Chapter 23 #5
Magic flooded into me from every direction.
It hit me like a freight train, and I nearly buckled.
Across the ballroom, Lydia’s head snapped toward me.
She was mid-fight, ice shards still flying from her hands, but something in my expression, or maybe something in our souls, because she and I had always been connected in ways that went beyond magic, made her go still. She broke from her formation and ran.
She crossed the ballroom at a dead sprint, ice forming a path beneath her feet, bane lunging at her from every side.
Valeria covered her flank, lightning arcing in wide, desperate sweeps.
She hit the stage in a slide, ice cracking beneath her boots, and skidded to a stop in front of me, eyes wide, chest heaving, blood streaked across one cheek. “Jupe—”
“Trust me,” I said.
She didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. She nodded and turned to her shield. “Rafe! Barrier! Around Jupiter and her shield, now! Hold the bane off as long as you fucking can!”
Rafe’s magic flared green at his fingertips, and he didn’t question his axis.
His shield formed up around him, and together they threw their magic outward in a massive, shimmering dome of multicolored light.
It slammed down around us like a bell jar, sealing me and my bonded inside with the bane locked out.
The barrier shuddered on impact. Bane slammed against it from every side, clawing, tearing, their dark matter bodies pressing against the light until it buckled and groaned. Rafe’s face was white with strain, veins standing out on his neck, but he held.
Inside the dome, my shield closed around me, shoulder to shoulder, their magic already pouring into me through the bond. The pressure was astronomical. I could feel my bones creaking, my blood burning, every nerve ending screaming. I closed my eyes and reached for the core of it.
It came from inside me. From the deepest part, the part that had never belonged to Earth, the part that remembered endless skies and violet oceans and emerald forests on a planet long since abandoned. Starlight tore through my skin like I was made of glass, and I screamed.
The sound was not human. It was something older, something that belonged to the void between stars, and it ripped through the ballroom with a shudder. The emergency lights shattered. The remaining chandeliers exploded. The marble cracked and split, and I rose.
I rose off the ground, my feet leaving the stage entirely, and the starlight lifted me, carrying me upward until I hung suspended in the center of the dome, my body wreathed in blinding white light.
In the reflection of the shield, my hair—the sleek black ponytail I’d spent an hour perfecting—was bleached white from root to tip as it broke free and writhed around my head, the color draining like ink from water, until it streamed around my head like a corona.
Hundreds of portals erupted in front of me.
They bloomed like silver flowers, each one the size of a penny, each one a perfect circle of starlight.
They filled the air between me and the dome wall, orbiting, humming, their combined harmonic so high it made the barrier itself vibrate.
Two hundred. Three hundred. Four hundred.
They kept coming, pouring out of me like blood from an open wound, and I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t want to stop them.
Five hundred. Six hundred. Seven hundred.
My skin was tearing. I could feel it, actual fissures opening along my arms, my chest, my face, and starlight poured from the wounds like liquid.
The pain was beyond anything I’d ever felt.
Beyond the Abyss. Beyond every training session, every portal convergence, every moment of my life.
It was like being unmade from the inside.
Eight hundred. Nine hundred. A thousand.
The portals filled the dome. They were everywhere, above me, below me, in every direction, a thousand pinpricks of silver light so dense they blotted out everything else.
The starlight had consumed me entirely. I was white.
Pure white. My skin, my eyes, my hair, my dress—all of it burned with the same blinding, terrible light.
“Now!” I thought, or maybe I said it, or maybe the bond simply carried the intention. I reached out with both hands and pulled.
The thousand portals converged. They slammed together like a collapsing star, each one folding into the next.
The sound was apocalyptic. A roar that shattered every remaining window in the ballroom, that cracked the marble floor from wall to wall, that made the very foundation of Imperium Academy groan.
The portals fused. Twenty became ten. Ten became five. Five became three. Three became two. And then, with a final, deafening detonation of light and force, the last two portals crashed together and became one.
It stabilized in the air before me, ten feet across, a perfect circle of silver-white light, humming with enough raw power to level a city. And through the event horizon, I could see a vast endless expanse of emerald trees and violet grass.