The kind that follows devastation, heavy and thick as smoke. I stand at the edge of the courtyard while the crowd presses against the sanctuary walls, their faces pale with terror and something deeper—the primal recognition that they’ve witnessed power beyond their comprehension.
The others hang back like she’s become something radioactive. Gray’s clothes are torn, dried blood streaking his skin where his earlier transformation left its mark. His eyes are wild when they find her, but there’s wariness there now. Fear.
Rhett trembles despite the heat still radiating from his skin, his hands clenched at his sides like he’s afraid to reach for her. Wes looks drained, hollow, his usual quiet intensity replaced by something that might be horror. Even Theo maintains his distance, brown eyes calculating but cautious.
Jace has gone completely still, his usual sharp grin nowhere to be found.
And Thane—Thane burns with fury, but it’s impotent rage directed at everything except the girl kneeling in the center of destruction. Even he won’t approach.
They see a weapon. A monster. Something that needs to be contained.
I see magnificence.
The courtyard is a masterpiece of controlled chaos. Where her silver Ether touched, flowers bloom from cracked stone—delicate, crystalline things that shouldn’t exist but do anyway. Where the black threads reached, the ground has turned to obsidian glass that reflects nothing, drinking light like a hungry mouth.
The sanctuary itself responded to her call, stones singing with power they’d forgotten they possessed. Windows lie in glittering fragments, but the building stands stronger somehow. Like it finally remembered what it was built for.
This isn’t destruction.
This is a coronation.
The woman in the center of it all kneels with her head bowed, silver and black Ether curling around her like a living crown. Her shoulders shake with what the others mistake for shame, but I can see the truth in the way the Ether moves—protective, reverent, claiming.
She whispers apologies, but the sanctuary doesn’t accept them. The stones hum with approval, the very air crackling with recognition.
Something shifts in the spider-web cracks beneath her knees.
Shadows slink free from the obsidian glass—small, sleek creatures stitched from living darkness. One that might be a fox, another that could be a raven. Their forms shift and blur at the edges, too real to be illusions but too impossible to be natural.
The crowd gasps and stumbles backward, whispers ofcorruptionandtaintrippling through their ranks like poison.
But these creatures don’t bare fangs. Don’t attack or threaten.
They bow.
The shadow-fox lowers its head with liquid grace, dark eyes fixed on the woman who doesn’t even notice its presence. The raven spreads wings made of night, dipping in a gesture of perfect reverence before dissolving back into the obsidian glass.
A third flickers at the edge of my vision—something serpentine and quick—just long enough to mirror the same motion before vanishing entirely.
My breath catches.
They think the black threads are rot spreading through silver light.
I see the truth.
The void doesn’t bow to weakness. It doesn’t acknowledge the broken or the corrupted. It recognizes only one thing: absolute authority.
These aren’t signs of her fall. They’re subjects paying homage to their queen.
While the others see infection, I’m witnessing expansion. Her power isn’t being tainted—it’s claiming new territory. The black threads aren’t corruption bleeding into her Ether.
They’re conquest.
The realization settles in my chest like warm honey, sweet and intoxicating. Around me, the crowd mutters about containment and control, about the danger she represents. They want to cage her, diminish her, make her small enough to feel safe.
They have no idea what they’re looking at.
I take a step forward. Just one, deliberate and measured, letting my boots ring against the cracked stone. The sound cuts through the fearful whispers like a blade, and several heads turn my way.
