Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JUPITER
The white swallowed me. Devoured me. I was nothing and everything and somewhere in between, a single point of light in an ocean of light, and I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t feel my hands, couldn’t feel the fissures splitting my skin or the blood weeping from my wounds. I was just... gone.
And then I wasn’t.
The first thing I registered was the sky.
Violet, not the orange-blue twilight of Earth.
It stretched above me in a vast, cloudless dome, and there were two suns hanging in it, one slightly larger than the other, casting light that was warm and golden and somehow softer than anything I’d ever felt on my skin.
The second thing was the sound. Sobbing, gut-wrenching sobbing that came from every direction. Shouting. People calling names, over and over, voices cracking with terror.
“Mara! MARA, ANSWER ME!”
“Has anyone seen my son? He’s eight, he has dark hair—”
“My husband was right behind me, he was RIGHT BEHIND ME—”
The murmur of hundreds of voices overlapping, some praying, some weeping, some just repeating the same word like a mantra, alive, alive, we’re alive.
The third thing was the grass. It was soft.
Like lying on silk, and it was cool against my bare skin.
My skin, which I could feel again. The air smelled like flowers.
Not one flower. Every flower. Roses and jasmine and something sweeter, something I didn’t have a name for, something that made my chest ache with a homesickness I’d never felt before for a place I’d never been.
Something tickled my cheek. A small, cool body, coiled tight, scales brushing my skin. “Noodle,” I said, or tried to. My mouth wouldn’t work. My throat was raw, like I’d been screaming for hours.
‘Never do again. I bite you.’ His voice in my head made my entire soul relax.
I tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze. The tickling came again. His tongue, flicking against my cheekbone, tasting the salt of tears I hadn’t realized I was crying.
Sound rushed in all at once. The sobbing, the shouting, the wind in the grass, the distant cry of something that was definitely not a bird. My body jolted, every nerve firing at once, and I sat up.
The world spun. Colors blurred. My stomach lurched and I gagged, but nothing came up. My body was too empty, too wrung-out, too utterly spent to even manage vomiting. I pressed one hand flat against the ground, and I breathed.
They were there before I could fully process it.
All of them converged on me from every direction, moving so fast they blurred, and the bond, the bond that had been screaming and white-hot and agonizing, snapped back into place like a rubber band, flooding me with terror and relief so intense it nearly knocked me over.
“Jupiter—”
“Jesus Christ, Jupiter—”
“Holy fucking shit, you’re alive, you’re alive—”
“Don’t you ever—don’t you EVER do that again—”
“Thank every god that exists, thank every star, thank—”
Hands were on me. Everywhere. Percy’s palm cradling the back of my skull.
Aiden’s fingers wrapped around my wrist, checking my pulse with shaking hands.
Eris’s massive arm braced across my shoulders, holding me upright.
Draco was on his knees in front of me, his violet eyes wild, his face streaked with dirt and blood and something that looked suspiciously like tear tracks.
Lucas had one hand on my knee, the other pressed flat against his own chest like he was trying to hold his heart inside his ribcage.
Rowan was behind me, his chest against my back, his breath coming in ragged gasps against my hair.
Theo and Phoenix flanked my sides, and Jamie was crouched at my feet, green eyes locked on my face, Gretchen perched on his shoulder with her feathers puffed to twice their normal size.
They were all talking at once. Overlapping so I couldn’t parse individual words anymore, just the overwhelming, bone-deep relief pouring through the bond, through every thread, every connection, until it filled me up so completely there wasn’t room for anything else.
“We’re here,” I said, and my voice was barely a whisper, scraped raw and thin. It hurt to even try, but I did. “We’re actually here.”
Percy’s hand tightened on the back of my neck. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot. “We’re here, honey. You did it. You fucking did it.”
I looked around, realizing we were on a hillside. The grass stretched in every direction, violet and emerald and silver, rippling in a wind that carried that impossible floral sweetness. Behind us, the landscape morphed into gentle, rolling hills dotted with trees.
It suddenly occurred to me that the bane were gone.
Lightyears away on Earth. I doubled over, a sob tearing out of my throat that was equal parts relief and horror.
We’d left them behind. We’d left the bane behind, sealed away on a planet that was now…
what? A hunting ground? A graveyard? I didn’t know.
I didn’t know if I could go back for the rest of our people, or if this was it.
But the bane weren’t here. I could feel it, the absence of that cold, wrong pressure, that soul-crushing darkness that had haunted every moment of our lives on Earth. The air was clean. The magic was clean. There was no rot, no decay, no wrongness.
Around us, the survivors were scattered across the hillside in clusters. Hundreds of them. Shield warriors in torn formalwear, Assembly members clutching each other, civilians sobbing into the grass. I saw Tala sitting on a boulder, her velvet dress in ruins, Malakai’s arm around her shoulders.
