The night after Esthara didn't feel like victory.
They had left the plaza in ruins—steam curling up from shattered ice, Hollowborn corpses dissolving into black ash—but the air was still wrong. Too still. Too cold. As if the Gate's closing had only locked the wolf in the room with them.
Kael's arm was heavy over her shoulders as they moved through the frozen streets. He'd insisted on walking, and she had let him—for a while. But when his steps began to stagger, when his breath turned to ragged gasps that came too slow, she stopped arguing.
"Sit," she said, steering him down onto a slab of fallen stone.
"I can keep—"
"Sit." Her voice cracked like ice breaking.
He did.
She knelt in front of him, hands braced on his knees. The stormlight under his skin had dulled, but it still flickered in places—thin threads of lightning that ran along his veins.
"Tell me," she said. "How bad?"
