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“Then I won’t hold it.” The idea is raw and half-formed, but the water is vibrating harder, and we’re out of time. “Just use your fire and keep the creature off me. Okay?”

He studies me as if he’s trying to see the future in my eyes.

“If you feel the current building inside you, you stop,” he says. “I don’t care if⁠—”

The water begins to swirl, and the drakon rises the way it always rises—slow and massive, with water pouring off its scales. Its white-hot eyes find us with the same fresh curiosity it’s worn every single time.

But unlike the previous loop, my hands stay steady. Because this time, I’m not the one who should be afraid.

Logan’s fire hits the drakon in an orange stream that slams into its face and drives its head sideways, the hiss of flame against wet scales filling the mist with steam. The creature shrieks and turns toward Logan, but Logan’s fire keeps coming, buying me seconds I can’t waste.

So, I raise my right hand toward the drakon, palm open, fingers spread, and I pull.

The lightning in its scales rips free, arcs across the gap, and slams into my palm hard enough to rock the boat. The current races up my arm and floods my chest, and like last time, the pressure builds instantly.

My heart rate spikes. The current pools in my ribs, the voltage climbing, and the memory of Logan’s voice—eleven seconds before your heart stopped—hits me so hard that my left hand shoots up, like it does when I pull lightning from the sky.

But this time, I’m not pulling it from the sky.

I’m channeling the drakon’s current, letting it tear through me and out through my open palm. The crack of it splits the air, lighting the mist white in every direction, and the sky answers with a rumble of thunder I feel in my bones. It’s low and hungry, my storm recognizing what I’m feeding it and demanding more.

So, I give it more.

I keep pulling, and more lightning rips from the creature’s scales, hitting my right hand. It floods my chest, and the pressure builds for one terrifying heartbeat… then the current finds the path I carved through my body and exits my left palm in another bolt that connects with the storm overhead. The lightning leaving my hand and the lightning striking down from the clouds meet in the middle and hold, becoming one continuous, blinding column of silver running from the drakon, through me, and into the sky.

My hair lifts, my skin glowing silver, but the current isn’t accumulating like it did in the time loop that killed me. It’s flowing. This is five hundred years of storms passing through my body, and every single volt of them knows me, singing through me on its way home.

This is who I am. Not a fire witch holding too much, but a storm doing exactly what storms do.

Because storms don’t save. They destroy.

And I’m going to destroy this drakon until not even its ash remains.

It’s shrieking and thrashing now, but I keep draining its stored lightning through my body and pushing it into the storm. Waves crash over the sides of the boat. The silver arcs along its scales disappear section by section, darkness spreading across its body, and every foot of it that goes dark makes the storm overhead flash brighter.

My left hand is burning from the lightning exiting through my palm. My right hand is buzzing with the incoming current. My chest is vibrating so hard my vision’s shaking, but my heart holds rhythm.

After three loops of my magic leaking, drowning, and nearly stopping my heart, five hundred years of storm is moving through me, and my body knows exactly what to do with it. Because I’m the wire, the sky is the ground, and the electricity is going where it belongs—out of the beast, through me, and into the storm.

The drakon makes one final lunge, but I plant my feet, hold both arms steady, and pull the rest. Lightning strikes down from the clouds, hammering into the creature’s body from above while I drain it from below, and I pull harder, shouting into the thunder, taking everything.

Its scales flicker with the final dregs of electricity. Then it dissolves, its massive body unraveling into silver ropes that lift off the water, spiraling up into the clouds. Thunder detonates across the lake in a rolling boom that echoes off the mountains, and the last piece of the drakon—one bright thread of light—streaks up into the sky and disappears.

The column of lightning connecting me to the clouds thins, flickers, and releases. It’s just me, standing in a rocking boat with both palms smoking, my hair floating on static, and five hundred years of storm rumbling overhead where I put it.

I did it. I killed the drakon. I passed Tempest’s test, and if what Ruby told me is correct, I earned my Storm Sword.

“Logan!” I spin toward him, grinning, riding a high that three near-death experiences couldn’t kill. “Did you see⁠—”

I cut myself off, because he’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me, at the water, and whatever he sees there drains the relief off his face between one blink and the next.

“Hold on to something,” he says, and then wind’s slamming into me from every direction, the boat spinning so violently I swear it’s trying to drown me again.

But I refuse to drown. Not again. Once was educational. Twice would just be embarrassing.

So, I grab the side with my right hand and Logan’s arm with my left. He pulls me against his chest as the lake churns beneath us, the flat gray water spinning in a circular current centered on the spot where the creature dissolved.

It’s a vortex, the center drilling through the lake in a column that’s deepening by the second. The boat’s spinning at the edge of it, Logan’s arm is locked around my waist, and with a curiosity I can’t contain, I look over the side.