Chapter 45 Crowned Beneath Red Sun
CROWNED BENEATH RED SUN
It wasn’t a draft or the erratic pull of the breach.
Jakobav stood with his hands thrust out as the wind answered him.
The force of it seized the room as if it had finally found its master, snatching at torchlight, banners, hair—at the very smoke twisting through the rafters. Everything bent to his will. His gaze locked on the glowing seam splitting the dais.
And the Leaches reacted.
A wave of wind crashed downward, hard as a hammer.
The nearest Leach skidded across the cracked marble, claws tearing grooves as it was shoved toward the tear.
Another was flung sideways, dragged screaming toward the breach as Jakobav forced the current deeper, pushing them back into the darkness below.
Ella braced herself as the wind tore past her.
She watched him turn and walk straight to Savina, who was holding back a swarm of Leaches by force, her stone spikes trembling. Jakobav thrust out his hands. The wind slammed forward in a single brutal surge, ripping every creature off the stones and hurling them into the open seam.
Yes. It’s working. Thank the gods.
She watched as more were forced into the tear in the marble. Their cries vanished down the darkness as the wind drove them deeper. Jakobav stood over the seam, wind surging down into it to hold the creatures at bay.
She’d seen him do this before. But not this much and not this long.
Power that wasn’t his always burned through him fast. Minutes, sometimes less. The longer he held it, the more she saw it draining him—his shoulders trembled under the strain. His breath was ragged, his arms rigid as the wind pinned them there.
The shadows in the tear shifted.
The Leaches were still deep in the darkness—but the moment the current faltered, the shadows surged upward again.
The Leaches were climbing back up. And his strength was waning.
“Shit,” she said.
Jakobav couldn’t hold that wind forever. And when it finally slipped, every Leach below would claw its way back up.
A cold certainty slid through her. This wasn’t over.
Beneath the roar of the wind, she felt it thread-deep—the breach didn’t stop in this hall. It ran farther. Beyond Orchid. Across the world.
She swallowed hard.
She’d closed a breach once before—the small tear by the castle gate. Maybe she could force this one shut long enough to figure out her next move.
Reckless.
Stupid.
Necessary.
Her body moved before doubt caught her. She stepped toward the seam and lifted her hands, reaching not for her flame but for the trembling threads within the split.
I have to patch it. Just long enough.
The breach surged toward her, darkness and smoke leaching out of the seam and slamming into her with enough force to drive her to the ground.
Sprawled across the broken marble, she realized the threads were fighting her, forcing her back.
She rose to her knees, searching for a tighter hold.
The threads shimmered, tugging against the breach.
She begged them to let her seize them, but every tug scraped her own flesh raw.
“Hold,” she whispered, to herself or to the tear in the Veil. She couldn’t tell.
Her father’s voice rang out across the chaos, barking orders as he drove the last of the guards from the hall, forcing them to flee for their own lives while he stayed behind. He was utterly exposed now.
Fuck. She couldn’t lose her father too.
The dais buckled beneath her knees. The breach widened.
If she could hold a little longer, reinforcements might reach the hall.
But if she kept pushing herself like this, she’d reach burnout, fatal if pushed past the breaking point.
If she died here, it would be an honorable death—queen for less than an hour and yet trying to save Orchid with all the strength she had left.
She poured everything into the threads that scraped her hollow from the inside.
Heat built behind her eyes until her vision blurred.
Something wet slipped from the corner of her eye down to her jaw.
Sound thinned into a high, needling ring over the widening tear.
Bitter smoke coated her tongue—resin, ash, and iron.
Jakobav turned. His eyes found Ella and stilled, and whatever he saw there made him move.
“Ella!” His voice thundered across the space between them, raw and absolute as he ran.
Ella’s body shook with effort. Her Threadwalking power wasn’t working—her sigil tattoo flared weakly and guttered out.
Then her power fizzled out entirely, her body collapsing.
Fuck. I burned myself out. All for nothing. I’m going to die here.
Her knees slid on grit. Jakobav reached her as the hall doubled and blurred, her father’s face wavering through heat and tears.
“I can’t hold on,” she rasped, the words tearing the sore place in her throat.
She sagged into Jakobav’s arms, a small, brittle laugh catching on the way out.
“The prophecy,” she whispered, half-mocking and half-broken. “Crowned under the red sun. What a joke. All of this, and nothing to show for it.”
With each breath, she was letting go.
His arms tightened around her and refused to yield.
“Do not let go. That is an order.”
Her tears came harder, burning down her cheeks.
“I cannot,” she sobbed.
She wiped her face and stared at the liquid on her hand—bright scarlet, not clear like water.
Blood tears.
Fuck, this is not good.
“I’m sorry. Jake, I didn’t—”
“Don’t do that.” His voice broke, stopping the words.
He framed her face in both hands, desperate, as if the pressure alone could keep her from fading.
His brow pressed to hers, and she felt the steady heat of him instead of the cold pull of the breach tugging at her like it meant to strip her lifeforce away.
“Do not let go of the prophecy,” he said.
“I can’t access my Threadwalking power—I burned through it all. The prophecy was wrong, Jake. My fire is useless. So am I. I’ve spent my whole life afraid I’m not enough—and I never will be.”
Jake’s breath hitched, a sound too close to a choke. “No.”
