Torn muscles crawled together in wet, agonizing increments. Each inch of healing burned worse than the injury itself, as if my body resented being forced to function.
I screamed. The hound's answering roar drowned it out.
The serpent constricted tighter as it drank, white coils pulsing with every stolen heartbeat. His strength bled out of him in visible waves—shoulders sagging, movements slowing by brutal degrees.
But it wasn't enough.
Strength roared through him, untamed and defiant. The giant's limbs lashed, forcing the serpent to shiver with the effort. Coils strained. Light jumped and flickered across his twisting form.
He laughed.
Blood ran down his face, teeth bared in something feral and cruel.
"That's it?" His voice grated, hoarse but confident. "I'll crush you with what's left!"
The hunger inside me grew sharper, more desperate. Healing stalled halfway—bones misaligned, lungs burning, blood flooding my mouth as something ruptured behind my eyes.
Time tilted against me.
Then—
Gold.
Vibrant. Dense. Warm.
Amber.
She stood a few steps away, both hands pressed to her own chest, fingers digging in as if she meant to tear something free. Her knees shook. Her lips moved without sound—like a prayer.
Golden light bloomed beneath me again.
It poured into the hollow the serpent carved inside me, filling it just long enough to matter. Her knees buckled; the vibrant gold in her hands dimmed like a dying coal as the cost of the Breath hollowed her out.
Our eyes locked.
We both understood.
No second chances.
I didn't regulate it. I didn't stop myself.
I opened wide and let the hunger take it all.
White getting tighter, coils thickening until they screamed under their own pressure. Absorption turned violent—no longer a pull, but a tear. His body betrayed him in stages.
First the breath—ripped from his lungs in a strangled gasp.
Then bone—ribs collapsing inward with wet cracks, spine bowing the wrong way.
Then organs.
Something inside him burst, hot and final.
His scream collapsed into choking disbelief.
I felt it all.
Every stolen pulse. Every dying spark.
The giant body gave up.
What fell beside me wasn't a man.
It was a crushed mass of meat, iron, and shattered structure—life reduced to something unrecognizable.
My body finished repairing itself in agony—bones snapping into alignment, organs sealing shut, nerves screaming as they rewired under force they were never meant to carry.
But I held.
The light didn't fade—it retreated. It flowed backward from the carnage, a living river climbing over my bloodied hand, winding up my arm, vanishing into me.
Silence crashed in.
Amber fell.
Her body crumpled to the dock, breath leaving her in a fragile, shallow rhythm.
I lay there, chest heaving, blood soaking the planks beneath me. The giant's remains pressed against my side—heavy, warm, final.
Above, the sky stretched wide and indifferent.
"I'm still here," the words scraped out, aimed at a memory of scarred hands counting copper in a dim room.
Footsteps approached.
Slow.
Unconcerned.
They didn't hurry.
They didn't fear me.
I turned my head.
White hair.
A black cloak untouched by the wind.
A crimson blindfold, perfectly still.
Luna stopped a few steps away, posture sharp, as if listening to the echo of what I had done.
Her attention passed from the hound's ruined body… to Amber's unconscious form… and finally settled on me.
Fear gripped me, sharp and honest.