91. STARS AND ASH
The world seemed to narrow as the scene shifted around me.
Silas grabbed Niall and ported him out of Skadi’s reach just as she whipped her hand through the air, but her attempt to command her shadows failed.
They twisted and writhed, shrinking in on themselves and evaporating like smoke.
She staggered sideways, staring down and gaping at the knife in her heart with utter disbelief.
When she lifted her gray eyes to me, they flickered.
The life in them was fading, blink by blink.
Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth as she let out a small, pained grunt. Then she collapsed to the ground, and did not rise again.
I didn’t know where the queen had gone, or how she had managed to do what she’d just done, but somehow, she had wounded the goddess . . . fatally, it seemed.
Torin and Lyceius both stared in shock . . . until the atmosphere shuddered a second later.
A wave of wind and pressure blasted against us from the east . . . from the valley.
The Aether. Aremis must have unleashed it.
Lyceius spun in search of the source, but my focus went straight to my mate, who was lying in Silas’s arms, breathing heavily.
Heal. Heal, I pleaded in my mind.
Silas was saying something to him that I could not make out. All I could hear was the echoing sound of my mate being skewered with a poisoned blade, and Silas having his wings ripped away from his flesh.
Both of them shook, their bodies fighting against the damage that had been done.
I mapped the pain in Niall’s pinched brow, and the strain in his clenched jaw. His hand clutched the wound at his side where blood was still seeping out.
And above him . . . Silas . . . with his missing wings . . .
I felt like I was going to be sick.
There was a wave taking form within me, growing from the depths of my soul. Higher and higher it climbed, like a Dreki clawing its way from the trenches of the mountains, eager to burst into the open sky and unfurl its wings in the daylight.
I inhaled a shaky breath, fighting back a sob that wanted to rattle free.
And then, just like the wind stirring before a storm, I felt Lyceius hurtle his power in my direction. His malicious intent rippled through the air, and that wave inside me came barreling up to meet it.
Light funneled through my veins, and I let out a yell as my power slammed into his. Something inside me had snapped. My well was blown wide open, and the pain, the heartbreak of loss, the desperation, all of it was fuel to my fury.
He snarled as he drew closer, his power reforming around him in a fervent tempest of dark energy, the force of which was more potent than before.
With the way Skadi’s body lay motionless in the dirt, I presumed she was either dead or dying, and if her blood-oath had been relinquished in that process, Lyceius now had the full breadth of what remained of his power back, and he was using it.
But it did not matter to me what the fallen god had in his arsenal.
I had more.
And it was time to end this. To end him.
I drew in a breath.
And detonated.
Light ripped through me like a dam had broken loose, flowing from what felt like an endless well.
I unleashed everything at Lyceius. My skin illuminated with a blinding white light, so bright that tears streamed from my own eyes at the reflection, and so cold that my skin pebbled, and a shudder rocked through me.
The power was so vast—seemingly endless.
It tore free from my body like white flames.
Its roar was a mesmerizing hum in my mind, a song of destruction.
At that moment, I realized how easy it would be to slip into the well and slide under the surface.
To stay there for a while, and let the world fall to the wayside. To revel in my power.
Lyceius was thrown back as the potent beam of energy pounded against his defenses like a battering ram. Slowly, the darkness around him began to unravel. My light was obliterating his corrupt power, shredding it into a million tattered fragments.
I was ablaze, burning, raging.
Niall’s voice came into my mind, a tether to ground me.
Auren, he said. Do it!
I kept my aim on Lyceius, but turned my head, and beheld my mate, who was watching with awe, and pleading at me with his eyes—eyes that were lining with tears.
He wanted me to use his power—he wanted to help—but I refused to let him empty his well for this.
In my mind, his shadowfire still sat before my stone wall, waiting quietly, patiently. I acknowledged it, then left it there, safe and untouched.
I set my focus back on Lyceius, thrusting more light into my assault, watching as it illuminated the fear in his face.
Niall’s frustration and distress rippled down the bond, and then his voice sounded again, in a tone different from anything I’d ever heard from him before.
Do it now! he yelled, firm and final. It was not a suggestion, but an order from my High Lord.
From my mate. The desperation that lined his words shattered my resolve.
It danced across the wall in my mind, and prickled down my spine, driving me into action.
My essence moved of its own accord, obeying his command.
It scooped up the bundle with gentle tendrils of light, and cradled it for a moment, as if to say, Thank you, before absorbing the offering.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Niall’s power rushing toward me.
It looked as if I was channeling it from him, siphoning his offering in physical form.
It funneled into me, wrapping around my limbs and chest like armor, black as the night, as if it were protecting me.
Then, shadowy tendrils leaked forth, intertwining with wisps of my light, before branching out like dark flames toward the shredded scraps of Lyceius’s power.
They swirled around him, snatching up every fragment of inky matter and forming a spinning bundle at his back—a black orb. A blot in the world.
The shadowfire was helping me cast him out.
The mating bond strained, and I sucked in a sharp breath as my heart pounded harder and faster than should have been possible. The talisman hummed against my forehead, a matching sensation to the thrumming in my chest.
Stars and ash, I said to myself in my mind, though my voice didn’t even sound like my own. It was many in one—a chorus of every facet of myself. An echo of a soul nearing its rebirth.
“Auren, wait!” Lyceius yelled, glancing over his shoulder in fear. “We can talk this through!”
I didn’t waste my breath on a response.
The more Lyceius tried to fight, the more his power was being stripped from him, leeched from his very being, and absorbed into this strange sphere-like void that was growing bigger by the second.
When he realized that there was nothing he could do, that my power had overcome his and he had lost, he cried out. “Stop this madness!”
