Fuck, this is not good.
“I’m sorry. Jake, I didn’t?—”
“Don’t do that.” His voice broke, stopping the words.
He framed her face in both hands, desperate, as if the pressure alone could keep her from fading.
His brow pressed to hers, and she felt the steady heat of him instead of the cold pull of the breach tugging at her like it meant to strip her lifeforce away.
“Do not let go of the prophecy,” he said.
“I can’t access my Threadwalking power—I burned through it all. The prophecy was wrong, Jake. My fire is useless. So am I.I’ve spent my whole life afraid I’m not enough—and I never will be.”
Jake’s breath hitched, a sound too close to a choke. “No.”
His grip tightened on her hand, desperation breaking through the steel of his voice. “Fuck. Don’t you dare give up on me.”
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles—hard, almost frantic. “Listen to me,” he said, the words tumbling out fast and uneven. “The prophecy… it can’t be wrong.”
His thumb brushed her jaw. “The red sun must mean something else. The sun—it has to be you,” he said, fierce and certain. “And the red?—”
His gaze locked on what she guessed had to be the blood sliding from her lashes.
Gods, I must look disturbing.
He bent and closed his mouth over the track of tears. The tip of his tongue followed the line of blood, and she shuddered.
Power surged from him in a rippling shock wave, quick and bright.
Ella thought she’d imagined it—her body fading fast, hallucinating as it went.
“Picture the Veil,” he said, voice rough. He lifted her against his chest as the Leaches’ cries closed in. “I’ll take us to it.”
She pictured the threads of the Veil and reached for them with all she had left. But this time she felt something she never had before: Jakobav in the threads with her. They were Threadwalking together.
Her magic surged again; his blood magic was calling to her flame. She felt the pull toward him like she had that first night in the castle—the pull toward the relic.
The two magics met like opposing stars caught in the same orbit. Around them, the threads arranged themselves likeconstellations, each strand lit, spanning into a thousand radiant paths between ripples and realms.
Their combined magic wove itself through the fraying lattice of what used to be the Veil. Her fire mapped all the places it had fractured, its threads pulsing faster until the vibrations felt like the Veil was screaming at her.
And suddenly she understood.
The Veil wasn’t broken because of its cracks. It was broken because it had been forced into place to seal the realms closed—twisted against its nature until every thread strained past breaking. It didn’t need repair. It needed release.
“Jake,” she whispered through the threads, her voice trembling with the knowledge settling into her bones, “we’re not supposed to restore it. We have to burn what’s left—free it.”
His power flared in answer, steady as a vow, as he gripped her tighter.
She reached for the frayed lattice, her fire gathering. She saw her flame change color—not orange from Orchid, not white from the Claiming, but a brilliant, impossible red.
His blood and her flame merged into a single burning force—a red sun.
Together they unleashed it into the shattered fabric until each thread blistered and finally began to unravel.
The Veil burned bright as a dying star.
The threads burned, glowing with that red flame before disintegrating one by one into brilliant dust.
