Chapter 74: Time Freeze

Azura’s POV

He got closer to the boys and I saw it.

I did not understand how I was seeing it. It was not something on the surface, not something the eye was supposed to catch. But it was there. Inside each of them.

A blue pearl sitting deep inside their bodies, glowing faintly, pulsing in a slow rhythm that had nothing to do with a heartbeat. Thick. Wrong. The way a splinter is wrong inside a wound, something that does not belong, the body has quietly been building itself around it.

Torin was looking at exactly the same spot I was looking at.

He stopped in front of Leo. Said something low and quiet. I was not close enough to catch the words.

The blue pearl inside Leo started to shake.

Small at first. A vibration, fast and tight. Then bigger. Then bigger still. And then it just came apart from the inside, like something that had been held together by pressure for too long and finally had nothing left to hold itself with.

Torin raised his hand in front of Leo’s mouth.

Black smoke poured out.

Not a little. A slow, dark stream of it, curling up from between Leo’s lips like something that had been living inside him for a very long time and was only now being pulled free. It rose into the frozen air above them and dissolved into nothing.

He moved to Ethan.

Same thing. He said the word. The pearl shook and shattered. He raised his hand, and the black smoke came curling out slowly and darkly, and then it was gone.

Then he looked around.

Careful. Methodical. Moving from face to face across the frozen group, checking each one. Looking for any sign of movement, any flicker behind anyone’s eyes.

His gaze reached me.

I did not breathe.

He looked at my face for one full second.

Then moved on.

I let the air out slowly through my nose and watched him walk toward Rhydor.

Rhydor was frozen mid-attack directly in front of where Ethan had been standing. One arm pulled back. Weight shifted forward. Completely still, the perfect image of someone who had been about to do something and had not gotten to finish it.

Torin stopped in front of him.

He looked at Rhydor’s frozen face for a moment. Something moved in his expression that I could not read from where I was sitting.

Then he lifted his foot and stamped directly on Rhydor’s.

Not gently. A proper full stamp. He pressed down, held it there for a solid second, and looked up at Rhydor’s frozen face.

Then he smiled.

I stared at him from the ground.

I thought about the two of them standing next to each other. Torin is a year or two older. Torin who had apparently seen enough of the world to know what a frozen timeline looked like and what to do when he found himself inside one.

And yet.

This was also the same Torin who stamped on his younger cousin’s foot while he was completely frozen and unable to do a single thing about it, and then smiled at the result as if he had just won something.

Rhydor was younger and carried himself like someone who had been responsible for other people since before he knew how to properly read. He walked into rooms and they got quieter. He made decisions and people stopped arguing.

Torin was older and acted like someone who had looked at adulthood from a distance, thought about it carefully, and decided it was not really for him.

Are their parents absolutely certain they got the ages right?

Torin stepped back from Rhydor and moved to the middle of the open ground.

He stood there for a moment. Then he started muttering to himself, just low enough that I caught pieces of it but not all of it.

"What was it again? Was it this one?"

He said a word. Looked around at the frozen world.

Nothing happened.

Wait, don’t tell me he forgot how to unfreeze time.

He said another one and looked around again.

Still nothing.

Goddess help us.

He let out a short quiet laugh and shook his head slowly. "Did I just freeze time permanently?"

He scratched the back of his head. Started walking in a slow circle, eyes on the ground, thinking hard. Stopped. Walked the circle again in the other direction. Stopped again.

Then something shifted on his face. Something small and quick. A flash of recognition, like a man who has just remembered exactly where he put something he had been looking for.

What is he? I thought

He said the word.

And a light burst from his hand.

No, no not a little light. Something shot upward from his palm in a clean line and hit the grey Wraithfen sky and exploded. And then it started falling.

Not crashing down. Falling slowly. Gently. Like small stars deciding to come down and visit for a moment. Tiny bright pieces of whatever it had been, drifting in every direction, shining softly as they fell.

Torin turned and walked back to his exact position. Mid-step. Foot off the ground. He held it there and waited.

The falling light touched the ground.

Everything came back at once.

The birds. The wind. Every sound snapped back into existence at the same moment, so sudden and so loud that my whole body flinched before I could stop it.

And Leo and Ethan went down.

Both of them. Same second. No stumble, no warning, no last effort. Just straight down onto the grass like someone had cut every string that was holding them up at the exact same time. They hit the ground and they did not move.

Everyone stopped mid-motion, not understanding what had just happened.

Torin was the first one to speak.

"Well." He looked at the boys on the ground. "Seems like it handled itself."

Bright. Easy. Like he had simply been watching and things had resolved on their own and wasn’t that convenient.

Something shifted on Rhydor’s face. Fast, there and then gone. He looked at the space where Ethan had been standing. Looked at the ground. Then looked very slowly down at his own foot with the particular expression of a man who had the strong feeling that something had happened to him that he could not account for.

Torin appeared at his side immediately.

"You alright?"

Rhydor looked at him. Then at his feet. Then back to Torin.

"Fine," he said slowly. "Nothing."

Torin smiled. The specific smile of someone who knew exactly what they had done and was completely comfortable with never explaining it.

I looked at the two of them and closed my mouth and said absolutely nothing. I would come back to this. I would find the right moment and the right question and I would sit with it until Torin gave me an answer I actually believed.

