Iseult wondered if she should do something. She wondered if this niggling beneath her lung meant she should help Alma or help Corlant. The Threadwitch she could never be like or the man who’d given her the Void. The girl who had replaced her at her mother’s side or the father whose Threads shone with family.

We didn’t have to be this way.

Everything seemed to happen with sluggish confusion, softened by the snow and cusp between night and day. Like a funeral dirge played at half speed. Iseult caught every beat. Every failed attack from Nomatsis and Purists alike. Every shriek of the shadow wyrm as it stampeded onto the scene, shadows and icicles bleeding off it. Silver Threads blaring.

Flames heated Iseult’s back and wind battered her side. No one attacked her, though. Purists gave her berth; Nomatsis too. She remained untouched beside the fallen wall, snow piling around her feet.

That was when Iseult saw her mother. Across the way where flames burned and an Icewitch aimed shards at a Purist, Gretchya waited, no longer bound in ropes. In her left hand, a knife dangled. Clean, unused. Even now, she would not join the fight.

Because Threadwitches do not cause pain, Iseult. That is only for the Void. Only for people like you.

But Iseult wasn’t causing pain. She’d become as still as the stasis inside her. As still as her mother twenty paces away. Snow trickled between them.

Until pain snapped through Iseult—winds she hadn’t sensed coming. A Nomatsi with fury in his heart and a funnel of air to fell her. She stumbled forward, catching herself on the snow with bandaged hands. Without thought—with only cool reaction, cool completion to what this man had initiated—she rounded on him and attacked.

Her fingers, still in their bandages, closed around his Threads. Too far for the old Iseult to have reached, but new Iseult had read the diary, and new Iseult knew how to cover distances. More importantly, new Iseult was stasis through and through. No conscience to get in her way. Sever, sever, twist and sever.

Iseult squeezed and the man collapsed in an instant. If he screamed, she didn’t hear it. Not with the shadow wyrm feasting nearby. Not with Corlant and Alma still locked, somehow, in combat.

The man’s soul slid into her, a subtle drip like blood off the tip of a blade. She didn’t need her fangs, yet bit by brutal bit, his Threads cleaved. His power became hers. Her heart swelled. Her belly. Her brain. A warmth instead of the usual heat, and no pain against her ruined hands. If anything, the draining Threads soothed. She could stand here all day and do this.