To The Final End (The Ether Chronicles #6)

Chapter 1

Thane

Dark.

Then not.

My eyes open to ash falling like snow.

For a moment I don’t understand where I am. The sky is wrong—too bright, too silver, fractured with light that shouldn’t exist. My chest doesn’t move. My heart doesn’t beat.

Then it does.

One brutal thud that cracks through my ribs like a fist.

I gasp. Choke. Claw at the dirt beneath me as my lungs remember how to work.

Dead.

The word surfaces before I can stop it.

I was dead. Not unconscious. Not fading. Gone.

I know the difference. I’ve walked the edge of it for centuries, fed from the dying, tasted the exact moment when life becomes absence. What I felt wasn’t sleep.

It was nothing.

And then something dragged me back.

I force myself onto my elbows. The world tilts, stabilizes, tilts again. Blood in my mouth. Dirt under my nails. The thick, low hum of Ether gathering—too much of it, pressure building against my teeth like a coming storm.

Where is she?

My vision sharpens.

The courtyard is chaos. Bodies scattered across scorched ground. Some moving. Some not. The silver veins in the earth pulse like exposed arteries, brighter than I’ve ever seen them.

Then I find her.

Bree.

She’s kneeling in the center of it all, hands buried in the dirt, head bowed. Silver mist pours from her like blood from an open wound—not curling, not drifting. Flooding. It streams into the veins beneath her, feeding something vast and hungry.

And ten feet in front of her—

Riley.

Kneeling the same way. Hands pressed to the ground.

Black-silver Ether erupting from her palms, streaming toward Bree’s light like a mirror reflection reaching for its source.

Their magic meets in the space between them, twisting together, shadow and silver becoming something I don’t have a name for.

Two halves of the same soul, facing each other across scorched earth.

My chest seizes.

I know what this is.

I’ve seen it once before. Centuries ago. A Source who gave too much. Who pushed everything she had into the world and burned herself hollow in the process.

She didn’t survive.

“No—”

The word tears out of me. I shove to my feet. My legs don’t want to hold me but I make them, staggering forward two steps before a hand catches my arm.

Stellan.

He’s worse than I am—blood at his lip, one arm clutched against his ribs, face pale as bone. But his eyes are fixed on Bree with the same horror I feel clawing up my throat.

“She can’t.” His voice is harsh, cracking. “If she pushes everything—”

“I know.”

“She’ll be killed.”

“I know.”

I wrench free. Start moving. The ground pulses beneath my boots, Ether humming so loud I can feel it in my teeth. Every step closer to her, the pressure builds—not against me, but through me, like she’s pulling from everywhere at once.

“Bree!”

She doesn’t hear me. Doesn’t look up. The silver in her mist is blinding now, too bright to look at directly.

I’m ten feet away when the veins ignite.

Light erupts from the ground in a column of white fire. The air splits. Sound dies. For one suspended heartbeat I see everything—Bree’s face lifted toward the sky, Riley’s hands locked in the dirt, their magic fused into something that screams through dimensions I can’t name.

Riley’s scream cuts through the light at the same moment mine does.

Then the blast hits.

White.

Everywhere.

I don’t feel myself fly.

Sound returns first.

Screaming.

Not battle-screaming. Not pain. Something older. Something wrong.

Phil’s voice—but not Phil’s voice. The thing underneath, the presence that wore him like a mask, shrieking as if the light burned through layers of it.

Ethos.

Ethos is screaming.

I have never hated anything more than I hate him in this moment.

I force my eyes open.

The courtyard is scorched. Silver ash drifts through the air like the aftermath of a star dying. The veins in the ground have gone dark—not dead, but quiet. Waiting.

I’m on my back. Twenty feet from where I was standing.

Move.

I roll onto my side. Push up. My arms shake. My vision doubles, then corrects. The ringing in my ears drowns out everything except that horrible keening—Ethos still screaming, still too close to Bree, the sound getting weaker, fractured.

The wall where Seth stood is empty. Scorched stone. Nothing else.

Where is he?

I can’t think about that now.

Bree.

I find her.

She’s collapsed forward, face in the dirt. Hair covering her features. Hands still buried in the earth, but limp now—like the Ether burned straight through her and left the shell behind.

She’s not moving.

Something inside me tears open.

“Bree—”

The word comes out broken. I don’t recognize my own voice.

Not my queen. Not the Source. Bree.

Stellan appears beside me. On his knees. Breathing hard. His hand finds my shoulder—steadies me, barely. His eyes find her at the same time mine do.

I don’t wait.

I don’t think.

I shove to my feet and I move.

“We have to get to her.”

It’s not a command. It’s not strategy. It’s the only truth left in me—the only thing that matters in a world that just went white and silent and wrong.

Stellan doesn’t argue. He’s already moving too.

Ethos’s screaming cuts off. But all I can focus on is her.

The silence that follows is worse.