The whirling mass devoured the space behind him, full of its own gravity and substance. It felt like a place made of endings—of death. A sound ruptured from the fallen god’s throat as he attempted to escape the sphere’s pull, but his feet continued sliding backward through the dirt.
The dark flames of Niall’s shadowfire began to sputter out, drifting away on the wind, tendril by tendril, leaving my light to command the giant mass.
I dug deeper, drawing more power from my well, and channeling it at Lyceius, and while I did so, something brushed against my senses, a semi-familiar presence that was far more potent than I’d felt before. Like a wild animal, it drew near, then skittered away again—ever-fleeting.
It was the Aether. Except now, I could see it.
In this state, in whatever plane I currently existed on, the Aether shimmied on the wind, a fluid form of iridescence, similar to how it had appeared upon Aremis’s skin.
It hovered around me, palpitating near my light.
Then, it shimmered along the beam, following it to the void that was descending upon Lyceius.
Time for a new age of the gods, it said, and I couldn’t tell if it was in my mind, or if the Aether had spoken for everyone to hear. Time for great powers to rise, and fall.
The mass spun faster, and the Aether danced around it, sinking into its orbit, reinforcing its form. There was a rim of my light encircling the sphere now—where my power was holding Lyceius’s hostage, caged in a warped confinement of space and time.
The fallen god’s eyes were wide with terror as he struggled to break free from the sphere’s hold. When the last of his corrupt power was wrenched from his possession and sucked into the black mass, Delyth’s words echoed in my head.
Cast. Him. Out.
In my mind, I envisioned Lyceius being swallowed up by the force—by the prison made of his own vile essence. His ultimate end. His own personal oblivion.
With one final push of my strength, the talisman hummed against my forehead, and the sphere pulsed as it began tearing the fallen god apart. Piece by piece, he was devoured. Skin was flayed from flesh, and bones were dissolved into dust, until his dying screams disintegrated like ash on the wind.
I reeled my light back to me as I beheld the giant mass, which was now so void of light that it seemed like a rip in our reality—an impossible blackness.
The Aether shimmered over the sphere one last time, and I heard it laugh as though it were finding joy in the ruination. A moment later, it hummed through the atmosphere and slid alongside me. May the gods bless you, it praised and hissed once again, before disappearing into the void.
A roar like a raging waterfall overwhelmed my ears as the ominous sphere wobbled, unstable and wild, and began collapsing in on itself, devouring its own existence.
Then, when it was no bigger than a grain of sand, it completely vanished with a blinding flash of light.
The event sent a pulse of power out across the land, shaking everything to its core.
The earth quaked, and I was thrown backward as the rush of pent-up energy skirted over the realm.
And then, my body convulsed.
I didn’t know what was happening, or why. My chest heaved off the ground, then crashed back into it, repeatedly. All I could see was light. All I could feel was power.
Something distant pulled at my body, an agonizing pain that I felt so deep in my bones, it brought tears to my eyes. A tether, one that I was sure was attached to my very soul, snapped, and whatever had been before, was re-written.
Then came the burning. It was as if my veins were being made anew. Light surged through every corner of my body, giving me a new life-force. A final form.
Remade.
Immortal.
As quick as it came, it ceased, and I settled onto the dirt, feeling a renewed source of strength. My core was now vibrating with energy—infinite and all powerful.
The talisman hissed atop my forehead as it restructured itself and cooled into its new shape. I reached to run my fingers over it, and found that what had once been a smooth band, was now braided.
The soft howl of a hollow breeze brushed by, caressing my face, and I felt each strand of my hair shift along with it.
Grains of sand plinked against my armor, and the sound was like a chime in my ears.
I heard every leather fiber groan and stretch as I moved to sit up.
I was hyperaware and attuned to everything.
Every aspect of my immediate surroundings shocked my senses, but the expanse beyond was eerily quiet.
All the sounds of fighting had ceased.
Still in a daze, I rolled over onto my side and looked toward the valley.
Familiar armor and weaponry . . . Fae . . . Dionachs . . . Witches . . . Dreki . . . Wolves. The forces from our realm were the only ones left standing.
Lyceius’s armies had disintegrated with the death of their maker. The ash of their bodies now drifted in the wind, fading into the hazy sky. Even Skadi’s shadows had ceased to exist. A few cries of victory pierced the air, echoing across the war-torn plains.
I turned over and noted the ground that had been scorched and ravaged around me. A line had been gouged deep into the earth nearby. Then my eyes landed on Niall. He was lying on the ground about forty feet away. Silas was still with him, and crouched at their side, was Torin.
I squinted at Niall’s form until I realized that the way he was lying was all wrong. His head sagged against the dirt. His skin was too pale. There was now blood running from his nostrils and out of his ears, drying on his neck.
“Niall?” I whispered. My voice was raspy, my throat dry.
Then I remembered what had happened. The poisoned blade . . . The bundle of shadowfire . . . Him yelling in my mind, Do it now! Those words, followed by that prickling sensation that I’d felt only a few times in the past . . .
It was . . . magic.
He had compelled me!
No! No!
I pushed myself up and fumbled over my feet as I ran to him. Torin and Silas moved away just as I fell to my knees at his side and pulled his body into my lap. I frantically wiped the hair away from his eyes and shook him repeatedly, hysteria pressing in on me.
“Niall! NIALL!”
I was manic. And he wasn’t waking.
The quiet, the stillness, all of it felt heavy, and I suddenly became terrifyingly aware that the thrumming in my chest, the feeling that had become an ever-present part of me, of our connection . . . had ceased.