Chapter 56 #2
The impact seized her from throat to spine, wrenching her wings wide as a piercing tone split her skull. Prismatic light scored the skin of her hands and wrists, burning so near the surface that her flesh began to glow.
“It’s time to strike,” Fenn growled. “Absorb any more magics and I’ll have to carry two bodies.”
Serenna’s fingers closed around her Starshard, and she forced everything else out—the pain, the panic, the sight of Vesryn in Fenn’s arms. Sound thinned first, the battle receding to a muffled roar. Distance collapsed as lake, shore, and sky opened around her.
For one glimpse, she saw everything.
Jassyn and Lykor below as Rimeclaw’s and Blossom’s vast forms vanished through a portal. Cinderax hovering low over the water beside them. Dracovae wheeling above. The wounded falling. The injured dying. Empty spaces where the hatchlings had been.
And above them all, Vesryn streaked toward the king’s glacial light, a white-gold defiance against endless blue.
So terribly alone.
Serenna seized the current and reached for sunfire. Every Starshard behind her converged in her Well, power narrowing into a single point. Prismatic Essence ignited from gem to gem until the crystal at her throat could no longer contain it.
Sunfire erupted, screaming through every vein and bone. Pressure whitened her vision as the power battered against the last limits of her body.
Then the stars began to call.
Their whispers moved through her mind with the slow turning of the blue spiral galaxy, ancient and horribly familiar.
“Return home,” they breathed. “You belong among us.”
Serenna’s wings missed a beat, and some small, traitorous part of her understood the king.
How easy it would be to stop resisting and let the chorus guide her upward.
To surrender herself to the stars. To trade the ache of flesh for the terrible ease of light.
Power instead of despair. To dissolve into the endless gulf waiting beyond the portal.
She ripped her mind from the stars and reached through the bond for Vesryn.
His light tore through the cold brilliance surrounding Galaeryn and crashed into the king, light shearing outward from the impact.
Galaeryn faltered, and the portal shuddered above.
Then the king’s power detonated, striking into Vesryn’s radiance, wrenching at the prince before Serenna could release the sunfire. She felt Vesryn straining against Galaeryn’s ascent while the king stripped him thread by burning thread.
“Hold him,” Serenna pleaded, panic and command colliding.
Heat flared through the bond. Then pain.
Serenna clenched her Starshard until its facets cut her palm and blood slicked the gem. Sunfire thundered through her as every wielder in the sky poured their strength into a single current, all of it bearing down on her Well.
She’d meant to channel the sunfire from below, past Vesryn and straight into Galaeryn. But their radiance had fused, white-gold snared inside the king’s glacial blue. Any blow meant for Galaeryn would destroy the prince first.
Serenna hesitated.
Vesryn had known.
She’d already seen what distance allowed the king. One broken volley after another had collapsed into him, each one leaving him stronger. Cast from here, this current would cross the same fatal span, leaving Galaeryn time to seize it and add its strength to the power already destroying Vesryn.
She’d have to go to him herself. While Vesryn kept Galaeryn fighting, she’d erase the last span of sky between them and release everything before the king had time to siphon the sunfire.
Every Starshard. Every Well. All the Essence they had left.
With Vesryn still locked against Galaeryn.
With the strike demanding her life as surely as his.
Vesryn had asked her to anchor the stars, but she needed to deliver him the sky.
“I’m sorry.” Serenna pushed the words through the bond to both of them—Fenn beside her, Vesryn above. Nothing followed that could carry her love, her terror, or the apology breaking her heart.
She gathered everything raging through her and stopped resisting the stars.
Fenn shouted her name, but his voice reached her from impossibly far away, from a world already disintegrating.
Sunfire tore through her chest, her ribs, her eyes. Essence filled every vein until blood and radiance became impossible to distinguish. She screamed as the boundary between flesh and light burned away.
Her Starshard ignited with what it could no longer contain, every Well behind her still funneling power through her as the crystal ceased to matter.
