Read Chapter 36: The Fate of the Brother

The cart lurched over a buried cobblestone, and Elara’s teeth clicked together. West Road stretched ahead, pale dust swallowing the border town’s last rooftops. Beside her, Dain’s hand rested on the crossbow at his hip, his eyes scanning the treeline.

“She’ll find us before we find her,” he muttered. “Rogues always do.”

“Then we make ourselves hard to miss.” Elara’s voice was steadier than she felt. Two days without her gift, and her palms still itched with phantom warmth—the memory of power, of purpose.

She heard it before she saw it. A sound like a child weeping, threaded through with something deeper, older. The soul-eater’s fragment-song. The rogue healer had it chained to her will, dragging it behind her like a wounded dog.

The woman stepped onto the road ahead of them. Grey robes, bare feet, hair cropped short and wild. Her eyes were hollow pits of hunger.

“You,” she breathed, looking past Elara, at Dain. “You carry the locket’s scar. And she—” Her gaze snapped to Elara, and confusion flickered across her face. “No. You’re empty. You’re nothing now.”

Elara’s jaw tightened. “I’m the one who’s going to stop you.”

The rogue laughed, and the fragment-song rose, a shriek that bent the grass flat. Dain moved—fast, the way he always moved—but something black and slick erupted from the rogue’s shadow, wrapping his legs, slamming him to the ground. His crossbow spun into the ditch.

“Dain!” Elara started toward him, but the rogue’s hand closed on empty air, and Elara felt a cold grip around her own throat. Not physical. Psychic. The woman was trying to pry open a door that no longer existed.

“Where is it?” the rogue snarled. “Your power. I can smell the scar where it lived. Who took it from you?”

Elara couldn’t breathe. She clawed at nothing, her vision greying.

Then a shape moved in the treeline behind the rogue. Tall, lean, moving with the careful economy of someone who had learned to hunt in silence.

Joran.

Elara’s heart stopped. He was thin, pale, shadows bruising the hollows of his cheeks. But his eyes—his eyes were clear. He raised both hands, and Elara understood. He didn’t have a weapon. He *was* the weapon.

“Joran, no!” she screamed.

The rogue spun. Too late. Joran’s fists came together, and light tore from his chest—white, blinding, impossibly familiar. It was her mother’s light. Her power. It had never left him. It had been sleeping inside her brother all along, waiting for the moment when the two of them stood on opposite sides of a monster.

The fragment-song shrieked. The black thing binding Dain dissolved. The rogue healer staggered back, her face twisting in horror as Joran’s stolen light poured into the soul-eater’s splinter, burning it, consuming it.

“You—that’s not possible—he’s a *vessel*, he shouldn’t be able to—no!”

Joran took another step, and the light swallowed him whole. For one perfect, terrible moment, he stood bright as a star at the end of winter.

Then he fell.

The rogue healer collapsed beside him, her body smoking, the fragment-song dying on her lips. The road went silent. Wind stirred the dust.

Elara was on her knees before she knew she’d moved. Her brother lay in the dirt, his chest still, his skin cool. The light had burned through him like a wildfire through dry grass. There was nothing left to save.

“Joran.” Her voice cracked. She touched his face. “Joran, open your eyes. Please.”

He didn’t. But his lips moved—a whisper so faint she had to lean close to hear it.

“Was it enough?”

Elara’s tears fell on his cheeks. “Yes,” she said, her throat closing. “Yes, it was enough. You saved them all.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face. The lines of pain—years of carrying her sickness, her wounds, her every ache—smoothed away.

“Then I wasn’t… just a spare part.”

“You were never that. You were my brother. You were my hero.”

His breath left him in a long, soft sigh. His hand, which had found hers, went slack.

Elara knelt there in the road, holding her brother’s body, while Dain stood a few paces behind her, silent. She heard him move closer. Felt his hand hover just above her shoulder, not quite touching. Waiting.

The soul-eater’s fragment was gone. Burned to ash. But in its place, something colder settled into Elara’s chest. She had trained new healers, taught them to gather pain and let it flow through them. She had told them it was a gift.

She had never told them what it cost.

Joran had paid her debts his entire life. And now the debt was settled in full.