Chapter 446: SURVIVE

Elien;

I don’t have much strength left in me.

The orb of blue fire still hangs around me, thinner now, and guttering at the edges the way a candle does when fighting against a steady gust of wind—bright enough to hold Balinar back, not strong enough to promise it’ll last through whatever he tries next.

I press both hands flat against my stomach and breathe.

"Ground yourself first."

Wilhelm’s voice to Elian surfaces from some lesson weeks ago—a quiet afternoon in the training yard, his hand steady on our shoulder while he explained, patient in a way I hadn’t expected from him.

I’ve grown to learn that Primordial magic doesn’t answer to panic. It answers to stillness. To intention held clean and unshaking, no matter what’s happening around it.

I force my breathing to slow. I’m weak and tired, but I can’t give up. Here, on my knees, watching Balinar circle the perimeter of my daughter’s flame with the patient, hungry look of a predator waiting for a wound to finally bleed out. I can’t give up. I can’t let him hurt her.

"You can’t hold that forever," he says, almost gently. But I know the crudeness of his mockery no matter what tone he uses to deliver it.

I don’t answer him. I don’t have breath to spare on him right now.

"Feel the source before you try to shape it." Koda’s lesson comes this time. I remember it from weeks ago, when he sat on the grass with us, cross-legged, while describing his connection to his bear — not commanded, he’d said, but invited. In his words, power isn’t something you seize. It’s something you ask, and it answers because it trusts you enough to.

I don’t know if my daughter’s fire trusts me at all. Most of whatever primordial gift Thalyra gave us lives with Elián now, not me—I only ever borrowed the edges of it, secondhand, through proximity. But I press my palm harder against my stomach anyway, feeling for the traces of it. It’s not completely gone with Elian. Some of it is still here—thin, exhausted, but still there, still burning.

Please, I plead inwardly. Not knowing exactly what or who I am blessing. Just a little more.

The flame flickers, and for one terrible second I think it’s about to gutter out entirely. It doesn’t. It steadies, faint and trembling, but steady.

"Hmmm," Balinar murmurs, watching, always watching. "She’s stubborn. Like you."

"Don’t talk about her!" I cut him off through gritted teeth, and he smirks.

"You have to find calmness underneath the fear," Zephan told me that once. Panic scatters power. Calm gathers it. Thanks to him, I’ve learned that.

I don’t feel calm right now. I feel like every nerve I have left is stretched thin enough to snap. But I reach for the memory of his voice anyway, for the particular steadiness he always carried even in bad moments, and try to borrow some small fraction of it now.

"Magic listens to intention more than strength." Selthía’s voice floods my memory next, cold and precise during one of our many chats, the way she always sounded in that quiet gallery full of serpent carvings. "A small, clear intention will outlast a large, chaotic one every time."

Clear intention.

I don’t need to win. I understood that the moment the flame first bloomed around me—this isn’t a fight I can win, depleted...alone, and against something this old and this patient. But I don’t need to win.

I need to survive. I need her to survive.

That’s what matters. That’s the only intention that matters right now.

I press deeper into the source of her fire. Like holding my hand out and hoping she takes it. She does. I feel her respond to my reach. Faint, exhausted, but responding—and feeling her hold on me, I think again of Elián.

Not\ longer reaching for him, or hoping he can hear me, because I know he can’t. This time...I’m just remembering him. Remembering the night he stood in front of Bram and didn’t flinch. The night he killed him without a single moment’s hesitation–not out of cruelty, but because he understood, with a clarity I’ve always wished he had, exactly what needed to be done, and did it.

If Elian were here, he’d already be fighting. He’d give everything he has to keep Balinar and these bastards away from our baby, and I’m going to do just that. No one will hurt her.

I don’t have his fire. I never have. I’ve always been the quieter half, the one who endures rather than the one who acts. But maybe his strength and fire are exactly what this moment needs from me.

I hold onto the memory of him and push it, along with everything else I can muster, into the thin, exhausted flame still curling protectively around me.

It brightens—not much, not nearly enough, but enough that Balinar takes an involuntary step back, his expression sharpening into something wary again.

"You’re drawing on something," he says slowly. "Something beyond what little she has left on her own."

"Get away from us," I say, with my voice coming out steadier than I feel.

"You don’t have the power for this," Balinar continues, circling closer despite his own wariness, testing the edges of the flame with his gaze the way you’d test ice before trusting your weight to it. "Whatever primordial scraps that child carries, they’re hers alone. You were never the one Thalyra blessed."

"I don’t need her blessing." I grit the words out, holding on to my daughter’s magic to stabilise her through sheer, stubborn will. "I only need enough to keep her safe until someone comes."

"No one is coming," Balinar says, almost pitying now. "Do you truly believe anyone can track you here? This place exists outside every border, every bond, every—"

He stops, and I watch something shift across his face—a flicker of genuine uncertainty, the first I’ve seen from him since he struck me hours ago.

I feel it too, underneath the exhaustion, underneath the fire still trembling around me...

Something’s coming.

A presence, distant but closing, moving with a speed and a fury I recognise even from this far away—some part of me that’s spent months in that household learning the particular weight of certain footsteps, certain heartbeats, even without a bond of my own to any of them.

Balinar’s head turns sharply toward the far wall of the chamber, toward the sealed door no one has gone near since I woke here.

"That’s not possible," he says, mostly to himself now, some of his earlier calm cracking visibly across his expression.

I press my hand harder against my stomach, feeling the flame answer, however faintly, drawing on whatever scraps of strength Wilhelm’s lessons and Koda’s patience and Zephan’s calm and Selthía’s precision and Elián’s remembered courage can still offer me, secondhand and borrowed as all of it is.

Just a little longer, I think, to the fire, to myself, to her...to nothing and no one who can actually hear it.

Suddenly, something slams against the chamber door hard enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling above us, and my heart leaps to my throat.

Someone came!!

Someone’s come to save us...But who??