This was not that moment.

Silas was already moving toward the boys on the ground.

"Now. While they are down." He looked at the warriors. "Move them. This is our window."

The Warriors moved in fast. Crouching, lifting, getting Leo and Ethan up onto their backs, preparing to move.

But then she came through the trees. That annoying woman.

From the direction Rhydor had thrown her. She pushed through the bushes and stepped out onto the open ground, and her gown was torn at the side, the fabric ripped from where she had landed. Her hair was loose around her face.

But her eyes were bright.

"Where do you all think you are going?" Completely calm. No shouting, no shaking. Just that stillness that was worse than anything loud. "The party is not over until I say it is over."

She looked at Rhydor.

Something moved across her face. Almost amused despite everything.

"We could have been great together." She tilted her head slightly. "But you are too stubborn." A small pause. "So die with them then."

She raised her hand above her head. A slow smile spread across her face, wide and satisfied and deeply pleased with itself.

"Boys."

The ground started shaking.

I felt it in my feet first. Then my legs. Then my chest. A deep vibration coming from multiple directions at once, getting stronger by the second, like something very large and very heavy was moving through the trees toward us.

She laughed.

That was the part that stayed with me afterward. Not the shaking ground or the sound coming from the trees. The laugh. High and bright and completely unbothered, like someone watching something they had been looking forward to for a long time finally arrive.

Then she snapped her fingers.

And she was gone. Gone from the air like she had simply decided to stop being in it.

But the vibration did not stop. It grew. Deeper. Closer.

We all looked toward the treeline.

The Bornes came out of the trees.

Too many. Pouring from between the silver trunks in every direction at once, those wrong bodies with their dead eyes, spreading out wide and moving fast. An arc that was already beginning to close around us.

Nobody spoke.

I looked at Leo and Ethan on the ground. At the warriors already carrying them. At Liona, beside me, with her eyes wide and her breathing shallow. At Rhydor standing completely still, looking at the Borne coming toward us, his face giving away nothing.

We could not kill them. That had already been established. And now we had two unconscious people to carry and nowhere near enough of us moving freely to hold this many Bornes back for long. And if we fought until we were slow and tired, they would bite. And then we would become what was coming toward us right now.

Axel reached over and held out his hand to Silas.

"It has been an honor knowing you."

Silas looked at the hand. Then at Axel. Then back at the hand.

Torin turned and smacked Axel on the top of his bald head.

Not lightly.

"I am not dying here with you." He pointed at Axel. "If that is genuinely what you want to do, go ahead and do it on your own. I have things to get back to."

Nobody laughed. But something in the weight of the air shifted just slightly.

The Bornes were getting closer.

And from nowhere two figures stepped out from the trees on the far side.

Every hand went to a weapon.

Then one of them shifted and we saw his face.

Corvin.

And beside him, the other warrior. But his face. Half of it looked like it always had. The other half looked like the things coming toward us from the treeline. The same wrong texture spreads from the edges. The same deadness creeping in. He was standing straight, breathing steady, but he did not have much time before it finished taking what it had started.

Corvin looked back at the group.

"Go. We will buy you time. Move now."

Axel stepped forward.

"Both of you. Come with us."

Corvin shook his head. He looked at his brother.

The brother kept his eyes on the Borne. Then Corvin’s voice came out steadier than it had any right to.

"I am not in control of myself anymore. Not fully." He stopped. "I don’t know what I will do when it takes over completely. I am not going back to the pack and finding out."

Silence.

"My family is there," he said. Just that.

Silas walked forward. He pulled one of his swords from its sheath and drove it into the ground in front of the two of them. He looked at them for a long moment.

"We will not forget this."

The brother looked at him. Something moved across the half of his face that still belonged to him.

"Tell our family we will be back." A pause. "If we make it out of this."

He looked at Corvin. Then back at the group.

"Maybe," he said quietly. To himself as much as anyone. Like the word was honest but nothing more than that.

Corvin looked at all of us one last time.

"Go. I mean it. Now."

Everyone started moving.

But I did not move.

"Amanda."

Rhydor looked at me.

"She is not here." I kept my voice even. "We have Leo and Ethan. But Amanda is not here."

"We will find her. We need to go right now."

"No." Simple. Clear. "She has to be somewhere close. If the boys were here then she is near here. In that castle or around it. The woman might have her, and the woman was just standing right there before she disappeared, which means Amanda is..."

"Azura."

"I am not leaving without her." I looked at him directly. Before turning around in search for Amanda "I came for all of them and...

I felt it on the back of my neck.

Sharp. Precise. The kind of hit that does not negotiate with the body. It just tells it what is happening next.

I turned.

Rhydor was standing directly behind me.

"I’m sorry," he said quietly.

The world started going soft at the edges. The Bornes are still coming. Liona’s voice saying my name somewhere behind me. The sounds of everyone moving. All of it pulling back slowly like water leaving a shore.

I opened my mouth.

"You fool."

I don’t know if it came out the way I meant it.

The ground came up slowly and then it did not come at all.

Just dark.

And somewhere inside it, getting smaller and further away with every second, a name I was not ready to stop saying.

Amanda.