Caden felt his body give out. His soul wasn't going to last much longer afterwards. He had spent too much power, and he knew well the risks that entailed. Blood didn't boil so much as it froze its way up through his throat. His nerves shut down and his joints felt empty, useless. The only thing holding him up after a while was the tomb of ice slowly growing in and around him. Veins were bursting. He could see but he knew his eyes were already useless. He could hear but the eardrums had burst. He could smell but the only scents on the air were blood and fire and a pungent, overwhelming mint.

Blueraven was hitting him with multiple spells at once. Taking his sweet time because there was no other way to do in a Sorcerer unless you were one. Caden knew as much from bitterly earned experience. He could still remember wondering how it felt every single time he had ever ripped the life or the energy out of something. Or someone. Now he knew.

"It won't be so bad after it's over," Blueraven finally assured him as he lowered the scalpel and looked Caden in the eye -- or perhaps in the soul, at this point. "You'll live on, after a fashion. In me, just like the rest of my shadows and aspects. Can you feel it yet?"

"No," the Sorcerer rumbled, his Voice operating independent of a mouth that had frozen shut from the inside out. He could no longer breathe. He didn't need to. He was cold. He was so far beyond cold that the word didn't even have a meaning for him anymore. He was not going quietly. Or at least not willingly.

There was nothing he could do but delay.

But every second delayed was another second lived.

There was still so much he wanted to do. So many things he had planned. So many people he wanted to see, even if it was just one more time. Veshua, maybe. Cadence, just to see what she was like, to wonder what it would've been like if he had been her father instead. His friends from Scara Brae to Salvar to Raiaera -- yes, they were friends, and he had never acknowledged it even to himself, because a Wizard is alone. But he was a Sorcerer too. And he had wanted to go back to Raiaera, back to Beinost and the College Arcana. In his dreams, he never wrote it down, but in his dreams he saw himself growing old and happy as the College's first Archwizard. He saw himself raising a daughter that wasn't his, and maybe a plethora of children who were, and they'd all have futures because Daddy paid for it in blood, sweat, tears, and triumphs. He saw himself holding hands with Neesal. He saw himself cracking jokes with old colleagues. He saw himself dying peacefully in his sleep after several centuries of making the world a place worth living in.

He didn't see himself dying like this.

But this was how it was going to happen.

Murder-by-temporal suicide, just before the end of the world.

Caden could no longer feel anything physical. He couldn't move so much as a single muscle and the last tethers binding his body and soul were stretching taut to the point of breaking. He closed his mind's eye to happy thoughts.

And with neither a mouth nor a throat nor anything else, the Sorcerer Spoke his last act of defiance.

"I'm not making it easy for you."