AZALIYAH RISE OF THE FAE

EXILE (PT.2) THE COLLAPSING

Her eyes snapped to his, the violet irises flashing with a volatile mix of pride and defensiveness.

“I am controlling it.”

“No,” he said, his voice entirely too calm for a man whose ribs were currently being scorched by unrefined sorcery. “You’re forcing it.”

Her jaw tightened so hard a small muscle leaped along her cheek. She despised being read, especially by a half-shattered stranger bleeding out in the mud. “I didn’t ask for a commentary.”

“And I didn’t ask to be your field experiment,” he shot back, his voice ragged but sharp enough to draw blood.

Silence struck between them like flint, heavy and breathless. For a second, the only sound was the rhythmic, oily drip, drip, drip of the dying canopy around them. Azaliyah stared down at him, her chest heaving, before she abruptly yanked her hand away from his side.

The violet light vanished instantly, plunging the clearing back into its dreary, monochromatic shadow.

Camron let out a long, shuddering exhale, the rigid tension easing from his powerful torso by only a fraction. He slumped back against the ash-dulled roots of the willow tree, his dark hair clinging to his forehead.

“Wow,” he muttered after a breath, his eyelids fluttering before focusing back on her. “You almost killed me twice. Pretty impressive for a rescue mission.”

Her brows lifted, and she crossed her arms loosely over her chest, her iridescent violet wings giving a defiant, agitated twitch behind her. “You’re still breathing, aren’t you?”

A beat passed. He looked down at his blood-stained, silvered Kirin legs, then back up to her face.

“Unfortunately,” he said dryly.

The sheer absurdity of his sarcasm in the face of death almost made her smile. Almost. She caught herself, flattening her expression back into a mask of cool indifference. She looked down at him again, this time studying him properly. She didn’t just look at the jagged, weeping tears in his skin or the blood pooling in the gray dirt; she took in the whole picture. The strange obsidian scales peeking through his human torso, the heavy, sweeping antlers that looked older than the forest itself, and the quiet, dangerous intelligence burning in his eyes.

“You’re not from here,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” he replied, his voice a low, gravelly pitch that vibrated through the damp air. “Obviously.”

His dark eyes flicked back to her face, sharper this time, tracking the elegant curves of her high fae features.

“You always state the obvious like that, princess?”

“Only when it needs to be said,” she replied smoothly, tilting her chin up.

“It didn’t.”

She ignored him, refusing to let him bait her. Her gaze moved over him once more, tracing the unnatural, violent blend of his forms. It was mesmerizing and horrifying all at once—the way his body looked as though it were trapped in a brutal tug-of-war, unable to decide what it was meant to be.

“What are you?” she asked quietly.

There was a pause. It wasn't long, but it was noticeable. A heavy hesitation, as if he were deciding whether she was worth the truth.

Then, he let out a rough breath. “A Kirin.”

She blinked, her brows knitting together. “A what?”

His brow furrowed slightly, a flicker of genuine disbelief crossing his face. “You don’t know what a Kirin is?”

“Clearly not,” she said, gesturing vaguely at his silver-furred hindquarters and cloven hooves. “And considering I’m currently looking at one bleeding out in my woods, an explanation would be helpful.”

He studied her for a moment, weighing a decision she couldn't see behind those dark, piercing eyes. Finally, he let his head rest back against the trunk, staring up at the suffocating sky.

“Ancient,” he began, the words dragging out of his chest. “Not from one realm. Not bound to just one kind of magic.”

Azaliyah shifted her weight, her soft flats pressing into the gray mud. She kept her arms crossed, listening intently, though she went out of her way to look entirely unimpressed.

“We’re not supposed to exist in pieces like this,” he continued, gesturing faintly toward the split skin and the mismatched scales along his ribs. “This… is what happens when something interferes.”

Her expression didn’t change, but deep in her chest, something shifted. A cold, familiar stone dropped into her stomach. "Interferes."

“Interferes how?” she asked, her voice losing its sarcastic edge.

His jaw tightened, a dark, bitter shadow passing over his features. “Breaks things,” he said simply. “Magic. Form. Balance.”

A heavy pause settled over the clearing.

“Everything.”

The silence that followed was different this time. It wasn’t empty or awkward; it was thick with a grim, mutual understanding.

“Yeah,” she muttered softly. Because she had seen that exact same ruin. Everywhere she looked.

The ash-barked trees. The stagnant, poisoned air. The dying, flickering portal. Her entire world. It was all being broken by an unseen, unstoppable rot.

She shifted slightly, her gaze drifting back toward the path she had run down. The portal to Earth was far beyond her line of sight now, hidden behind dense miles of black briars, but she could still feel its fading warmth in her memory.