The stars beckoned, a vast spiral leading to a home she’d never known. This time, when they called, Serenna reached back.
Then there was no pain at all.
The lake, the battlefield, Fenn’s voice, the body that had carried her this far into the sky—all of it fell away. She fell away.
What remained rose from her abandoned flesh in a shape wrought from living light. The gathered sunfire ascended with her, a star dragging the whole broken sky in its wake.
Below, every Starshard blazed, their freely given power following her into the dark.
Vesryn burned above.
Without flesh to measure it, the vastness between them no longer felt like distance. Serenna raced toward him, beyond any sense of measured time.
Galaeryn had unraveled the prince to a failing silhouette of light, and still Vesryn held, spending himself in bright fragments until Serenna reached him.
The bond flared when her light collided with his. His love tore through her, wordless and helpless, still fighting.
Serenna plunged through Vesryn and into Galaeryn, ramming the sunfire into the king.
The king’s power crashed around them, vast and endless with all he’d claimed. The sunfire inside Serenna strained toward him, caught in the same pull that had stolen every attack before.
Vesryn’s light shuddered around hers.
Galaeryn’s command sank into the magic inside her, hauling it toward himself. White-gold light tore from Serenna’s form, searing heat and strength though neither belonged to flesh anymore.
Far below, the Starshards burned bright, every wielder still channeling their magic through her.
The king couldn’t wrench it all from her. Instead, he struck back through the Wells sustaining her power, trying to seize the wielders themselves.
But none of the power flowing through Serenna belonged to them. Every measure of that magic had been given freely, shaped by sacrifice rather than conquest. Each wielder had reached past fear and opened their Well to her by choice.
Galaeryn reached through one connection, then another, searching for the will that ruled the rest.
There wasn’t one.
Every circle flared. Prismatic light flashed from Starshard to Starshard and Serenna drove it against the king.
His might scattered through the Essence, reaching everywhere, mastering nothing.
Unable to stop it, sunfire raced through the power Galaeryn had amassed over centuries, unmaking the magic that held his ascension together.
The king hurled himself toward the portal.
Blue light peeled from him as he fled, exposing the body he’d try to carry into the stars—flesh, crown, all of it—while Serenna and Vesryn had left theirs far below.
Serenna felt an infinitesimal rupture inside Galaeryn’s power as a sudden silence, the place where obedience had always risen to meet him gone still.
His ascent slowed, silver light cracking across his skin. Along the widening fissures, his flesh dissolved into fragments that lifted away and scattered into the dark.
Then his fury sharpened, and the magic around him pulsed with it. Serenna understood. If he couldn’t rule the stars, he’d make a grave of the sky.
Galaeryn went still under the portal. The light spilling from his ruined body reversed, pouring back into his flesh, centuries of stolen power compressing into the body already disintegrating around him.
Pressure crowded around Serenna as Galaeryn drew the wreckage of his ascension inward. The sunfire between them shuddered with it, and the pull raced backward through the current still joining her to the circles below.
The Wells jolted through Serenna’s awareness. She felt the lives at the far end of every connection and understood what his collapse would take with it if she left them open.
Her sunfire already burned through Galaeryn, dissolving his flesh. The king was fading.
Serenna severed every path beyond herself and let the Starshards go. One by one, the Wells vanished from her awareness, the prismatic connections between the gems going dark far below.
She’d chosen this death and refused to let the king dictate theirs.
Vesryn’s presence settled against her, tender as a hand seeking hers in the dark.
Serenna held him close as Galaeryn drew the last of his power inward.
Down near the lake, she sensed Fenn plunging after the body she’d left behind. His panic tore through the bond, raw and furious, all claws and fangs and love refusing grief.
Serenna opened the bond to Fenn and let him feel everything she had no time left to say.
Then sunfire burst from Galaeryn, every fissure in his body flooding with light.
The world flashed white, and Serenna vanished into starlight.