Page 123 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

He called his inner fire.

It rose fast. Red and gold flared hard across his staves, the flames breaking free to dance across his armor, wrapping his entire body in a fireball that was known to clear battle lines. He drove forward into the vortex.

The wind swallowed it whole, only to extinguish it as if it were nothing, and pushed him back.

He stood at the threshold, breathing hard, and felt something he hadn’t felt in centuries.

Useless.

“No.” The word came from somewhere deep.

He didn’t reach for the fire again.

This time he reached for something deeper—the thing he’d been holding at arm’s length since the night he’d first felt it. The thing Bellus had named and Martar had grinned about and Gellar had warned him would destabilize everything he’d built.

The Claiming.

He stopped fighting it.

Without the iron restraint that he’d spent three centuries keeping tightly leashed, he let his magick pour through him like a dam breaking. Raw power and fire flooded through his blood, bones, sinew, and every nerve ending that he’d spent a lifetime armoring against his curse to finally let the dragon free.

It didn’t roar; it simply became him, and he became it, and for the first time in three hundred years, Zarek felt the edges of himself dissolve into something larger.

The flame that answered wasn’t red anymore…

It went white. A clean and pure crystalline white flame that surrounded him and became a part of him. Burning along its edges was a thin line of teal blue the same color as his eyes. The white flame and power didn’t flare, and the wind that had extinguished his fire didn’t touch it. The vortex parted like the veyll, as if he’d sliced right through it.

Behind him, the wind sealed the outer world tight.

Was this what the Seers had seen? Was this what Katarra had been hunting? That new power? His own magick… just evolved?

He focused on Angela, lying ten feet away, crossing through the wind to the eye. He reached out to touch her—only to hit a bolt of electricity that threw him back.

His boots scraped across the debris-strewn floor to stay upright as he caught the side of the wall and pushed himself up against the howling vortex.

No way in Helviti was he done.

Removing his gloves, he gathered everything he had left—the white flame, the Claiming, the centuries of magick he’d spent his entire life containing—and let it build until his body was burning brighter than he’d ever allowed before.

With heart racing, gritted teeth, and his focus entirely on her, again Zarek battled through the vortex, back to the eye where he reached through the electrical field with both hands and took hold of hers, praying this wouldn’t burn her—instead, trusting in her magick and held on.

The current tore through him. He strained and roared, pushing his own power against it to override it, and felt it short.

But the vortex still whirled around them, churning the air like a voracious whirlpool filled with dark debris, cutting them off from the outside world.

As the adrenaline coursed through his veins, mixed with potent lashings of fear for Angela, Zarek dropped to his knees beside her, keeping her hands in his.

“Angela.” His voice was low as the stench of ash, dust, and burning electricity flooded the air. “It’s me. Wake up. Please.”

Tears streaked her face, which was too pale for his liking.

“Angela. Wake up. Now.” This time he gave the command of a captain, even though he’d learned that this woman did not respond to commands—it made her mad. But to wake her up, he’d use anything. “Angela!”

Still nothing.

Genuine fear did something to his heart as he cradled her soft hands in his as the world went to ruin around them. “Come back to me, Angela. I need you…” He kissed her hands and prayed that whatever had trapped her would set her free.

He’d never needed anyone in his life, for he was a man whose entire identity was built on self-containment, on being the thing that protected everyone from his power. He’d believed once that need was personal, and it wasn’t about being tough; it was about surviving a world where he lived on the fringes.