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The revival fails.
Sage knows the moment it happens. She feels her radiance recoils instead of answering her call, folding inward with a violent lurch, acting with its own brutal intent.
She tries to move and finds she cannot.
Her veins glow violently beneath her skin. It hardens where it gathers, crystallizing in her veins that stitch her muscles into immobility.
Her radiance pools down her throat.
She feels it rise in jagged increments, shards forming and reforming as they drag upward through soft tissue. It feels like swallowing broken glass that refuses to go down, edges biting deeper with every attempt to breathe. Her throat spasms in useless protest as apologies wilt on her lips.
She feels it go down her chest and breathing becomes absolute agony.
Her lungs feel packed with splinters, each breath shredding tissue further. She tastes copper and failure with each heave. The familiar warmth of her healing has curdled into something sour and invasive.
The world tilts. Darkness presses in from the edges of her vision but sound refuses to leave her. She can hear herself heaving and choking on her own blood and radiance.
Hands rush in to grab her as her knees buckle. Voices overlap and she can barely hear the orders snap into place. Then she’s being roughly lifted into a metal gurney.
“This is exactly why I warned you.” Viper snaps, her voice echoing through Sage’s skull like a bullet lodged between her eyes.
“We made the call together,” Brimstone answers. There is no hesitation in him, no tremor. “She knew the risk. She agreed to it.”
Their voices drift in and out.
“We knew this day would come,” Brimstone continues. His voice is clipped and shaped by years of demanding sacrifice. “Preparations are complete. There is no other option now.”
Hands push the gurney forward and Sage feels her body jolt.
Then she’s wheeled down a corridor that smells like antiseptic and cold steel. The ceiling lights smear into pale streaks above her. She feels cold and warm all at once. Her radiance continues to mutate like glass knitting itself through her muscles, slow and deliberate. Every movement sends a grinding sensation down her limbs. Light blooms beneath her skin in uneven patches, stretching it until it becomes translucent in places, revealing the horror beneath.
The argument follows her down the corridor and she listens without the strength to intervene, every word carving something hollow inside her.
A sharp laugh punctures through Sage’s eardrum a little too loudly. Viper. “Funny. Everyone says I’m the monster, yet it’s your decisions that led her.. us here. Failure after failure.”
There is a deep sigh before Brimstone’s timber voice echoes.
“Enough. If her radiance destabilizes fully, we lose everything. We must do this now or else she will be useless to us.”
Sage understands the logic. She always has. Better for the team to still have access to her abilities than to completely lose it. Still, the distance in Brimstone’s tone hurts more than she expected. It reduced her entire being to a function. A resource. Something to be managed.
The terms press into her thoughts, reshaping how she sees herself.
She had known she was living in borrowed time. Each revival carried a heavier toll, each miracle demanding more than the last. She accepted that debt long ago. What she couldn’t brace for was how excruciating it was to pay it, given it was never herself she was giving life to but to her colleagues. She viciously shoves that selfish thought down.
No, no no.
She should have been stronger.
If she had trained harder, studied longer, pushed her limits further, maybe this would not be happening. Maybe she would not be lying helpless while her own powers devour her body. The guilt settles in her stomach like lead.
She should have done better.
Her abdomen tightens painfully and it’s not just the guilt.
Something ruptures inside her with a sickening sensation. Her radiance is spilling through her organs, painfully threading through her stomach, her liver, her intestines. The pressure builds until she is certain she will split open.
White floods her vision.
Her heart stutters, struggling to pump around solidifying fractures within its chambers.
Each beat is slower than the last.
Her body is being rewritten.
Her old masters would have called this the cost of her attachment. She remembers each transgression she committed against their teachings. Healing had demanded it. You could not mend flesh without caring for the soul beneath it. She believed it completely.
Now she wonders if this is her punishment.
She feels Brimstone’s calloused hands lift her into the tube followed by countless hands piercing needles into her skin, sliding tubes into her veins. Each new insertion sends a shock through her system. The pain stacks, layer by layer, until it becomes impossible to distinguish one sensation from another.
Her radiance resists each intrusion, flaring angrily, spreading faster in response.
The tank seals with a heavy final sound.
Then liquid starts to pour in, thick and sluggish. It presses against her mouth, her nose, her eyes. When it forces its way to her lungs, searing pain blooms across her chest as her radiance reacts violently. Shards bloom outwards, puncturing through her ribs and extruding through her back.
Breathing becomes impossible.
She is drowning without the dignity of a struggle.
She is fighting two deaths at once. Drowning and petrification collide and her body does not know which threat to answer first.
She cannot win this. The realization arrives with terrifying clarity.
This is it.
There is no strength left to summon. She is not being killed by an enemy or a weapon. She is being undone by the very thing that once defined her. Her panic softens to despair.
The door slams open.
Reyna bursts into the room. The sight barely registers at first. Reyna slams into Brimstone who tries to block her path, sending both of them into a metal cart. Reyna stumbles but she does not slow. Her lover’s face is twisted with fury and terror.
Reyna is shouting, mouth wide, veins lit with violent light. The sound never reaches Sage properly, muffled by the fluid filling her ears. Brimstone tries to grab Reyna from behind as she lunges forward, her struggle feral and uncontrolled.
This is not the Reyna Sage knows.
Reyna has always been controlled, lethal with purpose. Now she is desperation given form, colliding with walls, with Brimstone as he grabs her, with anything between her and the tank. Her precision is gone, replaced by raw terror.
Sage wants to reach for her. Wants to tell her she is sorry. Wants to promise she tried.
Her arm does not move.
Her fingers twitch, useless, her body too far gone to obey.
Crystalline plates have claimed it fully now, fused and unresponsive. Only small islands of flesh remain.
A syringe flashes.
Reyna screams again, a broken sound. Viper moves forward, shaking, syringe in hand. There is hesitation. Then resolve. The needle sinks into Reyna’s arm.
The agony sets her nerves alight, her radiance splintering completely. Darkness claws at the edges of her sight. Consciousness slips through her grasp.
Reyna collapses mid reach.
Her fingers scrape the glass as she goes limp, leaving faint trails behind. Brimstone catches her before she hits the floor. Sage watches helplessly, her vision dimming as the radiance inside her surges one final time.
The last thing she sees is Reyna’s hand outstretched, her face twisted with anguish and disbelief.
Sage’s eyes burn as tears mix with the liquid surrounding her.
At the very least, she thinks dimly, her lover could not see her tears.
Small mercies.
Then the light finally goes out.