His grip tightened on her hand, desperation breaking through the steel of his voice. “Fuck. Don’t you dare give up on me.”
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles—hard, almost frantic. “Listen to me,” he said, the words tumbling out fast and uneven. “The prophecy… it can’t be wrong.”
His thumb brushed her jaw. “The red sun must mean something else. The sun—it has to be you,” he said, fierce and certain. “And the red—”
His gaze locked on what she guessed had to be the blood sliding from her lashes.
Gods, I must look disturbing.
He bent and closed his mouth over the track of tears. The tip of his tongue followed the line of blood, and she shuddered.
Power surged from him in a rippling shock wave, quick and bright.
Ella thought she’d imagined it—her body fading fast, hallucinating as it went.
“Picture the Veil,” he said, voice rough. He lifted her against his chest as the Leaches’ cries closed in. “I’ll take us to it.”
She pictured the threads of the Veil and reached for them with all she had left. But this time she felt something she never had before: Jakobav in the threads with her. They were Threadwalking together.
Her magic surged again; his blood magic was calling to her flame. She felt the pull toward him like she had that first night in the castle—the pull toward the relic.
The two magics met like opposing stars caught in the same orbit. Around them, the threads arranged themselves like constellations, each strand lit, spanning into a thousand radiant paths between ripples and realms.
Their combined magic wove itself through the fraying lattice of what used to be the Veil. Her fire mapped all the places it had fractured, its threads pulsing faster until the vibrations felt like the Veil was screaming at her.
And suddenly she understood.
The Veil wasn’t broken because of its cracks. It was broken because it had been forced into place to seal the realms closed—twisted against its nature until every thread strained past breaking. It didn’t need repair. It needed release.
“Jake,” she whispered through the threads, her voice trembling with the knowledge settling into her bones, “we’re not supposed to restore it. We have to burn what’s left—free it.”
His power flared in answer, steady as a vow, as he gripped her tighter.
She reached for the frayed lattice, her fire gathering. She saw her flame change color—not orange from Orchid, not white from the Claiming, but a brilliant, impossible red.
His blood and her flame merged into a single burning force—a red sun.
Together they unleashed it into the shattered fabric until each thread blistered and finally began to unravel.
The Veil burned bright as a dying star.
The threads burned, glowing with that red flame before disintegrating one by one into brilliant dust.
The Veil disappeared, unmade and free at last.
Jakobav’s voice reached her. “Hold on to me.”
She did.
A figure formed in the light ahead of her: tall, luminous, features shifting like memory.
“At last,” the figure said, voice layered with ages. “The realms were never meant to be sealed. You bring the balance we have waited for.”
A hand lifted in benediction, something in the motion achingly familiar.
“Be proud, Ellandria. And go home.”
The figure dissolved into radiance, and the threads snapped with a sound like breaking dawn. Light rose in a single note, brighter than starlight, searing until suddenly, they were back on the dais.
Jakobav staggered and fell back with her in his arms. The hall lay in wreckage—pillars broken, marble cracked, the air full of settling dust. No new creatures pushed through the seam. The wound in the world had gone still.
She knew the realms now lay open, no longer straining against the ancient enchantment that had sealed them apart.
Jakobav lowered her to her feet, keeping one steadying arm around her waist as she found her balance. The crown sat slightly askew in her tangled hair, her coronation whites reduced to torn silk streaked with soot.
She reached for his hand without hesitation. Their fingers met amid dust and ruin, anchoring them to the world they had remade. Ash drifted in slow spirals, bright as snow in torchlight.
Maeren dragged herself upright with a grimace and a crooked smile.
Soren lifted from a crack in the marble floor like a man climbing from a river, shoulders streaked with grit.
Savina lowered her hand, and the pillars she’d called settled back into the dais, leaving scars the stone would no doubt remember.
She heard a gasp from one of the few who remained—guards, the injured, the inner circle still standing. And there, watching from the steps of the dais, was her father.
She had just disappeared and returned—she could only imagine the shock and confusion he must have been feeling.
Instead, her father looked at her like he’d witnessed a miracle. His gaze went to Jakobav and then returned to Ella.
“Gods, Ellandria… you’re alive,” he breathed.
Her father crossed the distance in two staggering steps and pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly as if afraid she might vanish again.
The Veil was gone, but the air still trembled with what it had cost.
Gods. They’d actually done it.
The realms were open. The prophecy was real.
The red sun had never been a star in the sky.
Red was his blood magic. Sun was her fire.
And Jakobav truly was the relic.
A sob rose unbidden as she looked across the shattered hall at the faces that had once been her enemies—Maeren’s battered but unyielding stance, Savina’s jaw set with exhaustion, Soren’s eyes dark with quiet pride, Thane leaning bloody but grinning against the broken marble.
They’d come for her.
They’d fought for Orchid. For her father. For every kingdom still clinging to light.
She’d been so wrong about the Dravaryns. Of course they’d crash her coronation uninvited—and by doing so, save the fucking world.
She let out a half-laugh, half-sob.
The enormity of it hit her all at once, leaving her swaying but unbroken. Her hands were raw, her skin streaked with soot. She looked up to the oculus where stars burned in daylight, and warmth bloomed inside her in answer.
Tears cut tracks through the debris on her face. She touched one with the tip of her finger, half afraid it would still be blood, but it fell clear and warm.
The realms hadn’t ended.
They’d only just begun to breathe.