This time, when he launches for Azar—whatever Azar has become—Azar doesn’t tremble. He doesn’t shrink and endure. In all the shifting, in all the enduring, Azar has grown. He’s become something else.
I realize then that he’s cast off his mask.
Freya was right that Azar was destined to take Veralden Radien’s magic and make it something more. Azar was the child of her creator, the sky lord, but he was also the product of two enemies who nevertheless managed to love, imperfectly though it was.
He was saved by a dear friend and an earth child bonded.
He was raised by that same friend, and then he became something more by choosing at every turn to do the light and bright thing. He chose to follow Jörð’s path, not his father’s, and in doing so he was diminished.
And he grew.
Here on earth, Azar’s real power, Azar’s real strength was buoyed up by his goodness, and by the love he shares with me. A brilliant golden light arcs between Azar and me, and our bond begins to illuminate like the sparklers we buy at Fourth of July, only much, much larger.
When Veralden strikes this time, his magic and Azar’s combine and explode outward, then contract back in.
This time, when the magic reforms, it’s not in the shape of Veralden. It’s not Azar or Axel either. It’s a tremendously large beast of no color I can pinpoint. Holographic silver? Dark grey with rainbow glints? As soon as I try to describe it, it changes again.
“Veralden?” I stumble back, my hands bumping Hyperion’s leg. “Is—what happened?”
But the bond pulses, and as the enormous, staggeringly beautiful head lowers to be on level with mine, I realize the eyes—the eyes I know. It’s Azar, not Veralden Radien.
“How?”
He knew how to destroy, but creating is harder, and you taught me how. Now I know how to make something valuable that didn’t exist before. I know that connections bolster our strength. Thanks to you, I learned to believe in something unbelievable. You taught me to form something new, something different, something that has never before been and to accept that as a gift.
“Sky and earth,” Coral whispers. “He’s both.”
As Azar turns to face her, I realize she’s right. Underneath the rainbow sparkle, the dark holographic silvers and blacks, he’s the deep, burnished gold of earth. He’s Axel and Azar, and he’s all of them.
Freya’s words come to me, then. “But my son’s not two people—he hasn’t lived two lives. He’s one person with two masks.”
We’re finally seeing Azar without his mask.
He’s spectacular.
“I love you,” I say.
The great beast that is my love, my darling, shifts then, and he’s a man, only he’s different. He’s a little bigger, and he’s a little shinier—his skin’s a luminescing golden tone, and tiny bits of light keep shedding away from him. “I love you more.”
I smile. “I think that’s not quite right.” I drop my hands to my belly. “Because you may be sparklier, and more powerful, and all of that, and you may have just saved us from the big, selfish Veralden Radien, but I’m the only one here growing another person.”
Axel’s eyes widen. “You—what?”
“Think you’ll be able to stick around for it? Or do you feel any urges pulling you to fly away to another planet and start massacring people to steal their magical energy?”
Axel may look different, but his laughter’s the same. “I will never leave you.”
“Even if I drain your power and plague you constantly with irritating small demands?”
He drops one strangely glowing hand to my cheek. “Even then.”
“Great,” I say. “Because I have the strangest urge to eat very rare meat and a big old pile of edamame. Is that something you think you can handle?”
He mouths the word edamame.
In that moment, I can’t help wondering whether, if I had believed in Freya, whether we might have called Veralden Radien with Azar’s egg and spared ourselves a lot of misery.
But there’s no real way to know how that would have gone.