“You picked a terrible place to land,” she said, looking back down at him.

“Wasn’t exactly aiming for it.”

“That makes two of us.”

Another long pause stretched between them. The forest seemed to hold its breath.

Then, the ground beneath them cracked.

It wasn't a subtle shift or a small tremor. It was a deep, violent, splitting sound that ripped through the bedrock of the earth, like a colossal bone snapping beneath the realm. The vibration traveled straight through the soles of Azaliyah’s thin flats, making her stumble forward a step.

Both of them went entirely still.

Then another c***k echoed. Closer. Louder.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Camron said, his voice dropping its dry humor.

She threw him a sharp look. “You think?”

Before he could respond, the ground split wide open just a few feet away from his hooves. A jagged trench tore through the gray dirt, and a darkness yawned beneath it—vast, empty, and completely endless. There was no bottom to the fissure, just a terrifying void.

To their left, the ancient ash trees began to tilt. They didn’t snap or fall over like normal timber. They tilted slowly, uniformly, as if some massive, invisible hand beneath the earth was violently dragging them downward by their roots, pulling them into the abyss.

“We need to move. Now,” she said, her wings flaring wide, glowing a panicked violet.

“You think I can run like this?” he snapped, gesturing fiercely at his bleeding, silver-furred legs.

She looked at his injuries, then at the rapidly widening chasm, then back at his face. “You’re going to have to try.”

He let out a short, humorless breath, gritting his teeth as he braced himself against the tree. “Fantastic.”

The ground cracked again, the fracture line tearing straight toward them.

Azaliyah didn't wait for him to complain further. She lunged forward, her flats sliding through the mud, and grabbed his powerful arm. Hooking her shoulder under his, she hauled him upward with far more strength than her slender frame suggested.

He staggered, a sharp groan escaping his lips, his cloven hooves clawing wildly for purchase on the trembling earth. He barely caught his balance, leaning heavily against her.

“You’re enjoying this,” he muttered through clenched teeth, his breath hot against her ear.

“Just a little,” she shot back, though her own heart was hammering against her ribs. “Now move!”

Then they ran.

The ground did not merely c***k anymore. It surrendered.

A deep, cataclysmic rupture tore through the earth directly behind them, ripping upward in a wave of destruction as though something buried beneath the realm had finally decided to breathe. The sound was entirely wrong. It was too loud, too erratic—it sounded alive, a roaring beast devouring the landscape.

Azaliyah did not look back. She didn’t need to. She could feel the terrifying physical pull of it. It was a vacuum, an anchorless gravity dragging the world inward, swallowing the trees, the mud, and the air piece by piece.

“Faster!” she snapped, her flats kicking up gray dirt as she navigated the bucking ground.

“I’m trying…”

Camron’s voice cut off as his footing slipped. His hybrid body was fighting itself, his powerful human torso struggling to synchronize with his injured Kirin half. One side was moving faster than the other, his hooves sliding dangerously on the slick, dying terrain.

“Try harder!” Azaliyah shouted over the deafening roar of the collapse.

“Incredibly helpful advice, thank you!” he shot back, his jaw locked as he forced his bleeding legs forward.

Suddenly, a massive oak tree lurched sharply to their left, its roots ripping straight out of the earth with a sickening screech. It didn't fall toward them; it was sucked backward, flying horizontally into the split earth with a hollow, echoing sound that simply never ended.

Azaliyah’s breath caught in her throat, her violet eyes widening. “What is that?”

Camron didn't answer. Because as she glanced at him, she saw the sudden, stark tension in his face. He didn’t know. And for the first time since she had found him, the confident, sarcastic facade was gone. He looked genuinely alarmed.

They ran harder, desperation fueling their strides.

The forest was completely collapsing around them now, turning into a nightmare of flying debris and dissolving reality. Massive chunks of land broke apart like brittle biscuits. Thick, ancient roots snapped with the sound of breaking bones. Entire sections of the earth folded inward, collapsing into the void like paper crushed in an unseen, monstrous hand.

The very air began to scream. It was a high-pitched, tearing sound as the atmosphere itself fractured. The magic—what little remained of it in this blighted realm—was being dragged down into the void along with everything else.

Azaliyah felt the drain instantly. It was a physical ache in her chest. Her own internal magic flickered wildly in response, unstable and hyper-reactive, as though her power were being torn between two opposite directions at once—trying to keep her alive while being pulled toward the abyss.

“No,” she muttered under her breath, her teeth grinding.

“Not now. Don't you dare.”

Suddenly, the ground split right beneath her feet.

