The brother reacted instantly, and the moment Ronan stepped forward through the smoke with his sword burning bright enough to peel his own shadow off the walls, the man lunged for his sister's arm and yanked her back toward him.
"Move," he snapped, and darkness surged outward from his body, folding in on itself and thickening as it tried to swallow them both in a collapsing curtain meant to erase their outlines and drag them out of sight.
But the flames didn't retreat. Ronan's fire crawled along the shadow as if it had found something worth hunting, clinging to the darkness and burning it from the edges inward, tearing glowing seams through the black wherever it touched. Where the shadows recoiled, the fire followed, snapping and hissing and refusing to be smothered no matter how much dark the brother poured into it.
