I watched him realize his mistake in the instant before he died. Saw the moment he understood that you couldn’t control corruption—you could only become it or be consumed by it. He’d chosen to harness it.
I’d chosen to become it.
My corruption hit him like a tsunami of ending. He didn’t dissolve slowly like the guards. He simply ceased. One moment he existed, raising his hands in a futile attempt at defense. The next moment, there was nothing. No body, no ash, no trace that Malachar had ever stood there. Just empty space where a person used to be, and my corruption still spreading, still hungry, still consuming.
The barriers he’d erected crumbled. The walls he’d summoned dissolved. Even the corruption in the Heartspire itself recoiled from what I’d become, recognizing something far worse than itself.
I stood there, breathing hard, and felt the transformation complete.
The corruption had spread across every inch of my body. Where Elle’s marks had turned her into solid gold and light, mine had transformed me into solid black and death incarnate. My skin was shadow made flesh, my marks a network of darkness that pulsed with the rhythm of entropy itself. I could feel it—not just the corruption, but what lay beyond it. The endingof all things. The final darkness that waited for everyone and everything.
I was death’s avatar. Destruction given form. The perfect balance to Elle’s light.
“Kaelren?” Sarnyx’s voice was small, uncertain, maybe even afraid.
I turned to look at my team, and through eyes that were more void than anything else, I saw them flinch. Good. They should be afraid. Everything should be afraid of what I’d become.
“Get to safety,” I said, and my voice carried harmonics of ending, each word a small death. “This is between me and Auradelle now.”
“But—”
“Go!”
They went, scrambling away from me like prey fleeing a predator. Only Peeble remained, still on my shoulder, their small form trembling but refusing to leave.
“You’re terrifying, pretty boy,” they said.
Good. Let them all be terrified. Let Auradelle see what he’d created with his manipulations and his patterns and his sixteen iterations of failure.
I walked forward, shadows bleeding from my every step, corruption spreading across the floor in fractals of decay. The entrance to the Convergence chamber loomed ahead—massive doors of ancient wood and twisted metal, sealed with power that had held for centuries.
I didn’t bother trying to open them.
I walked through.
The doors exploded when my corruption touched them, matter and magic alike dissolving into nothing. I stepped through the space where they’d been and into the chamber beyond.
And there she was.
Elle hung suspended in the Bloom’s embrace, her body covered in golden marks that had spread everywhere, flowers blooming from her skin with each heartbeat. She glowed like the sun at dawn, beautiful and terrible, light made flesh.
And I was pure onyx made flesh, the ending of all things.
We were perfect opposites. Perfect balance. The thing the Convergencehad been trying to create repeatedly, finally achieved.
Auradelle stood beside his apparatus, and for the first time since I’d known him, I saw genuine fear in his eyes.
“What have you become?” he whispered.
I smiled, and it was the smile of graves opening and stars dying.
“Exactly what you needed,” I said. “Now let’s finish this.”
35
Bryx
Earlier, I’d stood in the rebel camp, explaining my brilliant plan to Thrak while Kevin buzzed irritably beside me, his left wing still torn from our scouting mission. We’d strategically positioned everyone, two hundred and fifty rebels across three attack points, sonic amplifiers I’d cobbled together from stolen Crown tech, and every bee Kevin could convince to join us. Thrak had been skeptical, Vera had calculated our odds of survival at roughly twelve percent, but here we were anyway.
