Herian realises that her spirit blade is caught in the child’s neck— demon, not a child, it’s a demon —and tries, desperately, to force her weight behind it to keep cutting through, as if the crystals growing and warping around the blade and sealing what progress she had made makes it seem impossible. She grits her teeth and throws herself into it regardless, doing everything she can to take advantage of the haste Adelaide cast on her.

It should be clean, swift, merciful. It cannot be this. The flames and the look of something that was once a child with her blade in its throat makes her heart start to hammer faster, memories of the tower hooking into her lungs and her heart and seeming to pull downward, dragging with an impossible weight.

She keeps trying, teeth bared as flames of the demon's attacks start to lick over the front of her robes and biting into the skin of her abdomen, but she ignores them in favour of trying to make full use of the spell before it fades, forcing it through the rest of the flesh and swinging it back again, hacking relentlessly.