Merlin could not move.
The flesh that once held centuries of defiance now felt like wet paper—a collapsed cathedral of magic, scorched nerve by nerve by Ouserous's divine thunder. His limbs lay twisted at unnatural angles, fingers trembling in spastic flicks, not from pain, but from how thoroughly his body had been rewritten. The lightning hadn't just pierced him. It memorized him—broke past the final sanctums of his layered soul and carved silence into them.
And still… still he looked.
His eyes, bloodshot and cracked like molten glass, locked on two still forms beside him—Aurora and Loki. The two who followed him, loved him, feared him. Lay beside him like shattered statues. He could no longer tell if their chests rose.
Lightning buzzed faintly in the air like a gnat chewing through metal. His skin still hissed with the leftover heat.
He blinked. Slowly.
Aurora.
