“Linnard,” I swallowed, “I don’t know what she’s told you but it isn’t true – or not quite, anyway – not that she’s lying to you, but she doesn’t understand the truth and if I could just speak to her…”

“She doesn’t want to see you, Kas,” Atar said in a softer voice designed to carry only to my ears, rather than those of the neighbours I could sense watching, listening in. “She says zat you changed.”

What does she mean, I changed? We both changed!

How dared she try to control the truth like that? Did they know what she’d done?

“Over,” Linn repeated with finality, and, nudging his wife back, he went to slam the door.

I rushed down and forwards and then I was there, wraith turned low, satyr-strength and fey-flight easily keeping him from closing the door, even though he had his feet on the ground.

I saw him straining against my immovable pressure, saw the fear on Atar’s face, and I felt sorry for them.

I could hear Em’s sobbing, uncontrollable, echoing down the stairs – and I did not feel sorry.

“I’ve changed?” I hissed. “It’s your daughter who changed. You know she’s a killer, don’t you?”

“Whose fault is zat?” Linn gasped, still struggling to shift my weight. “You made her zis – zis champion!”

“It was before that!” I spat. “Maybe if she let me tell you when she died –”

“Vot?” Atar breathed, falling back against the hall wall in shock.

“You let her die?” Linn whispered, suddenly stepping away from the door, his hand sliding limply down its surface. Then his face hardened. “You – let – her – die!”

He struck me, and I wasn’t using my wraith or my shield. His fist connected with my chin. The skin on his knuckles opened, he hit me that hard, and I did feel a trace of pain.

I let it happen. It would’ve been a simple thing to slip aside, but I forced myself to take it. I could hardly return the favour if he didn’t land the blow, could I? And I found I really, really wanted to hit someone right now.

I struck him back, and he had a bit less choice about the matter. My fist connected with his chin, and his skin opened again –

Blood, delicious-smelling blood, splashed out to cover the door.

Atar screamed.

“It’s okay,” I murmured, reaching for my demiskin to find a healing potion –

Satyr-reflexes alone let me evade the lightning that came in two directions – one finger of electricity came streaking at me from Em halfway up the stairs, but there was another beam, bigger, perhaps lethal, shooting down at me from the sky outside.

It wasn’t too difficult to ascend slightly and slip back out the doorway before I was fried. The two lightning-bolts met just below me, then together they flowed back into the house, up the stairs to infuse Em with their energies.

I started working on shields as she gave chase, tearing out the doorway, wreathed in her tempest. Within two or three seconds we were far above the powerless ones below.

This is it, I thought, grinning, as she struck my defences with an initial set of lightning-bolts, testing them. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

She killed Nighteye. She defended the Magisterium over Zadhal. She never trusted me, not really. She took Timesnatcher’s side over mine.

“You, Feychilde, leave me vith no choice!”

Her voice was that of the arch-magister, the same as it had been that night when we first met. But this time, there was no excuse.

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This time, I was the darkmage.

“Come on, tell me you’re not enjoying this,” I yelled back, still grinning, rebuilding shields at the same rate as she destroyed them. “We’ve always been waiting for this, you and I!”

“I don’t even know you, sorcerer! And you do not know me!” Her eyes shone white, the radiance only disappearing as she blinked, twinkling like twin stars out there in the night. “Henthae explained everything! Ze lie, it is over!”

My grin slipped somewhat. “Say again?”

I slowed, and watched as she screeched to a halt a hundred yards from me. She was a nimbus of pure white in the blackness. The wind didn’t buffet her like it did me – it radiated out from her, platinum hair dancing in the tornado.

“It voz Lovebright! It voz always her! She had plans for you, plans zat never saw ze light of day… I voz to be instrumental in vot you became… and so I have been, to my regret.”

She unleashed a sheet of lightning that tore through five shields at the same time, the rolling waves of power crackling as they spread through my blue lines.

She’d been holding back.

I furiously fought to remake the defences, frowning. “What was Lovebright?” I forced myself to laugh. “You’re not making any sense now!”

