44 – Always You

Celestine DemonBorn drifted closer, not flying so much as flowing through the air, until her breath brushed Ashley’s cheek.

The contact made Ashley’s skin prickle at once, her body recoiling from the wrongness of it even as she forced herself to stay still. She stared into the woman’s red iris and saw her own reflection there, small and tinted crimson.

“Have you ever heard of the concept of personal space?” Ashley asked, locking eyes with her.

“Personal space?”

Celestine chuckled.

Then her arm shot forward, and her clawed hand closed around the back of Ashley’s head.

Talons scraped across her scalp, sharp enough to cut loose a few long strands of hair. They drifted away beneath them, falling toward the churning glow below, only to curl and dissolve before they ever reached it.

“Your personal space is inside me,” Celestine said, drawing her closer until the words seemed to crawl over her skin before reaching her ears. “You’re a part of me, darling. A shard. A stray nerve that learned to mistake itself for a body.”

A muscle jumped in Ashley’s jaw.

Celestine noticed.

Her gaze dropped to Ashley’s face with slow amusement, and her claws pressed a fraction deeper against the back of her skull.

“I own you,” she said softly. “Every breath you take is borrowed from something that was mine first. You are a glitch in a broken system, a little error that learned to speak and mistook that for meaning.”

“Meaning what?” Ashley asked.

Her voice came out flat. She kept her eyes locked on Celestine Demonborn’s, letting the claws remain where they were while she gave the woman nothing to read.

“That none of this is what you want it to be.” Celestine’s smile thinned. “I saw through Aury’s eyes. I watched you build yourself a story. A real world. Real people. A noble little quest to save them all.”

Her grip shifted against Ashley’s scalp, almost tender.

“Very moving,” she said. “Very proper.”

She leaned closer.

“Very boring.”

A tremor started at the corner of Ashley’s mouth, and she smothered it before it could become anything Celestine could use.

Almost.

One eyebrow betrayed her.

Celestine’s gaze caught it at once. Her mouth curved with quiet satisfaction, and she gave the smallest nod, as if Ashley had confirmed exactly what she had wanted to hear.

The Ascendant God, if that title was even worth believing, opened her free hand and angled her palm toward Smulknefire below.

“I’ll show you what I mean,” she said as darkness gathered over her palm.

It folded inward, layer after layer, drawing the light around it into a tight, rotating sphere. The air between her fingers bent toward its center, and the red glow of the chamber thinned wherever the orb passed over it, as if the spell were not casting shadow but making light forget how to exist.

Then the sphere sharpened at its front, its slow rotation turning toward the dragon’s head.

“Stop,” Ashley said. “What’s the point of this? I thought you needed the dragon alive.”

“Needed,” Celestine said, tasting the word as if it amused her. “Yes. That is the right word.”

Her gaze slid to Paco, standing between his father’s horns.

“You brought me a much better, pocket-sized replacement. I have no use for the big one anymore.”

The darkness in her palm stretched forward. One side of the sphere drew itself into a narrow point, and the whole thing began to spin fast, the tip boring through the air as if it were already drilling into flesh.

Paco jumped.

He darted into the space between Celestine’s hand and Smulknefire’s head, wings flaring wide as he forced himself to stop there. He was smaller than the spell. He was smaller than everything in that chamber. It did not matter.

His body shook with the effort of holding position, purple light trembling along the edges of his scales, but he did not move away.

Celestine let the spell go with a small turn of her wrist.

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The black point slipped from her hand and crossed the chamber in absolute silence, less fired than decided.

Paco stayed in its path, tiny against it, wings spread too wide for his body as the distance between him and the spell vanished.

Only then did he close his eyes.

A sound tore out of Smulknefire beneath them, too broken to be a roar and too desperate to be commanded.

“No.”

Then the spell opened around him.

Six narrow lances broke from the central point, curving past his wings, his throat, and the fragile line of his spine in a perfect ring. They passed so close that the air shivered around his body, then snapped back together behind him without slowing, reforming into a single rotating spear.

Paco opened his eyes as the spell left him untouched and turned in time to see the spear shooting forward, its momentum unchanged.

Ashley blinked.