The shadow wyrm let them. Though whether by choice or by circumstance, Iseult would never know, for now the concerted efforts of the Nomatsi witches had turned on it. Now it had new targets to keep it busy, new people on which to feed.

“Alma,” Iseult tried to say, but her throat had rusted and the battle was too loud. New winds, new flames, new screams from a shadow wyrm to drown the world in its pain. Gretchya had already aimed them toward the other girl anyway. To the body, now lying upon the snow while Corlant leered.

Blood, blood, great swaths of red stained the white and stained the crumbled stones.

“Her Threads linger,” Corlant said. He turned his bruised eye first on Iseult. Then on Gretchya. Then onto the chaos unraveling around them, as if he’d only just noticed the wind and flame, the stone and ice, the water and fury ripping across the encampment.

Snow still fell.

“Take her Threads.” Corlant returned his focus to Iseult. Somehow, he didn’t have to yell to be heard. “She cannot resist you now.”

Iseult didn’t respond. Instead, she slid to the snow beside Alma while Gretchya dropped to Alma’s other side. Blood streaked over their clothes, snow seeped into their knees. Alma’s knife’s hilt, embedded in her chest, shivered and quaked with ragged breaths.

“I’m sorry.” Iseult clutched at the edges of the wound with bandaged hands. The blood soaked into them. “I’ll find you a healer.”

Alma laughed. A sound filled with more emotion than Iseult had ever heard. Alma’s eyes, unsteady and half closed, found Iseult’s face. “We didn’t … have to…”

“Stop talking,” Gretchya said curtly. Her stasis had returned, though tears gathered in her eyes. “We will find help—”

Alma’s eyes closed. Her belly shuddered. “Be.” A final spurt of blood, and she died. The clouds parted. Moonlight peeked through, small pinpricks on Alma’s face. As pale in death as she had been in life.

“A pity,” Corlant said, his voice a cold font in Iseult’s ear. She hadn’t noticed him crooking in, hadn’t sensed his Threads throbbing. “Now she is dead, and no one can save her.”

Iseult’s fingers tightened in her bandages, clutching at the knife hilt. Snow melted into Alma’s blood. “Now she is dead,” she repeated. “And no one can save her.”

With those words, the final dregs of Iseult’s stasis toppled to the snow. Dust, ash, swept away on winds and flame, the walls she’d built to hold everything in could no longer contain the truth. Thousands of secrets she’d stuffed away for years.

Years and years and years. Everything she’d never wanted to face and never wanted to feel. Even now, her first instinct was to frantically push it back in. Stasis, stasis! In your fingers and in your toes!