I saw Lydia’s shield huddled together, Rafe pale but conscious.
Kassie was curled against Tye’s chest with her face buried in his neck.
I saw my parents. My mom was on her feet, scanning the crowd, and when her eyes found mine, she crumpled.
My dad caught her, and they both went down to their knees, and I felt their relief hit me across the distance like a wave.
Tears spilled over onto my cheeks as I smiled at my daddy, and he smiled back.
Everyone was trying to get their bearings.
Shield teams were forming defensive perimeters, checking injuries, taking stock.
Assembly members were shouting at each other, already trying to establish some semblance of order.
Someone had started a fire. Someone else was passing out water…
which I had no idea where they could have gotten it from.
And then I noticed the cluster of people standing at the edge of the cliffside. They were maybe two dozen, maybe more, gathered in a tight knot at the crest of the hill where the ground dropped away. They were facing outward, away from us, and they were perfectly still.
“Jupiter.” Draco’s voice was careful. “We need to show you something. But you need to brace yourself.”
I looked at him. His violet eyes were bright, almost feverish. “What is it?”
“Just—” He swallowed. “Just come see.”
They helped me up, and my legs were jelly, my body a wreck of fissured skin and aching bones, and I leaned into Percy on one side and Lucas on the other as they half-carried me across the hillside.
The grass whispered under our feet. The wind picked up, warm and sweet, tugging at the tatters of my dress.
The cluster of people parted as we approached. I recognized some of them. Order members, shield warriors, a few civilians who’d been brave enough to venture to the edge. They stepped aside without a word, and the expressions on their faces made my stomach drop. Awe. Disbelief. Tears streaming down.
We reached the cliffside, and the wind hit me full-force. It whipped through my hair. My now…very white hair, bleached from root to tip. The air up here was thinner, colder, carrying the scent of soil and growing things. I braced myself against Percy’s chest, and I looked.
The world fell away beneath my feet. The cliff dropped hundreds of feet to a valley floor carpeted in violet grass and emerald trees, and beyond the valley, stretching to a horizon that seemed to curve with the planet itself, was a city.
It was crystalline. Every building, every tower, every structure was built from something that caught the twin sunlight and fractured it into a thousand colors. The towers spiraled upward, some of them impossibly thin, others broad and massive, their surfaces shimmering.
Bridges of translucent crystal connected the spires at dizzying heights, and even from miles away, I could tell the entire city had been grown rather than built. It was beautiful. It was magical. It was the most breathtaking thing I’d ever seen.
But… That wasn’t right, was it?
The cities should be in ruins.
Nature should have taken it all back.
But ten thousand years was a long, long time, and I’d heard once, I’m not sure where, that nature always found a way. Life always found a way. And I believed it now with every shred of my soul. Because on the valley floor, cutting a path through the grass toward the base of the cliff, were riders.
They moved in formation, a dozen, maybe fifteen of them, mounted on creatures that looked like horses.
They were massive, their bodies a deep, luminous violet shot through with tiger-like stripes of white and orange.
Their manes flowed like liquid shadow, and their hooves struck the ground with a sound that carried all the way up the cliff.
The riders were armed. I could see the glint of weapons—spears, curved blades, something that looked like a crossbow. Their armor was dark and sleek, fitted to their bodies. But most of all, they were Aelari. I could feel the faint hum of zodiac magic, distant but unmistakable, rolling off them.
My Ophis magic, what I could conjure in my current state, reached for them, searching, hoping, desperate to find the familiar signature of my own designation, to feel another Ophis in the flesh.
And there they were.
All of them.
Every single rider carried that familiar starlight in their veins.
I felt it radiating outward, vibrating through my bones, my blood, the fissured skin. It was the same frequency. The same harmonic that lived inside me, that had lived inside me since the day I manifested, that had made me feel like a freak and a weapon and a miracle all at once.
The starlight that poured from my wounds wasn’t bleeding anymore. It was reaching. Stretching toward the riders like tendrils of silver thread, connecting across the distance, and I could feel them reaching back.
Ophis. Every single one of them was Ophis.
Survivors. Descendants. Family.
My knees buckled, and Lucas caught me, his arms locking around my waist, holding me upright.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I could only stare down at the valley floor as the riders drew closer, their mounts’ hooves thundering against the violet grass, and the starlight in their veins burned brighter with every step, answering mine, calling to mine, singing the same song my blood had been singing my entire life without me ever knowing the words.
As more of our people gathered behind us, watching the riders come closer, close enough to see their individual faces, I raised a single hand in greeting, letting starlight glitter and sparkle over the tips of my fingers, bright enough for them to see across the plain.
And then, as if they could feel me too, the rider in the very front raised a hand right back, and starlight winked back at me, saying welcome, sister.
Welcome home.