MACE

The door of the cabin clicked shut behind us, a final, wooden period at the end of my mother’s tragic sentence.

Outside, the night air was bitingly cold, a stark contrast to the suffocating warmth and death inside. I inhaled sharply, the scent of damp pine and decaying leaves filling my lungs, trying to scrub away the smell of ozone and burned magic that clung to the back of my throat.

I had left her there. My mother. A victim of Michael’s parasitic ambition, finally at rest, but abandoned in a dusty shack in enemy territory. The guilt was a physical weight, heavy as a stone tombstone chained around...