Page 85 of Roaring Spell

This is going to hurt.

The magic isn’t just powerful—it’s wrong. Centuries of stolen energy, dark and corrupted, tainted by the Preservers’ ideology and the suffering they’ve caused. It pours into me like liquid fire, burning through my veins, searing my thoughts, trying to tear me apart from the inside.

Every nerve screams. Every muscle seizes. My heart stutters, stops, starts again with a painful lurch.

I don’t let go.

The resistance fights. The same gift that lets me shrug off elemental attacks now struggles against a concentrated assault of ancient, malevolent power. It’s like trying to drink an ocean—impossible, overwhelming, destructive. But I keep trying. Keep fighting. Keep holding on because that’s what bears do.

We don’t give up. We don’t let go. We protect what matters, even when the cost is everything we have.

Might not survive this.

The thought is distant, clinical. Almost peaceful.

The siphon screams—or maybe that’s me screaming, hard to tell through the agony. Light blazes from the device, from my hands, from my eyes. The world becomes white and pain and desperate, stubborn refusal to release my grip.

She’s going to be so angry about this.

The thought cuts through the chaos with perfect clarity. Sakura, furious at me for doing exactly what Grandmother Peach warned against. For being stupid and heroic. For sacrificing myself without asking permission.

She’s going to yell at me. Probably cry. Definitely create weather.

Worth it.

If this works—if I can absorb enough power to destabilize the device—then she lives. The town lives. The Warding Line survives.

If it doesn’t work, at least I tried. At least I didn’t stand there doing nothing while the woman I love faced an impossible choice.

The woman I love.

I’ve never said it out loud. Never put it in my poetry, never admitted it even to myself in clear terms. But here, with power tearing through me and darkness creeping at the edges of my vision, the truth is undeniable.

I love her.

And if this is the last thing I do, at least it’s a worthy ending.

The siphon cracks.

The sound is like ice breaking—sharp, sudden, final. Fractures spread across the crystalline surface, light leaking from the wounds. The power flow stutters, chokes, begins to reverse as the device loses cohesion.

More. Just a little more.

I pour my bear’s resistance into the effort. Not absorbing the magic anymore—redirecting it. Letting it flow through me and back into the earth, grounding it the way Sakura grounds her elements when they threaten to overwhelm her.

The siphon shatters.

SEVENTEEN

SAKURA

Time stops.

The siphon explodes in a blaze of light, and Torin—my Torin, my stubborn, poetry-writing, self-sacrificing idiot of a bear—is thrown into the trees and crumples to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.

He’s not moving.

He’s not moving, and his face is gray, and there’s blood trickling from his ears and his nose, and Valesh is screaming about twenty years of planning, and reaching for a weapon, and I⁠—