Varia looks up, holds out her night-hued wooden fingers. I can’t feel the spell, even though I’m in her body. But I can see what it does—shimmering the air just before her, a low, soundless hum, and then a violent popping noise as someone materializes from the wavering air. Someone with long white hair, with ice eyes once cruel, now hollow, and dressed in a gray robe that covers his head.

Gavik. Fione’s uncle, Varia’s first Heartless, and the man who tried to kill her so long ago. Who drove her out of Vetris because he feared her, feared the Bone Tree that called to her in her sleep. He’s the man who tried to kill Lucien, too, and who succeeded in drowning hundreds, if not thousands, of witches. He was once the most powerful man in Vetris, in Cavanos, one of the most powerful people on perhaps the whole Mist Continent.

But now his expression crumbles to nothing more than dust when he sees Varia.

“Y-You? How did you— I was in Vetris. Did you… No.” His ice eyes widen. “The Crimson Lady wouldn’t let you spell me away—”

“No one lets me do anything anymore,” Varia says softly. “Least of all a little tower stuffed with your precious white mercury.”

His eyes dart to Varia’s neck, our neck, to the Bone Tree choker that I know is there. Made of valkerax fangs. Made of pure magic, pure power. I recoil at the terror that flashes across the former archduke’s face.

“New God above. You’ve done it. That foolish girl helped you, didn’t she? You have it now, and now—” His throat bobs, and a strange calmness comes over him. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

She doesn’t even grace him with a yes or a no.

A genocidal maniac. A religious fanatic. A fearful man, whose fear hurt and destroyed the lives of so many.

DESTROY.

Varia’s hate burns cold. Burns like winter, like Breych in the dead of night, like putting a hand to a block of ice and leaving it for eternity. Our hand pulls out a velvet bag, embroidered with the word leech.

“No—I can help. You need me—”

He doesn’t even get the chance to beg.

She denies him the chance, like he denied so many witches.

Her wooden fingers collapse, fisting around the bag. A second of resistance, of Gavik clutching his chest frantically, eyes bugging out of his skull, and then the give.

The squelch, the blood running down her fingers, the velvet soaking wet and dripping onto the waving grass.

I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard of it, feared it like a nebulous reaper far off, but I’ve never seen it happen in front of my eyes.

But it does.