“Lovebright, who made me love you! She – she made Henthae do it to me… Eizzer vay, I do not love you, Kastyr Mortenn. It is undone, now. I do not, and I never did!”

There was no word in the languages of the Mundic Realm – no word even in Zadhalite – for the kind of cold that entered my gut. It was a blade. It was designed to kill.

‘I remembered how she’d defended me. How quickly we’d become besotted with one another.’

All a lie?

All of it? Everything she’d felt? Everything I’d felt from her?

The knife of ice that entered my stomach and slashed around in there – it found my ego, found it and punctured it, jabbing the serrated blade in deep and sawing back and forth, releasing every scrap of identity I’d built up for myself since kicking a gravestone three months ago.

“You’re serious,” I said, having to hear myself say it aloud for it to begin to sink in.

“I am serious,” she replied, voice shaking. “You… you need to understand, before zis happens. Thinking of you – it is repulsive to me now. I voz never… never vith you to begin viz…”

I could tell she was barely dealing with it either. It must’ve been far, far worse for her.

Our relationship had only been going on a couple of months – better expressed in weeks, really. I supposed I hadn’t even known her a hundred days.

But squashed into those days were thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of minutes. Existence hadn’t been a slow, laborious thing since becoming a champion – I’d lived those minutes, those seconds, down to the very last.

I loved her, damn it. And despite everything we’d been through together – everything we’d shared – this was it.

I accepted it, not with anger, but with submission.

I should’ve known… should’ve known it was too good to be true…

“Em, you must be –“

“You cannot call me zat.”

“No, listen, Em – Emrelet, I don’t –“

“Do not speak to me!” she screamed suddenly, screwing her eyes shut, and thunder drowned out my words, even when I tried to augment them.

There was something about having my power of speech robbed from me, something that ignited a spark within my breast, a fire that despite its briefness came to touch the tinder of my slowly-churning frustrations.

Touch them and set them ablaze.

“Fine,” I said to myself, and started moving towards her. I would batter her with my shields –

When I’d covered half the distance, travelling close to top speed, she opened her eyes again.

Silence – complete, utterly bewildering – suddenly descended. The air itself expired.

“And now you are mine, heretic,” she snarled quietly.

I feared her.

I feared her.

It was only in the light of this revelation that the reality of my situation really struck me.

Why did I join with the vampire again?

I’d struck her dad. I didn’t even know how injured he was, and I’d barely even made an effort at healing him afterwards –

I faltered, almost careening off to the right –

This, this darkness, it was an addiction, and as I realised my error, my foolishness – that was when she unleashed her true power.

Nothing had been done to my mind by the vampire, nothing that equalled the transformation in hers since Henthae showed her the truth.

She didn’t open up with flame, with ice or wind or any of the other tricks at her disposal. I was a darkmage, ostensibly trying to hurt her – one with the power to do so, maybe.

She had to respond as she did. I left her no choice.

My sentence, to be carried out immediately, was death. The punishment for Heresy, death.

I slowed to a crawl but not by will, losing leverage in the air – I only realised what she was doing when I found that I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t maintain my altitude. My wraith only slowed the process – even that power required some kind of substance to move through, it seemed.

She’d stolen the air within my shields – it was ingenious, I had to admit, evading the ill-will clause by tweaking the pressure of the air just beyond the shield’s edges… and without the air my wings, my lungs, didn’t work.

“For vot it’s vorth,” she murmured as I stopped moving forwards and felt my stomach lurch in descent, “I am sorry it has to be zis vay.”

She knew what she was doing to me. She knew what this meant to me, and she did it anyway. Satyr-durability wasn’t even going to have a shot at getting me through this. I built up speed, and I knew what the impact would be.

I plummeted. I fell.

As I had the last time Em, the Em I knew and loved, had died.

Only this time the way she died destroyed not her body but her soul, the death-blow dealt not by demons but by a respected elder, by Mistress Keliko Henthae –

Only this time, no one could catch me.