He never saw the Mammoth hit him. There was only the after. A single impossible moment where the world folded into a fist around him, crushing everything between heartbeats — and then the pain slammed through him so violently he forgot what bodies were supposed to feel like.

It lasted all of a second. Then it was gone. Not eased. Not numbed. Gone.

The mist swept in, warm and thick, smothering the agony before his mind could process it. What had been a scream inside him became a strange, distant quiet — like someone had reached into his chest and turned the volume down on himself. He lay on the floor, cheek against mirrored glass, unable to remember how he got there. Or how many bones were broken. Or which organs were leaking into places they shouldn’t.

His hearing rang — a high, sharp note that felt less like sound and more like pressure. His vision blurred into watercolor streaks. Shapes moved in frames, not in motion — Yumi in three broken fragments of movement, Evie flickering, Locke bursting in and out of vision like a glitch. Roscoe was a still shape in the corner. Aramis’s chest tightened, but even that felt wrong, loose, distant.

He tried to inhale. The air bubbled in his lungs. Wet. Heavy. Final.A cold certainty set in. He wasn’t going to survive this. Something pressed against the back of his skull — not literally, but in feeling. A soft warmth. A hush. Death, not as an ending, but as a Mother’s hand slipping fingers gently through a child’s hair. Comforting. Patient. Waiting.nHe should have let go. Anyone sane would have. But his mind — the only unbroken thing left — clung to one thought like a man clutching a lantern in the dark: If I’m dying anyway… then everything I have left is theirs.

He dragged his fingers across the floor. The movement sent a quiet cascade of wrongness through his torso, but the mist dulled it until it felt like it belonged to someone else. He didn’t rise — he couldn’t — but he pressed his palm to the cold mirrored glass, smearing blood he barely recognized as his own. His vision flickered again.

Evie, running toward him with her shoulder hanging wrong. Yumi, vaulting on a shattered leg just to buy someone a second. Locke, firing into illusions without hesitation. Roscoe, who had stood between disaster and his people until disaster won. Strangers, all of them — but in a way he had never expected to have.

His chest hitched, something like a sob catching behind the ringing. He let magic bleed out of him — not shaped, not guided, nothing but raw will and the last warmth of a life leaving him. He poured into the floor the only thing he had left to give: the memory of them.

Not words. Not commands. Just the emotional truth of what he’d witnessed — bravery, sacrifice, stubborn human love. His voice was barely a breath against the glass.

“…remember… them…”

A pause. A shudder. His fingers slipping.

“…not… him…”

His body sagged. His vision tunneled. Death’s soft hand brushed a thumb along the back of his head, soothing, inviting. He pressed his palm harder anyway. If this was all he had left — if this was the last imprint he ever made on a living world — then let it be this:

Protect them. Please. Protect them.

Nothing else mattered anymore.