The others regrouped beneath Vann’s rudimentary structure and went still—resigned, almost, as they gaped at the sky behind her—and Lunara closed her eyes.
She had friends and a family now. A mate and a life worth living. Love. So much fucking love, she hardly knew what to do with it.
They needed her. Whatever was there, she would not be afraid. Not anymore. Not ever again.
With her hands clenched into shaking fists, Lunara turned and faced her destiny.
Hundreds of feet high, a tsunami of darkness was hurtling straight for them, churning with bodies and bones and blood.
A cataclysm of rotting death.
“This is the moment we planned for. It’s time. Time to accept your bright place in the sky. Burn, sister. Shine. Unleash fire on night. Release all your fear and wield vengeance that blinds.”
Releaseallher fear.
One foot in front of the other, Lunara flashed her fangs and tore the top from the well. The barrier was no good to her anymore. Had no place in her life. She loosened the nervous, spectral fingers she’d kept wrapped around Illamiata sinceclaiming it, letting them slip away and finally unlocking the cage she’d built around herself all those decades ago.
“Yes, moth. That’s it. Let go and stamp your name upon eternity.”
She was free. At last.
As the darkness hit, Lunaraerupted.
Power exploded from her in a tempest of wind and searing light, and she screamed into the descending void—screamed and screamed, releasing the torment that had followed her every day for decades, until her throat was raw and shredded.
As bits and pieces of cursed creatures rained down, she swam amongst her rage. Let it shine out from every particle and pore. Let herself burn.
Hotter than the sunstar and brighter than the moons. More staggering than the galaxies. More infinite than anything the cosmos had ever held within themselves.
She was a celestial fire of divine retribution. The Unknown made manifest.
A Star Goddess in her own right.
Illamiata pulled from the essence of the world and gave it back to her, and she used every drop to administer its vast destruction.
Her incineration was accompanied by shrieking death throes—quieter and quieter, less and less—until there was nothing left but ash and afternoon sunlight, beaming all the way down to the barren chasm floor.
Just before she collapsed—before her knees could hit the dirt and her body could crumple—Lunara looked up past the charred remains and at the scorched chasm wall.
At the perfect doorway carved there and the reddish glow shining from within.
At the cave he’d made to save her, where her life had finally begun.
Just before she collapsed, Lunara found him.
Brand.
Araxis spat,the misty fog of his midnight power drawing back and away from thethinghe’d just suffocated with it. Not quite a Forgotten, not quite a creature—some abomination in between that curdled the blood in his veins.
Seeing was different than hearing. Brand and Lunara’s storytelling had done little justice to the reality.
Pandemonium reigned around him, the stink of death mixing with Nakarat’s wafting smoke to burn like acid in his lungs with every putrid breath. His brother’s dragon roared in the sky, pummeling the land in front of the Ghostwood with its fire.
The flaming wall was going a long way towards stemming the flow of monsters, but it was almost too little, too late.
Dead. So many were already dead.
And it did nothing to dispel the writhing pocket of darkness within the otherworldly trees of the ‘Wood. It had been there since the beginning. Unmoving, but watching. Waiting.
