Quentin's body sailed through the air in a limp, rag-doll arc that felt almost unreal to watch, like the moment had been stretched just long enough for the inevitability of it to sink in. Then he hit the double doors with a sound so violent it rattled the bones in my chest.
The wood splintered on impact, blood spraying across the polished surface behind him in a crude, sweeping pattern that looked like a painter having a mental breakdown with a bucket of gore.
The shock of it left me frozen—not magically, not physically, but mentally—because seeing Quentin of all people flung like a sack of flour was the kind of thing that rewired your understanding of the world.
I clung tighter to my hiding spot behind my marble guardian, Sir Stiffbottom, who stood proudly useless as always, rigid and noble in that way only statues and emotionally constipated aristocrats could manage.
I dared a glance toward Elvina, who was still shaking uncontrollably in her puddle of fear and humiliation. The girl whimpered so softly it barely counted as sound, yet the pitiful little noise somehow filled the entire space.
Her eyes stayed locked on the carnage unfolding before us, wide, wet, and trembling like she half-expected the universe itself to reach down and swat her next.
Iskanda strode forward with slow, steady certainty. Gods, that cold gleam in her amber eyes hadn't dimmed in the slightest.
She dragged her spear along the floor as she moved, and the screeching scrape of metal against marble sliced straight through the heavy silence left in Quentin's wake. She didn't spare either of us a glance—until she passed Elvina.
She flicked her wrist, whipping the blood from her spear in a bright, arcing spray, and several droplets landed across Elvina's face. The girl convulsed once, gagged, then hurled violently onto the floor, tears streaming down her cheeks as she tried to muffle herself.
The stench punched the room like a physical force. I pressed a hand over my mouth as quietly as I could and tried not to join her.
For a moment, I let myself believe it was done—that Iskanda had finally put Quentin down, that we would all go home after I paid a therapist for several years of emotional reconstruction.
Her footsteps slowed.
The tension eased just slightly. I dared another look at Quentin's limp shape against the shattered doors, and that's when I saw it: his hand dragging shakily across the marble, smearing blood into a pattern I didn't recognize.
He was drawing something. Something deliberate. Something that glowed with a faint, icy shimmer almost immediately.
My stomach dropped.
Iskanda paused mid-stride. She noticed it too—the faint shift of light, the creeping cold, the strange weight in the air. Her expression tightened, but hesitation was the only warning she got. The next instant hit like a physical shock.
In the span of a blink, the entire room plunged several sharp degrees, cold flooding through the air with such speed it stole my breath. The flames of the fireplace guttered out with a soft hiss, suffocated by a force far older and crueler than any simple magic.
Then the floor erupted—no dramatic rumble, no warning—just a violent, explosive bloom of ice bursting upward in jagged, towering spikes. The marble cracked beneath the frost's rapid expansion, fractures racing out like white lightning.
I yelped and scrambled backward on instinct, but it didn't matter; ice shot up around my boots, locking my feet in place so fast the pain didn't even reach me until seconds later.
Iskanda cursed—an uncharacteristically raw and panicked sound—as she was rooted mid-step, both legs trapped up to the calves.
She tried wrenching herself free, muscles bulging beneath her clothes, but the ice only tightened around her, climbing higher as if eager to swallow her whole. Quentin forced himself upright, re-summoning his staff and using his it as a brace.
Frost spiraled along the jagged shaft in a luminous coil, making it look like something pulled from a myth about frozen gods and long-dead monsters.
Before Iskanda could even lift her blade, Quentin raised his staff and unleashed a spell that seemed to warp the very air.
The ceiling groaned. Frost spread across it in a spiderweb of shimmering fractures. Ice condensed in the blink of an eye, gathering mass so quickly it defied physics, coalescing into a massive pillar of razor-edged frozen stone.
It fell toward Iskanda in a single, horrifying plunge.
She didn't hesitate. She didn't scream. She let her spear dissolve—melting into black nothingness—then threw both her hands up.
