Page 164 of Veinblood
The magic he hurls at us is uncoordinated, disjointed, and our combined power doesn’t just block his assault, it unravels it, finding the weak points where his stolen abilities fail to work in harmony and tearing them apart.
Blood flows faster from the crystal wounds as his body rebels against the strain of channeling so much mismatched power. The fragments flicker erratically, their light stuttering.
Flames sputter and die before they can fully form, ice meltsinto slush before it can strike, and stone crumbles back to dust as the magic holding it together fails.
“You think this changes anything?” Desperation bleeds through his voice now, high and strained. “I still have more power than both of you combined!”
He hurls everything he has left toward us in one final, desperate gambit—fire and earth, wind and ice—and the cavern shakes under the assault.
But storm and shadow rises to meet it. Our combined magic doesn’t try to overpower his. Instead, it does what Ellie and I have learned to do together. It adapts, it flows, and it finds the spaces between his attacks and exploits them.
The explosion when our powers meet shakes the chamber. We’re all thrown to the ground. My ears are ringing, spots dance before my eyes, and I drag myself to my feet, spinning aroundto find Ellie. She’s nearby, on her hands and knees. Lifting her head, her eyes meet mine, and she nods.
Turning, I face Sereven once more. The light in the crystal wavers then dims while I watch, and one by one the shards go dark, and the power surrounding him dies. For a heartbeat, he stares at me, mouth open, and then he grabs the hilt of his sword and pulls it free.
I recognize it straight away. It’s the blade our father gave him before Authority poison claimed his soul.
“You don’t deserve it!” he screams, pointing the sword at me. “The power. The throne. The loyalty of people who should have followed me.” The words are filled with years of resentment. The older brother who lost everything to the younger sibling. “You never did understand the strength it takes to sacrifice everything for a greater vision.”
“Is that what you call it? Murdering our parents? Genocide? Agreatervision?”
“It isnecessity!The world belongs to those strong enough to claim it. The weak exist to serve or be swept aside. You’re proof of that. Strip away your shadows, and what are you?Nothing!The only way you can defeat me is if you use magic to do it.”
The taunt cuts deep. It isn’t true, but it shows the real divide between us. Sereven sees power as external, something to be taken, stolen from others, and hoarded like coin. He has never understood that true strength comes from within, from the bonds we forge with others, from choosing to protect rather than destroy.
I could end this now. He has no power left to defend himself with. One thought and he’d be dead. But I don’t. Instead, I let all but one of my shadows fade. The remaining one forms into a blade, which settles into my hand.
“Stand down,” I tell Ellie without turning around. “Whatever happens, do not interfere.”
“Sacha, no.”
“Promise me, you will not intervene.”
“But—”
“Promiseme.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Go to Mira. If I fall, she will need you.” I raise my sword, and meetSereven’s eyes. “No shadows, no Voidcraft. Just me and you.”
He stares at me for a second, then nods. “To the death, then …little brother.”
We circle each other, and each step brings memories flooding back. Summer afternoons in the private courtyard behind the Lirien Spire, learning swordwork from a Veinwarden who treated us both with equal measures of patience and exasperation. The way Sereven always favored his left side slightly, how he telegraphed his attacks with a tiny shift of his shoulder, the combination he used when pressed into a corner.
Steel rings against shadowblade as he tests my guard. The sound cuts through me. I helped polish that sword as a child, watched our father present it to Sereven on his eighteenth birthday.
Now it seeks my throat.
“When did you become this?” I deflect his probe, my counter strike forcing him back. His parry is flawless—muscle memory from a thousand sparring sessions. “When did my brother become a monster?”
“I became what Meridian demanded.” His blade seeks my throat in an aggressive thrust that would have killed me if I hadn’t seen him execute a similar move years ago on the battlefield. “What you could never become.”
I turn his attack aside, and my counter strike catches him across the ribs, parting fabric and flesh in a line of crimson. He reacts exactly the way our weapons master told him never to do. His sword sweeps wide in a horizontal slash meant to gut me.I jerk back, the wind of his passage stirring memories of when that same wild swing would earn him a wooden sword to the ribs and a lecture about control. Now it earns him my pommel driving toward his skull.
He ducks, and his leg sweeps out to take mine out from under me with the exact same timing he used when we were boys. But I’m not a boy anymore, and neither is he. The wall that catches me is unforgiving, and when I surge forward, it’s with decades of fury behind every strike.
The flurry that follows is vicious, desperate. I vary my rhythm like our master taught us—fast, slow, heavy, light—watching Sereven’s eyes widen as he realizes his Authority training has made him a prisoner of predictability. Each attack comes from an angle he doesn’t expect, at a speed that breaks his timing.
