"No…"
The word tore out of Princess Evelyn before she could contain it — raw and ragged, stripped of every layer of composure she had spent years building.
"I didn't make all those sacrifices just to end like this."
The roar that followed shook her chest from the inside, fury crashing through her like a wave that had nowhere left to break. If the force of her rage alone could have killed, every goblin knight currently tearing through her people would have dropped where it stood. The ground would have been littered with black armor and silence.
But fury changed nothing. The goblins continued their advance, unhurried and relentless, and the battlefield continued its grim arithmetic regardless of what burned in her heart.
Despair had taken root.
