A mage's worst nightmare, Chronus thought, isn't death.
Death is an ending. Endings have a certain mercy to them — they're complete. What they took from you stops being something you have to live without, because you stop having to live at all.
But to take the magic — to take it specifically, completely, permanently, while leaving everything else intact—
The memories of every spell she ever learned. The muscle memory of every casting motion. The instinct, the love of it, the seventy years of identity built around being someone who could do this—
All of it, present. All of it, remembered. And none of it, ever again, reachable.
He smiled.
"Oh, Morgana," he said quietly, to the unconscious girl hanging from his hand, "this is going to be so much better than killing her."
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