The circle collapsed the moment the fel sigils flared wrong. I remember the smell first—sulfur, rot, and the bitter tang of my own failure.

I had been tracing a containment lattice meant to dissect a lesser annihilan’s binding pattern. Instead, the spell answered something else. They came through like tearing cloth—claws, horns, slavering hunger. I fought, of course. I always fought. But numbers and surprise are cruel teachers.

They dragged me through a rent in reality into their lair, a cavern of warped stone and pulsating veins of fel.

My wrists were chained to a jagged obelisk that hummed with dampening runes, crude but effective. I tested them anyway, methodically, because panic wastes energy. The magic recoiled each time, biting into my nerves like frost and flame together.

I have commanded demons. Bent them. Broken them. Yet as they circled, speaking in guttural amusement about hollowing my will and wearing my body like ceremonial armor, fear settled in my soul.

I thought of Silvermoon’s spires at dawn. Of quiet halls in Dalaran where no one ever waited for me. Of a future that might simply… end here, unnoticed.

Time blurred between jeers and probing talons. I calculated escape vectors that did not exist. For the first time in years, I wondered if power had only built me a taller, lonelier prison.

Then the cavern screamed. Fel fire twisted sideways as another force tore through the lair. Shadows collapsed into razor-edged void. Demons shrieked—first in rage, then in terror—as precise, merciless magic reduced them to drifting ash.

I could not turn fully, but I knew that power. Controlled. Scholarly. Ruthless in a way only one who studies damnation like an art form could be.

A colleague. Council.

Relief struck so sharply it nearly hurt. I watched the last of the pack disintegrate under disciplined incantations. Boots approached over scorched stone. My chains dissolved under a careful unraveling spell, links unraveling into motes of dim green dust.

The moment I could move, exhaustion and something far more fragile surged through me. I stared up at my rescuer, voice cracking before dignity could catch it.

“Will you marry me?”