OURS: The Hunted Prince

Chapter 6:A Sliver Of Death

*Death magic doesn't kill. It unmakes.”*

_DRAVEN POV_

Smoke poured from his mouth.

Not fire. Not heat.

_Absence._

The air went cold. So cold my lungs burned on the inhale. Quiet, too. The kind of quiet that happens before an avalanche. Before the world ends. Like the world was holding its breath, waiting to see if we’d all vanish.

I stepped back. One step. Measured. “Don’t touch.”

My voice didn’t echo. Sound died two feet from my mouth.

The man on his knees didn’t scream.

He _unhappened_.

One second he was there. Sweat on his brow. Piss running down his leg. Begging with eyes that had seen too much. The next —

Ash.

Not burned. Not scattered. Just... gone. A pile of gray that wasn’t quite ash, because ash means something was there. This was the color of “never.”

And where the ash touched stone, the stone turned to Hollow.

The cobblestones didn’t crack. They didn’t blacken. They just stopped existing in a perfect circle, three feet wide. The edges weren’t melted. They were _unfinished_. Like reality forgot to draw them.

Nothing would grow there for a thousand years. No moss. No weeds. No memory.

Everywhere was quiet.

Lucien spoke first. His voice was empty. Not angry. Not shocked. Just... hollow. “That was Death,” he said. “Not Red. _Death_.”

The word hung there. Death. Not the kind we deal. Not the kind with blood and screams and a body left behind. This was worse.

Cassius crouched. Slow. Careful. Like the air itself might bite. He dipped a finger near the Hollow, close enough that I saw the hair on his knuckles stand up. Pulled back before it touched. Smart.

“The seal is still locked,” he said, voice low. “This was a sliver. A splinter left behind. Old. Rotted. Weak.”

Weak. It unmade a man and left a hole in the world, and Cassius called it weak.

I looked at Nyth City. At the smoke rising from the temple district. At the people running, screaming, praying to gods that couldn’t hear them anymore.

“Someone found a piece,” I said. “And they’re stupid enough to use it.”

Stupid. Or desperate. Or both.

Lucien kicked a pebble into the Hollow. It vanished before it hit the center. No sound. No bounce. Just gone. “If they could break the seal, we’d all be dead already,” he said. “Death Magic doesn’t leave witnesses. This was small. Targeted. A coward’s trick.”

He was right. Death Magic didn’t do warnings. When it was free, cities vanished. Bloodlines ended. Maps had to be redrawn because the land itself forgot what used to be there.

Death Magic was banned at the beginning of time.

Not because it kills. Everything kills. I’ve killed. Lucien’s killed. Cassius paints with it.

It was banned because it’s cruel.

It _unmakes_.

It takes your name from your mother’s mouth. One minute she’s calling you for dinner. The next, she stares at your empty chair and doesn’t know why she’s crying.

It takes your shadow from the wall. You walk past a place you stood every day for twenty years, and the sun doesn’t remember you.

It makes it so you never were. No grave. No stories. No “he was a good man.” Just a space where a person should be, and the world moves on like you never took up air.

At the beginning, the witches who used it didn’t win battles. They didn’t need to.

They erased bloodlines. Entire families gone in an afternoon. Not dead — _missing from history_.

They erased names from stone. Kings. Gods. Monuments that stood for millennia, gone because someone spoke a word and meant it.

They erased souls so hard the gods couldn’t find them. No afterlife. No rebirth. No punishment. No peace. Just... nothing.

The world nearly broke.

Reality got thin. Like over-washed fabric. People started forgetting words. Forgetting their own faces. The sky cracked over the Eastern Isles and it still hasn’t healed right.

So the first kings came together. Vampire, Werewolf, Witch, Fox, and Dragon. Enemies. Monsters. But even monsters have lines.

They sealed it.

With Red Magic.

Blood magic. Soul magic. The kind that costs. The kind that binds.

Death to anyone who speaks of it. Death to anyone who seeks it. Death to anyone who remembers it too well.

And when the others saw what happened to the ones who tried... when they saw men unmade in the street, when they saw mothers forget their children’s faces...

They begged to be killed.

By us. By sword. By fire. By anything that left a body.

Because either way, they’d die. But death by us was better than being _unmade_.

At least with us, someone would mourn you.

But like we always say: no mercy for traitors.

The survivors from the temple — the ones who weren’t unmade — were on their knees. Sobbing. Snot and blood and terror.

“Enjoy your time while it lasts,” Lucien taunted, grinning despite the Hollow at his feet. Unbelievable. The man was standing on the edge of nothing and he was smiling. “Should’ve thought about that before you played with gods’ mistakes.”

We left them there. In their own tears. In their own filth.

The fear in their eyes was satisfying. Vindicating. Three hundred years of peace and they thought we’d gone soft.

And sickening. Because it meant they’d forgotten. Forgotten what we are. What we do.

But they made their choice.

They reached for Death. They thought they could control it.

Now they carry their cross.

Now they wait.

Because Duskmoor doesn’t forgive.

And Death Magic doesn’t give second chances.