Her palms met the descending pillar with a bone-shaking crack that echoed through the chamber, rattling the walls and shaking dust loose from the rafters.
The impact reverberated through the floor and straight into my legs. I let out a tiny, utterly betraying squeak before clamping both hands over my mouth. My heart felt like it had punched itself out of rhythm.
Iskanda held the pillar. Held it. But not without cost. Her arms trembled violently under the crushing weight. Her stance faltered. Blood welled in her mouth and slid down her chin as she gritted her teeth hard enough I could hear the strain from across the room. The entire pillar groaned as she fought to keep it suspended.
Quentin's laugh broke through the tension, brittle and triumphant, edged with hysteria. He pushed himself upright fully and limped toward her, leaning heavily on his staff but still managing to carry the swagger of a man who thought he'd already won.
His chest heaved with uneven breaths, blood dripping down his shoulder in a steady rhythm, but the gleam in his eye was pure arrogance.
"You thought strength would save you," he rasped, voice cracking but still steeped in smugness. "You thought you could brute force your way through this fight. But you never understood real power, Iskanda. Not the kind I wield."
His words slurred slightly at the edges, but his expression remained that same insufferable mix of superiority and delusion. He pointed his staff at her, breathing harder now. "This is over. You've already lost."
Iskanda didn't lift her head immediately. She didn't waste the breath. She steadied herself against the pillar, arms shaking, fingers digging into the ice with such force her nails cracked.
Then slowly—painfully—she looked up at him. Her amber eyes were sharp, blazing with defiance so intense it pierced straight through the growing frost.
"No," she whispered. "I haven't."
Her gaze flicked to me.
My heart stopped.
"Loona," she said, voice tight but commanding. "Now!"
Everything inside me seized. Gods above, she'd known I was here. She'd known the entire time. All my pathetic hiding, all my trembling attempts to stay silent—it hadn't mattered. She'd counted on me being here. She'd trusted me to intervene.
I didn't have time to panic properly. I didn't have time to think at all.
The ice tightened around my ankles as though sensing danger, but I threw my entire weight forward, twisted my hips the way I'd learned through too many narrow escapes, and wrenched myself free with a cry that tore through my teeth. The ice shattered in a burst of sharp cracks, leaving a ring of broken frost around my feet.
Quentin spun, eyes widening, but he was already too late.
One heartbeat.
Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
I dropped into the shadows.
My body dissolved into darkness, slipping instantly into the realm that lived just beneath the surface of the world—all smoke, instinct, and predatory movement—the perfect escape, the perfect ambush, the perfect place for me to strike back.
I shot forward.
Quentin couldn't see me—thank the Saints for small mercies—but he felt something.And Quentin, when he panicked, didn't just react.
He detonated.
A furious storm of ice and jagged frost erupted around him in every direction, a wild, uncontrolled cyclone of shimmering death. Shards the size of dinner plates screamed past my face; spines of frozen air stabbed down from the ceiling; a spinning halo of razor crystals cut through the floor like it owed him money.
I ran anyway.
Dodging, ducking, rolling beneath a whirlwind of frost that wanted me violently reconfigured. One shard grazed my hair; another sliced open the hem of my skirt; a third nearly took my ear off before I dove sideways, skidding across the ice.
"Show yourself!" he screamed, whipping another volley of ice in a full, blind circle that would've cut me in half if I were half a heartbeat slower.
But panic makes people predictable.
And predictability makes them mine.
In three bounding leaps, I burst from the shadows in front of Quentin, materializing right between two spiraling columns of ice he'd launched like a panicked god with a tantrum. His expression was still halfway between realization and terror, his mouth beginning to shape some spell, some threat, some desperate apology—
I didn't give him the chance.
My fist came up in a perfect arc—driven by fear, fury, adrenaline, and a deeply personal hatred for arrogant men with too much magic and not enough common sense.
And then—
CRACK!
My knuckles slammed straight into his balls.
The air exploded out of him in a violent grunt before he folded in half around my punch like a book closing on the last line of a tragedy.