Read Chapter 35: The Last Trial

The border town smelled of rot and burnt prayer.

Elara pressed her back against the crumbling wall of the chapel and listened to the wind carry something between a moan and a hymn. Three days west of the city, and the sickness in the air had only thickened. The soul-eater’s fragments were not dormant here—they were *breeding*.

“You feel that?” Dain asked, low, his hand resting on the hilt of his short sword.

“I don’t feel anything.” The words came out flatter than she intended. She had meant them as a joke, the old kind, the kind that said *I used to feel everything and now I feel nothing*. But the silence that followed told her it hadn't landed.

Dain didn’t look at her. He’d barely looked at her since the barracks. Since the conversation where she’d asked him why he’d chosen her over Joran and he’d answered with a truth that cut both ways.

“Someone’s raising the dead in there,” he said, nodding toward the chapel doors. “And I don’t mean the honest kind.”

Elara risked a glance through the gap in the hinges. Inside, rows of bodies lay wrapped in white linen, laid out on pews like offerings. And at the altar, bent over a corpse with her hands buried in its chest, was a woman in healer’s robes. Old style. Pre-Covenant. Before the guilds had made healing a science, rogue healers practiced the *raw* arts—bloodletting, essence-mapping, and the forbidden work of pulling power from the dead instead of the living.

The woman’s fingers came out slick and black. She raised them to her lips.

“She’s eating the fragments,” Elara whispered. “She’s not trying to destroy the soul-eater. She’s *absorbing* it. Making herself the vessel.”

Dain tensed beside her. “Then we kill her before she finishes.”

“She won’t finish. She’s not strong enough. That’s the problem.” Elara watched the woman convulse, black veins crawling up her neck and jaw. “She’s trying to become the monster. But she’ll burn out first. And when she does, the fragments won’t just scatter—they’ll detonate. This whole town becomes a spawning ground.”

“Then we end her fast.”

“Wait.” Elara grabbed his wrist. His skin was hot. She didn’t let go. “If I could reach her—before she goes critical—I might be able to redirect the flow.”

Dain looked down at her hand, then at her face. “You don’t have your gift anymore, Elara.”

“I know.”

“You can’t heal her. You can’t pull the corruption out.”

“I know.”

“So what are you planning?”

She released his wrist and straightened her spine. “I’m going to talk to her.”

The rogue healer heard the door before it finished opening.

“Come to finish the work?” Her voice was cracked, wet. She didn’t turn. “Or come to stop me?”

Elara stepped inside. The smell hit her—copper, rot, and something sweet underneath that made her stomach turn. She’d stood in plague wards before. She’d been the one choking on lung-blood while the life drained from her arms. But this was different. This was *wrong* in a way she had no instinct for anymore.

“Anselm,” Elara said. “You studied under Master Thorne in the border cloisters.”

The woman’s hands froze. She began to turn, slow, like her bones were grinding against each other. Her face was young. Younger than Elara had expected. And her eyes were black.

“You know my name.”

“I know what you did. In Greystone. The children you saved from the fever.”

Anselm’s lips peeled back. Not a smile. A baring of teeth. “I saved them. And what did they give me? Nothing. The town threw me out when the abbot said my methods were unclean. *Unclean.* I gave them everything. I took every ache, every cough, every dying breath into my own body until I was more wound than woman. And when I had nothing left to give, they called me *dangerous*.”

“You broke the Covenant.”

“The Covenant is for healers who have something to lose.” Anselm stepped away from the corpse. The black veins had reached her collarbone. “You lost yours, didn’t you? I can see it in you. The emptiness where your gift used to live. You know what it’s like to be hollow.”

Elara’s throat tightened. She did know. She knew it every morning when she woke and reached for something that wasn’t there. Every time she watched a soldier limp into her training yard and she had to teach them a bandage instead of just *taking* the pain away.

“I know what it’s like,” Elara said, quiet. “And I know what you’re about to do will kill you.”

“It will make me more.”

“It will make you nothing. The fragments are not a gift. They’re a hunger. The soul-eater doesn’t serve its host. It *enslaves* it. If you absorb enough, you won’t be Anselm anymore. You’ll be an open door for something that wants to feel nothing at all.”

Anselm laughed. It came out wet, gurgling. “You think I want to feel anything? I felt the children die. I felt their mothers’ grief pour into me like a river. I have felt *everything* for too long. The soul-eater doesn’t take pain—it takes *feeling.* And I want it gone.”

Elara took a step forward. “Anselm. Look at me.”

The rogue healer’s black eyes met hers.

“You said you know what I lost,” Elara said. “But do you know what I found?”

A flicker. A crack in the black.

“I found people who stayed.” Elara gestured behind her, toward the door where Dain moved in the shadows. “People who carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. People who chose me even when it cost them everything.” Her voice cracked. “The pain isn’t the price of healing. It’s the *proof*.”

Anselm’s hands trembled. For a moment, just a moment, the black receded from her pupils.

“Too late,” she whispered. “It’s already inside me.”

The floor erupted.

Black tendrils burst through the chapel stones, wrapping around Anselm’s ankles, her waist, her throat. She cried out—not in pain, but in *ecstasy*—as the soul-eater’s fragments fused with her spine. The corpse on the altar sat up.

Elara lunged. Not with magic. With hands.

She grabbed Anselm’s arms, rooted her to the ground, and pressed her forehead against the rogue healer’s.

“Listen to me.” Her voice was steel. “The fragments don’t just feed on feeling. They *mimic* it. What you’re feeling right now—the power, the relief—that’s not you. That’s the monster convincing you to open the door.”

“I *am* the door,” Anselm rasped.

“No.” Elara dug her fingers into the woman’s shoulders. “You’re a healer. You don’t open. You *close.* You seal. You knit the wound shut even if it costs you your own hand.” She pulled back, met the black eyes one last time. “Let me help you close this one.”

Anselm’s lips peeled apart. A scream tore out of her—a sound that split the chapel’s rafters and sent the corpse flying. The tendrils tightened.

And then, through the scream, Elara heard it.

A heartbeat. Not Anselm’s.

*The soul-eater’s heart, somewhere beneath the town, beating in rhythm with the corpse on the altar.*

And it was getting faster.

“Dain!” Elara shouted. “The corpse—it’s not dead. It’s a hive. Cut the spine—cut the binding between them!”

Dain burst through the door, sword already swinging. The corpse twisted, unnatural, its jaw unhinging to reveal a nest of black threads where its throat should have been. Dain brought the blade down in a single arc.

The threads screamed.

So did Anselm.

Her body convulsed, black veins collapsing inward, and for a heartbeat Elara saw the girl beneath—the one who had saved children, who had given everything, who had been thrown out for the sin of being *unclean*.

Their eyes met.

“Thank you,” Anselm whispered. “For seeing me.”

Then her body dissolved into a rain of black ash.

The chapel went silent.

Elara stayed on her knees, hands empty, ash settling in her hair. Dain lowered his sword. His chest heaved.

“Did it work?” he asked.

Elara shook her head slowly. She looked down at her palms. They were black.

Not ash.

*Threads.*

Thin, living strands of the soul-eater’s essence, burrowing into her skin.

“No,” she said. “It didn’t work.”

She looked up at Dain, and for the first time since losing her gift, she felt something.

*Pain.*

“The last thing she did,” Elara said, her voice shaking, “was give me her wound.”

The threads pulsed. And somewhere beneath the town, the soul-eater’s heart beat faster.