Wren didn't walk home that night.
She burned.
The rejection pulsed in her veins like poison, a dark magic of its own. Her magic—normally silver, songlike—now twisted into something unfamiliar. Sharp. Blood-soaked. A whispering thing.
Every tree she passed leaned away.
Thistle found her near the cliff's edge at dawn, where the sea screamed against the rocks below. Her fingers were stained with magic. Her eyes glassy.
"I felt it break," he said, voice quieter than usual. "The bond."
"Good," she whispered.
The sea salt stung her lips, or maybe it was the tears.
"I'll never be his again."
"Is that what you want?" Thistle asked.
Wren turned to him slowly. "I want to erase him from me. From my body, my memory, my soul."
He blinked, tail flicking.
"And I want him to know what it means to scorn a witch."
Wren returned to her cottage with new purpose.
She poured salt circles and summoned old books. The kind witches locked in blood-stained vaults and swore never to use. She unwrapped her grandmother's obsidian dagger, buried since the great culling of witches thirty years ago.
She traced the sigil of vengeance onto her floorboards and let her blood drip into a black vial. Potion brewing was forbidden for emotional revenge—but forbidden was all she had left.
Thistle watched her work. "You're making it, aren't you?"
"The Unmaking Draft," Wren murmured. "One drop and the bond that was—will become a tether of suffering. The wolf will feel what I feel. Every hour. Every heartbeat."
"Wren," he said carefully, "this is old magic. Dark magic."
"I know."
"And once you start… there's no going back."
She held up the vial. It shimmered with a terrible beauty.
"I don't want to go back."