39. Chapter 39
AMARIA
The ground shook again. Harder.
I found Dreadscale through the smoke checking a shallow gash along Pyrrath’s shoulder while Maxx knelt beside him, swearing softly over a blood-slick bundle of bandages.
"The prophecy changed." No preamble. No time. "It's not sacrifice—it's surrender. The bond. Eryndor and I have to get to the rupture site before the Veil tears itself apart."
Dreadscale's eyes flicked to the crack splitting the sky. To the Marks blazing through our clothes. To Eryndor at my shoulder.
He didn't ask questions.
"Go. We'll hold what's left and get everyone back to Skal'Varin."
Hundreds of years of war in those words. No hesitation. No sentiment. Just a commander reading a field and making the call.
Maxx watched me for a moment before he finally smiled softly.
"Try not to break the sky worse, darling." His voice was light. His eyes weren't.
He opened his mouth again. Closed it. The joke he'd been building died somewhere between thought and sound.
"Bring her back," he whispered.
Three words. Just the raw, terrible truth of a male whose whole heart was sitting in a room miles behind us, not remembering his name.
The wind shifted. A griffin landed at my back—close, impatient, wings half-spread. Ready.
I turned toward it with Eryndor at my side.
Movement caught my eye. Caden was running toward us through the smoke, full sprint, blood and ash streaked across his face.
No words. He pulled me into him—hard, brief, and let go before either of us could make it harder. He stepped back. Put his hand on the griffin's flank. Looked at me with steady eyes.
"Come back."
"I always do," I said.
His mouth twitched. Almost a smile.
He didn't watch me go. He turned back toward the battlefield, drew his blade, and went to work. Protecting me the only way he had left—by making sure I had a world worth coming back to.
The griffin lowered its wing. I climbed on. Eryndor swung up behind me, his arms settling around my waist. The bond humming between us like a song the world had been waiting to harmonize with.
We launched, and the battlefield began to shrink beneath us—the smoke, the dead, the living who had bought us this chance with everything they had.
Above us, the sky was tearing itself open.
We flew toward the wound.
The sky was dying.
I could see it happening—the blue retreating, pulling back from the edges of the world like skin peeling from a burn.
The Veil fracture had changed. What had been a rupture was reaching more violently now.
Tendrils of un-reality stretched across the atmosphere like fingers at rapid-fire speed, grasping at clouds, at mountain peaks, at anything solid.
The edges didn't just widen. They surged. Hunting. Devouring.
The griffin's wings beat harder beneath me, muscles bunching with battle-honed instinct. This creature had faced the fracture before. Two centuries ago. When my mother held the Northern passes and the sky tried to swallow the world the first time.
Eryndor's arms tightened around my waist. The bond between us—raw, new, blazing—meant I didn't need to hear his voice to know what he wanted to show me.
I looked down. A forest folded in on itself. Trees bending, twisting, collapsing into a point that swallowed them whole. A river ran backward for three heartbeats and then ceased to exist. Its bed smooth and dry, as if water had never touched it.
A village. There. Smoke from chimneys. A road. A stone wall around a garden. Then—absent.
The ground where it had stood was featureless. Smooth. No rubble. No foundations. No evidence that anyone had ever lived or loved or died in that space.
Erased. Like it had never been.
"It's not just spreading outward." My voice came out thin against the wind. "It's spreading down. Into the earth."
Mountains sagged on the horizon. Valleys filled with a nothing that looked like fog but moved with purpose.
And the crack was following us.
I could feel it at my back—a pressure against my skin, a cold awareness pressing between my shoulder blades. The Marks in our chests blazed like torches, and the Void could feel them. Could feel what we carried. What we meant to do.
It did not want to be sealed.
The griffin banked hard.
A tendril of void-sky stretched toward us—a grasping hand of unreality, fingers made of absence. The griffin's wings found dead air. No purchase. No lift. Gravity stuttered and for one lurching second we fell sideways through space that had forgotten which direction was down.
My stomach dropped. My hands fisted in feathers. Eryndor's grip turned to iron around my ribs.
Then we were through. The griffin screaming its defiance, wings catching real air, climbing hard. The other six adjusted around us—tightening formation, ancestral muscle memory snapping into place.
I looked back.
The tendrils were still reaching. Closer than before. Faster.
