Chapter 20 · Deadly Gambit

"Get your hands off me, Mara!" Lucan snarled, his voice sounding like grinding gravel. He slammed his back against the jagged obsidian wall of the Core, his chest heaving.

I didn't budge. I stepped closer, my boots crunching on the crystallized mana shards littering the floor. "Shut up and let me in. You're spiking so hard you're going to blow a hole through this entire district."

"I can handle it," he spat, though his pupils were blown wide, swallowing the gold of his irises. A vein in his neck pulsed with a sickly violet light. The curse wasn't just eating the city's magic anymore—it was eating him.

I grabbed his collar, yanking him forward. "Handle it? You can barely stand. If the bond snaps because you're too proud to take a stabilizer, Noah dies. Do you get that? My brother dies because you wanted to play the martyr."

Lucan froze. The mention of Noah always hit a nerve, but the violet light surged again, throwing us both back. He groaned, collapsing to one knee. The air around him began to warp, sucking in the ambient light like a dying star.

"Mara, get back," he gasped. "It's... it's not stabilizing.