The Veil disappeared, unmade and free at last.
Jakobav’s voice reached her. “Hold on to me.”
She did.
A figure formed in the light ahead of her: tall, luminous, features shifting like memory.
“At last,” the figure said, voice layered with ages. “The realms were never meant to be sealed. You bring the balance we have waited for.”
A hand lifted in benediction, something in the motion achingly familiar.
“Be proud, Ellandria. And go home.”
The figure dissolved into radiance, and the threads snapped with a sound like breaking dawn. Light rose in a single note, brighter than starlight, searing until suddenly, they were back on the dais.
Jakobav staggered and fell back with her in his arms. The hall lay in wreckage—pillars broken, marble cracked, the air full of settling dust. No new creatures pushed through the seam. The wound in the world had gone still.
She knew the realms now lay open, no longer straining against the ancient enchantment that had sealed them apart.
Jakobav lowered her to her feet, keeping one steadying arm around her waist as she found her balance. The crown sat slightly askew in her tangled hair, her coronation whites reduced to torn silk streaked with soot.
She reached for his hand without hesitation. Their fingers met amid dust and ruin, anchoring them to the world they had remade. Ash drifted in slow spirals, bright as snow in torchlight.
Maeren dragged herself upright with a grimace and a crooked smile. Soren lifted from a crack in the marble floor like a man climbing from a river, shoulders streaked with grit. Savina lowered her hand, and the pillars she’d called settled back into the dais, leaving scars the stone would no doubt remember.
She heard a gasp from one of the few who remained—guards, the injured, the inner circle still standing. And there, watching from the steps of the dais, was her father.
She had just disappeared and returned—she could only imagine the shock and confusion he must have been feeling.
Instead, her father looked at her like he’d witnessed a miracle. His gaze went to Jakobav and then returned to Ella.
“Gods, Ellandria… you’re alive,” he breathed.
Her father crossed the distance in two staggering steps and pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly as if afraid she might vanish again.
The Veil was gone, but the air still trembled with what it had cost.
Gods. They’d actually done it.
The realms were open. The prophecy was real.
The red sun had never been a star in the sky.
Red was his blood magic. Sun was her fire.
And Jakobav truly was the relic.
A sob rose unbidden as she looked across the shattered hall at the faces that had once been her enemies—Maeren’s battered but unyielding stance, Savina’s jaw set with exhaustion, Soren’s eyes dark with quiet pride, Thane leaning bloody but grinning against the broken marble.
They’d come for her.
They’d fought for Orchid. For her father. For every kingdom still clinging to light.
She’d been so wrong about the Dravaryns. Of course they’d crash her coronation uninvited—and by doing so, save the fucking world.
She let out a half-laugh, half-sob.
The enormity of it hit her all at once, leaving her swaying but unbroken. Her hands were raw, her skin streaked with soot. She looked up to the oculus where stars burned in daylight, and warmth bloomed inside her in answer.
