The crater still smoked.
Steam curled from scorched roots. The air was heavy with the scent of molten bark and blood.
But the silence didn't last.
Vortan stood.
Burned, cracked, scarred, but not broken.
His chest rose slowly, deliberately. And then his eye opened wider, redder, brighter than before.
"You almost did it," he said, voice a whisper and a roar all at once. "Almost."
Rayan tried to rise, but his legs buckled beneath him.
Malrick braced him with one arm. "We can still"
"No," Orien said sharply, eyes scanning the air.
It changed.
Something ancient was coming.
Vortan raised both arms. No incantation, no spell words. Just will. Pure, raw will.
The sky split.
Not with lightning, but with remembrance.
From the clouds came fire not like a dragon's, but colder, darker, older. Fire that didn't burn flesh, but soul. A howl echoed in the distance, like a child's scream swallowed by time.
The flames spiraled downward. They weren't just fire. They were judgment.
Rayan's eyes widened. "We can't dodge that"
"Don't," Orien muttered, stepping forward alone.
He closed his eyes.
Then raised both hands high.
Ice bloomed from his palms, not just ice, but memory-frost, drawn from the deepest wells of forgotten magic. It expanded not as a shield, but as a mirror, reflecting time itself.
The spell collided.
And bent.
Orien's barrier did not stop the fire, but it redirected it. With an arc so precise, so impossibly narrow, it spun the flames into the sky in a spiral. The blast cracked the heavens. Birds fell dead. The sun flickered.
Orien collapsed, smoke rising from his robes, frost lining his lips.
Rayan stared at him in disbelief. "You… you turned it?"
"I bent the angle," Orien rasped, barely conscious. "Not the fire."
But Vortan was already moving.
No mercy. No pause.
He vanished then... reappeared.
Directly before Rayan.
One palm struck the young mage in the chest.
Not a blow of strength.
A blow of memory.
Rayan screamed.
He saw his mother's face burning in a house he'd forgotten.
He saw Samantha, not as Zayran had, but in her final breath, whispering something only the dead remember.
He saw himself, younger, smaller, terrified… forgotten.
The pain wasn't physical. It was personal. Intimate. Cruel.
Rayan flew backward, crashing into the remains of a tree, the breath torn from his lungs.
Blood spattered across ash.
"Rayan!" Malrick shouted.
Orien tried to rise, but could not.
Vortan lowered his hand, breathing slowly. His voice was like falling dust:
"One down."
The smoke around Rayan curled like it mourned.
And then...
Silence.
The end of a heartbeat.
To be continued...