"It's chasing us," Eryndor said against my ear. His voice was steady. His heartbeat through the bond was not.
Then movement in the crack. Things crawling out.
Riftborn. Smoke and scream given form—the creatures from my mother's stories, the things she'd held the Northern passes against for seven winters.
But these were fresh. Fed on the King's amplified rupture, on concentrated void energy that had been building behind the dam of his hoarded power.
Now that dam was broken and everything behind it was pouring through.
They were faster than the stories said.
More solid.
More intentional.
They swarmed toward us—drawn to the Marks the way a current pulls toward a drain. Dozens at first. Then scores. Pouring from the crack in a stream of smoke and teeth and hunger.
The griffins answered.
War cries split the air. Seven voices in unison—pure, timeless—and the sound shook reality solid again. The tendrils of void-sky recoiled. The Riftborn scattered. For three wingbeats, the path ahead cleared and the sky remembered how to hold its shape.
Then the swarm regrouped. Thicker this time. Angrier.
A Riftborn broke through the formation and came straight at us—smoke-body stretched long, jaw unhinged, shrieking with a sound that was the opposite of the griffins' cry. A sound that wanted to unmake.
The Fury answered before I could think. Golden light blazed from my chest, punching through the creature like sunlight through fog. It came apart. Dissolved. The nothing inside it meeting something older and ceasing to exist.
More behind it. Three. Five. A dozen.
I burned them. One after another. The Fury pouring out of me in waves, clearing the path, buying us distance.
Eryndor's blade sang behind me—covering my blind spots, cutting through smoke-flesh, the bond between us turning us into a single, lethal weapon.
His sword arm moved and I knew where it was going before the blade arrived.
I leaned left and he struck right. No words. No signals. The bond did the work.
But there were too many.
Every Riftborn I destroyed, three more clawed through the widening crack.
The griffins' cries pushed them back but couldn't seal the source.
The Fury burned them away but the smoke just kept pouring, kept coming, an endless vomit of corrupted creatures spilling from a wound that was tearing wider with every passing second.
The Void was producing them faster than we could kill them. And the rupture site was still miles ahead—I could feel it pulling at my Marks, that magnetic ache, the call of the place where everything started.
The swarm thickened behind us. Hundreds now. Massing. Building into a wall of smoke and scream that was gaining ground with every wingbeat.
If the swarm hit us at the rupture site—where Eryndor and I would be completely exposed during the surrender to heal the veil—it was over. Everything we'd fought for, everyone who'd died to get us here, all of it for nothing.
The griffins knew.
Four of them peeled from the formation. No signal. No command. They banked hard, turned to face the swarm, and spread their wings in a line across the sky.
A wall of feather and Fury between the darkness and us.
Their cries erupted—four voices hammering reality into place, pushing back the Riftborn, holding the line with nothing but sound and stubbornness and two hundred years of waiting for exactly this moment.
The remaining three flew harder. The rupture site pulled at my chest like a hook buried in my sternum. Close now. Close enough that the Marks were burning through my clothes, through my skin, golden light leaking from us like we were the ones coming apart.
The sky around us was more void than sky.
Patches of blue between stretches of nothing, the world reduced to islands of reality in an ocean of absence.
The griffin navigated by instinct—finding pockets of real air, threading through gaps in the void-tendrils, primal eyes reading a sky that was trying to stop existing.
A Riftborn broke through. Then another. The four griffins behind us were holding the bulk of the swarm, but stragglers slipped past—faster ones, hungrier ones, drawn to the Marks like arrows to a target.
I burned them. Eryndor cut down whatever survived the flames, and the three griffins still with us tore the rest apart.
We kept flying. The air thinned. The temperature dropped. The mountains rose ahead—and between two peaks, visible now, a column of light and shadow twisted into the cloudline.
The rupture site.
The place where everything started. The place that broke me.
The place I was choosing to go back to.
My chest seized. Memories hit like fists—ropes biting into my wrists, void-iron humming against my spine, Kaelen's voice saying you were born to end it, Brannick turning his back while I screamed—
Eryndor's hand found mine where it gripped the feathers. He didn't speak. Didn't need to. The bond carried what words couldn't—I'm here. I'm not leaving. You're not doing this alone.
I breathed.
Gripped his hand.
And we dove toward the wound in the world.