Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
JAMIE
It was not lost on me, the irony of sitting on the icy ruins of a dead moon, with the most powerful Ophis in ten thousand years curled against my chest like a lifeline, and thinking, for the first time in a decade, that I might actually be at peace.
The cracked bone-white regolith stretched in every direction, the smear of stars overhead so thick they looked painted on.
The planet hung low and massive above the horizon, a monster of silver and violet and emerald so beautiful it nearly brought tears to my eyes.
Crystalline rings surrounded the planet, made of ice and rock that sparkled in the light of the binary stars.
This was her dreamscape, but she let me build the details. I made sure the gravity was just right, the air breathable, the emptiness not so crushing. No darkness tonight. No tendrils of shadow, no screaming. I wanted to replace the nightmare with something to look forward to.
I sat with my back braced against a fragment of moon rock. Jupiter leaned into me, her shoulder blades aligned with my sternum, the fall of her hair warm against my chin. My arms were looped loose around her waist.
Draco was perched on the edge of a ridge above us, knees drawn up, hands laced in front of them, eyes fixed on the planet. The violet from the surface caught in his hair and made it look like moonlight. He’d gotten good at dream walking, and bringing him into the fold was easy.
We’d been doing this every night for weeks now.
Sometimes she brought one of the others through, usually Phoenix or Lucas, but most nights it was just the three of us.
I didn’t mind. I liked the company. And if I was honest, I liked the way she relaxed in the dream space, the way her laughter came easier here, the way she let herself be unguarded.
I smoked, of course. In dreams, the cigarettes never ran out. The taste was always perfect. I let the smoke curl and drift, watching it catch in the low lunar breeze.
Draco shifted, still watching the planet with a scholar’s eyes. “You ever wonder if any of those old cities are still standing? I mean, the bane didn’t glass the surface. They just drank up the magic. The structures might have survived, at least the ones built out of crystal or alloy.”
Jupiter twisted a little to look at him. “Wouldn’t nature have taken it all back by now? It’s been ten thousand years, right? If the forests are anything like Earth’s, it should be all ruins and trees and moss.”
“The atmosphere is different,” Draco pointed out, his tone gone into full academic mode.
“Higher oxygen. The plant life is aggressive, but some of the cities were built to last. Aelari crystals could regenerate after trauma, and some of the towers were engineered to withstand tectonic shifts. Even if the smaller stuff rotted away, the major structures could still be there. Maybe even functional.”
He looked down at us, eyes gone a little dreamy.
“Would you want to even imagine it that way?” I asked Jupiter. “All abandoned and swallowed by forests and time?”
“I want to see it as it is,” she said simply.
“I’ve always hated the cleaned-up versions of history, the ones that pretend you can just reset the clock and start over.
If it’s half-ruined, I want to walk through the ruins.
If it’s wild, I want to see how wild it got.
But I guess I can’t help wondering if any of it will feel like home when we get there, or if it’ll just be a graveyard. ”
I tightened my arms around her.
Draco nodded. “After the Crossing, the Assembly tried to stamp out that kind of thinking. They didn’t want anyone going back, didn’t want anyone studying the old technologies that might let them open the doors again, because they’d lose their control over the Aelari on Earth.”
“Do you think they’ll want to build new academies on the home worlds?” She asked, looking up at me. “Shield warriors are kind of our culture now, right? It would make sense to be ready, just in case the bane ends up following us back someday.”
I shrugged. “Most likely, yes. But the Assembly’s going to want to take control of whatever is created.
They’ll run it the way they do on Earth.
Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with our academies.
It’s not like the Assembly is some kind of evil entity or anything, but the politics will carry over. ”
“I want to go before them,” she said, chin lifting. “I want to see it before the Assembly gets their claws in. I want us to be the first ones to set foot on the home worlds.”
Draco smiled down at her, and I could see the naked adoration in his eyes. “I’ve already started compiling supply lists. Malakai’s been helping me. If we’re going to have one shot at making it to Ophiuchus, then we need to make sure we’re prepared.”
Jupiter went quiet again. I could sense the shift in her mood, the way old anxieties tried to creep up. But here, in this dream, they never got far. My presence pushed them back, smothered them before they could really take hold. That was the gift I gave her here, and she knew it.
“Do you think,” she asked, hesitating, “there will be ghosts? I mean… like echoes of the people who were lost there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you’ll feel it when you walk through those cities. Like old music in the walls, or fingerprints in the dust. Not ghosts, but something close to memories.”
She leaned into me, and I let the dream flex, let the surface of the moon go soft and the air grow warmer, let the sounds of what might have once been a city drift up out of the cracks in the dust. Laughter, chimes, something like voices echoing from far away.
It wasn’t concrete, just impressionistic, but it was enough to give her a taste.
I molded the dreamscape, filling it with smells of spices, perfumes, and lush greenery.
Everything I imagined would come alive down on the surface of that once thriving planet.
She shivered, but it wasn’t fear. “That’s… haunting. But also kind of nice.”
“I think we can revive it,” Draco said. He was standing now, pacing restlessly along the edge of the ridge, hands in his pockets.
“If we can figure out how to reawaken the ambient magic, we might even be able to restore some of the old technology. The Ophis star-maps imply there are dormant nodes under every major city. Reconnecting them could re-activate the planet’s shield network. ”
She sucked in a breath. “Wouldn’t that draw the bane, though? If we light up the system again, won’t they sense it?”
“Not immediately,” Draco said. “They’re still stuck on the outside rim of the galaxy, and you can portal us thousands of years ahead of their current incursion point.
They can’t travel as fast as we can, so we’ll have time to fortify, maybe even time to evolve new tactics before they catch up. A few hundred years head start.”
“That’s a hell of an advantage.”