Using every ounce of fae grace she possessed, she launched herself into the air. Her violet wings gave a desperate, powerful beat, allowing her to leap across the widening gap. She landed hard on her flats, barely clearing the edge as the space she had occupied a millisecond ago vanished into the endless black darkness.

Camron did not clear it as cleanly.

His injured back leg slipped on the crumbling lip of the crevasse. His powerful upper body dropped hard, his chest slamming against the breaking edge.

Azaliyah spun around on instinct, her wings flaring out for balance. She lunged forward, dropping low, and caught him by the leather of his vest just as the earth beneath him dissolved.

“Move!” she screamed.

“I am moving!” he roared, his hooves thrashing against the open air of the void as he tried to haul himself up.

Another massive rupture tore through the ground directly in front of them, forcing them to skid to a halt on a rapidly shrinking island of dirt. For half a second, there was nowhere left to go. They were completely boxed in by the void.

Then, through a chaotic gap in the falling trees, Azaliyah saw it.

Faint. Flickering. Beautiful.

The portal. It was still open, just fifty yards away.

“There,” she breathed, the translucent vortex reflecting in her wide eyes.

Camron followed her gaze, and something in his expression tightened, a grim realization dawning on him. “Is that…?”

“Yes,” she cut him off, already throwing his arm back over her shoulder and pulling him forward. “Run!”

They didn't need to say anything else. The time for banter was entirely gone.

They drove forward into the final stretch, dodging falling branches that shattered like glass, leaping over broken ground, slipping through the gray mud, and catching each other repeatedly. They were barely keeping pace with a world that was unyielding in its desire to unravel faster than they could escape it.

Behind them, the surge of the collapse accelerated. It swept forward like a tidal wave of pure nothingness, moving faster and faster, as if the void itself knew they were trying to leave. As if it refused to let them go.

“Go! Go!” she snapped, pushing him ahead of her.

“I’m right—”

The earth split cleanly between them. A sharp, instantaneous chasm ripped through the dirt, separating them by a yard of empty space.

Before Azaliyah could grab him, the ledge beneath Camron gave way entirely. He disappeared.

For half a second, he was simply gone, swallowed by the rising shadows of the trench.

Azaliyah’s stomach dropped into a hollow, terrifying pit. A panic she hadn't felt in years seized her throat.

“Antler head!” she shouted, her voice cracking over the roar of the dying realm.

A hand shot up from the crumbling edge, his fingers digging desperately into the loose, gray topsoil, gripping, holding on by sheer, stubborn force of will.

“Still here,” he gritted out, his face pale, his muscles shaking under the strain of his own heavy, fractured form.

She didn't think. She didn’t calculate the risks. She moved on pure, raw instinct. Dropping heavily to her knees, her flats sliding in the mud, she reached over the precipice and seized his wrist with both hands.

“Don’t you dare let go,” she ordered, her violet eyes blazing.

“Wasn’t planning on it, princess,” he gritted through clenched teeth.

Suddenly, the ground beneath Azaliyah’s knees began to c***k. The island of dirt they were on was giving up. It was going to drag them both down.

“Of course,” she muttered, a flash of pure defiance cutting through her panic.

She pulled. She pulled with everything she had, but his Kirin half was too heavy, and the void was pulling back harder. In her desperation, the dam inside her mind broke. The magic surged.

This time, it wasn't a choice. A blinding explosion of violet light burst from her palms. It was wild, erratic, and completely uncontrolled—not a precise spell, but a raw, violent eruption of pure kinetic energy. The purple arcs of lightning struck him, wrapping around his torso like a coiled whip. It didn't heal him; it yanked him.

The sheer force of her violet magic tore him straight off the crumbling edge of the cliff, launching his heavy body upward.

An instant later, he slammed directly into her. The impact knocked the wind from her lungs, and they both hit the hard, vibrating ground, tumbling together through the gray mud as the cliff behind them slid completely into the endless dark.

For a moment, they lay there in a tangled heap of limbs, wings, and antlers, gasping for air.

“…You really could’ve given me a warning,” Camron groaned into the dirt, his voice muffled but still managed to hold that infuriating trace of dry sarcasm.

Azaliyah snapped her head up, brushing a strand of dark hair from her face, her chest rising and falling unevenly. “I didn’t exactly know I was going to do that,” she snapped, already grabbing his arm and hauling him aggressively back to his feet.

She looked ahead. The portal was right there now, but its edges were fraying, shrinking by the second.

“It’s closing,” he said, his voice dropping all humor.

“I see that.”

The wave of darkness surged right at their heels, devouring the last of the forest. The portal shrank further. Smaller. Smaller. A tiny, flickering eye of light.

“Jump!” she yelled.

They didn't hesitate. Together, they leapt headfirst into the swirling glass.

And the world disappeared.