KIERAN’S POV
Jack did not fall the way he was supposed to.
There was no clean end to it, no moment of surrender that made anything feel settled or justified.
There was only resistance that slowly decayed into something less coherent, as though his rage had begun to forget the shape it was meant to hold, until he crumpled to the floor.
Ashar stood over him in the aftermath, massive golden form still bristling with residual power, chest rising and falling in heavy, controlled breaths.
The corridor around us was ruined beyond recognition—reinforced steel warped and split, black scorch marks burned into surfaces never meant to carry heat, and fragments of corrupted flame still drifting in the air like dying embers, refusing to accept their own extinction.
Jack lay in the center of it all.
Or what was left of him.
The darkness that had once consumed him was gone. Not defeated so much as expelled, forced out in violent rupture until there was nothing left to sustain it.
