The Plunge
1140 Words
The ring shrieked—an actual sound now, as wet glass dragged over the slate.
It rose around Talia’s boots, sticky-cold, anchoring her shadow to the ground.
She could move, but barely; every motion took twice the effort and cost three times the breath.
Kaela slammed herself against the binding from the inside. The world became sharp edges and bright.
Across the clearing, Lucian and Amaria faced one another, the space between them a pressurized void.
“You’re in violation,” Lucian said softly. “Coven Laws. Crown Rule.”
“Then try me,” she said. The bangles on her wrist rang as a bell struck underwater.
She lifted both hands. The ring convulsed. The air warped between them, ready to shatter.
Lucian moved with intention. He raised his palm—and the pale fire roared, not gentle any longer but hungry, a tide of quiet light that rushed across the rock and ate the ring as if it were chalk lines.
Amaria hissed. The rogues howled. The ground bucked like a living creature.
Talia’s body snapped free.
She staggered—caught herself—heard Alina’s short, choked sound as Leon’s arm crushed tighter, pulling her with him, using her body as a shield.
“Let her go, you coward!” Talia shouted above the high wail of magic.
Leon’s grin was stained red. “Come take her.”
“Done,” Casius said.
He moved. Leon slashed; Casius let the blade pass an inch from his belly, stepped inside the guard, and drove a fist into Leon’s ribs.
Something gave with a wet crunch. Leon gasped, his arm convulsing around Alina’s throat. Alina bit his hand hard enough to draw blood. He yelped. Casius wrenched his injured wrist and forced him down.
Thomas came at Talia—fast, clean, no warning left in him, a blade flashing for her throat. Once, that would have unmade her. Once, she would have hesitated to see the boy who’d held her hand under the old oak.
Once.
She ducked. His blade cut air.
“Did he just try to kill us, Talia?” Kaela cried in shock.
“Afraid so.”
Talia slammed her hilt into his solar plexus and felt the breath go out of him with a sound that was almost a word. He recovered, vicious, and they fell into the ugly, intimate language only two people who know each other’s bodies can speak: feint, counter, memory, spite.
“You were always a good student,” he grunted, parrying a strike to his neck.
“You were always mediocre at best,” she spat.
He tried to crush her will with his alpha aura again. It hit her mental shields like freezing rain.
“You don’t get to command me,” Talia reminded him. She slapped his guard aside and cut his thigh open to the bone.
He screamed, staggered, and went down on one knee.
“Talia!” Alina gasped.
She pivoted—Leon had faked going down; his good hand had found Alina’s hair, yanking her off-balance. Casius’s weight shifted, ready to break him in two—
Amaria moved first. Her hands flared. The ring, though scorched by Lucian's fire, snapped like a whip.
It didn’t go for Talia this time. It went for Alina.
“No,” Lucian said, and it wasn’t a word so much as a law. Light leapt from his hand and met the ring mid-arc. Light and shadow smashed together in a soundless concussion that blew dust and pine needles up into a funnel around them.
For a second, everything froze—the witch, the king, the blades, the rogues—caught like insects in amber.
Talia saw it then. A glint in the dirt near Thomas’s knee.
An engraved symbol on the metal plate he had dropped. The same hidden mark she had found, years ago, inside the grip of her father’s old dagger. The one found in the river. The one he had called "a piece of home."
Her stomach dropped through the earth.
“You stole that,” she breathed, the betrayal hitting her harder than a knife. “You killed him.”
Thomas’s eyes flicked down to the mark. Just once. Enough.
The world lurched back into motion. Sound crashed in—the river, the howls, the ring of steel.
“Casius!” Lucian barked.
“I have her,” Casius snapped.
He didn’t. Not yet. Leon twisted like a snake and threw Alina toward the witch. For one impossible second, Alina hung between king-fire and marsh-shadow—caught between two laws that would rather break a girl than lose to the other.
Talia ran. She didn’t think about the ring or the knives or the king. She ran.
Amaria’s mouth curved. “Take,” she whispered to the circle.
Lucian’s voice was a blade. “Mine.”
Light and dark slammed again. The shock wave blew Talia sideways. She hit a stone, rolled, and came up with the taste of copper in her mouth.
She saw Alina tumble, saw Casius dive, saw Leon’s boot turn toward escape.
She saw Thomas reach for the metal plate. The air around his fingers shimmered—he was trying to open a portal.
“No!” Talia screamed. “Don’t let him take her!”
She launched herself at Thomas. Her blade met his wrist just as his fingers brushed the plate. He screamed; the marked metal skittered—spun—clinked to the edge of the rock—and dropped.
Into the river.
The ring shrieked. Amaria’s head snapped toward the water like a hunting bird.
“NO.”
Lucian’s eyes cut to Talia, then to the river, then to Amaria. Calculation flashed like lightning behind his gaze. He said one word that Talia didn’t recognize. The light in his palm dimmed. For a hairbreadth, the witch’s magic faltered.
“Now,” he said.
Casius wrenched Leon down and tore him off Alina.
Thomas lunged at Talia with murder in his eyes.
Alina sucked air like a drowning girl and crawled toward Talia on hands and knees, coughing, eyes wild.
The ground under them cracked.
The ring, denied its anchor, grabbed another—the seam Talia had used. It widened—stone lips parting over black water roaring far below.
The rock shoulder where Talia, Alina, Thomas, Leon, Casius, and half the fighting rogues balanced… shivered.
Lucian stepped once, twice, three times—each step a command. His voice came down like winter. “All of you. Stand. Down.”
No one did.
The ledge gave.
Talia grabbed Alina. Their fingers caught, slid, caught again.
Casius snatched Alina’s other wrist.
Thomas's knife flashed toward Talia’s back.
Lucian reached for the sisters with one hand and flung a light at Amaria with the other.
The rock broke.
They plummeted into darkness.
- Writer