I’d grown up on tales of the old-world shield battles, the kind of mythic blood-and-dust stories that were supposed to scare you straight at eight years old, but the moment I set foot in training at Imperium, I understood for the first time why the Order had survived when every other tradition died.
The walls down here were twelve feet thick.
The stone was dark, pitted, stained with old magic.
Every cold corridor twisted off into a maze of tunnels, chambers and old forgotten alcoves.
During the day, we trained in the arena, practicing with the other shield teams fighting class one and two bane under the ever watchful eye of Professor Saris, but in the evenings, we were down here in the forgotten part of the academy, where we would practice dangerous magic in peace.
Jupiter stood in the center of the room, hair braided down her back, face set in that look of utter, terrifying focus that still managed to be sexy as hell.
The rest of the Horizon shield formed a loose semicircle along the outer ring of the room.
Lucas, Rowan, Theo, Phoenix, Aiden, Eris, Draco, Percy, and me.
We were all on edge, exhausted, but the moment Jupiter started calling up her magic, every single one of us locked in.
Samuel and Jareth were present today too. My uncles from the Zenith Shield team, and at almost fifty-five years old they were still built like tanks. They’d been training the new shield teams for decades, both at Dominion, Imperium, and at Paragon Academy, a smaller institution in Russia.
I could feel the emotions in the room like a color. My Pisces magic hummed at the base of my skull, picking up on every ripple. At first, it was the usual cocktail of nerves, anticipation, and stark fear. But everyone in the room today mostly just radiated excitement and hope.
She knelt on the stone floor and closed her eyes. “Ready?”
“Ready,” each of us called back, letting Jupiter know that we were here to brace her when she needed the power boost.
She exhaled slowly, and the temperature in the room plummeted. The first portal opened at chest height. The size of a coin, and it made every hair on my arms stand up. She held it there, fingers splayed, and then without pause, opened a second. Then a third.
Within thirty seconds, there were fifteen perfect pinpricks of starlight suspended in the air in front of her. They shimmered, lining up with geometric precision, orbiting an invisible center of gravity.
Soon, there were twenty. Thirty. By the time she hit seventy-five, sweat beaded along her brow, a single dark strand of hair stuck to her cheek. Her hands didn’t tremble. Not once. The only sign of strain was the way her jaw locked, lips pressed tight.
I heard Jareth whisper, “Christ above,” under his breath.
Samuel just grunted, but his eyes were wide.
It took a lot to impress my uncles who’d seen their fair share of shit in their lives. The rest of the Order was gathering at the edges of the chamber now. I could feel them, even if I didn’t look. The magic in the air was a beacon. There was no way anyone upstairs missed it either.
Eighty. Ninety portals, each one identical, each one connected to the same anchor point. The glow was blinding now, bright enough to fill the room with starlight. The bond raged between all ten of us, strengthening as we slowly fed her bits of our magic.
This was what we were built for. Together we were a force of fucking nature, and she was our center of gravity.
A hundred portals. She drew the last portal out with a shuddering breath.
Then, with a slow sweep of her palms in a tight spiral, the portals began to converge.
They were merging, folding into each other, their barriers blurring, the light pressing inward.
The harmonic climbed, the pressure building, an unholy frequency that made my bones vibrate.
The smaller circles fused into larger ones, twenty at first, then ten, then five.
Jupiter’s whole body trembled now. Her face was white, lips drawn back from her teeth.
At the edge of my vision, I saw Uncle Samuel’s hands clench so hard his knuckles went white.
Jareth shifted nervously on his feet, but he didn’t say a word.
There was a low murmuring from other members of the Order, and even Tala had a look of naked fear on her face as she watched.
The final fusion happened so quickly if I blinked I would have missed it. The last five massive portals twisted together, the light flaring so bright it felt like a sun igniting inside the chamber, and then—
Silence.
One portal remained. As wide as a door. Stable and shimmering, and so dense with energy it made the whole room crackle with magic. Through it, I caught a glimpse of…something gray, dark and... I couldn’t quite make it out past the bright light.
She held it open for thirty seconds, and then finally let go. The portal winked out and the light faded. Jupiter sagged forward, catching herself on one hand, breath coming in harsh, uneven bursts. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the stone.
Nobody said anything for a long moment. This moment was too tense. Too unimaginable. Centuries of preparation, waiting for hope had led to this one woman and the power swirling inside of her. For so long it had only been theoretical.
“In fifty years in the Order, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Samuel said, eyes still wide.
I flexed my hands, trying to get feeling back. My own magic was singing, tuned to hers like a moth to a flame. The bond was flooded with awe and reverence, but also a staggering amount of relief. Jupiter was okay. She hadn’t burned herself out.
I could feel a sense of hope spreading. Not just among us. Through every member of the Order who’d come to witness the demonstration. It was a wave, bringing some of them to tears. Even Tala’s eyes were shining.
Jupiter sat back on her heels, wiped her face with the back of one hand, and grinned. She looked spent, dark circles under her eyes, skin shining with sweat, hair wild. But her smile was pure satisfaction.
She looked at Tala, and at Malakai next to her as she stood to her feet. “Do you want to know where that portal led?” There was a wicked gleam in her eyes that had me and the guys eyeing her suspiciously.
I’d caught a glimpse of something through the portal, but it was gone so quickly I couldn’t make it out. Tala was about to ask where the portal led, when Draco answered instead.
“The moon.” His voice echoed as the chamber fell to complete and utter silence. All eyes swiveled to him. He stood there, staring at Jupiter like he’d just witnessed a damn miracle in the flesh. “She made a stable portal to Earth’s moon.”
Jupiter only grinned proudly as she echoed, “The motherfuckin’ moon.”