The fire sputtered from her hands as her breath locked tight. Her wings tore free, scales cascading in plates to shield her skin. She stepped forward, eyes locked on Vesryn.
Lifting her trembling hands, she summoned an orb of illumination between her palms.
“Shift!” Serenna shrieked as the earth consumed him inch by inch, his shoulders vanishing into the wall.
The prince’s pupils slashed into slits as scales erupted in an obsidian rush. Wings didn’t form—he was pinned too tightly—but the rest of him glinted with an iridescent sheen, refracting her light.
Serenna’s heart battered her chest as she stared at the quivering glow. She worried it would slip beyond her control and destroy them both.
No more hesitation.
Vesryn had hurled her into danger, driving her past fear until she’d learned to stand without faltering. He’d prepared her. Now it was her time to prove it.
Serenna plunged past the shape of her doubts, heaving open the floodgates of her Well. Essence slammed through her like a storm surging against stone.
The orb in her hands bloomed whiter.
Then detonated.
A cataclysm of sunfire burst from her palms. Essence cracked across the floor in silver veins, raced through her ribs, clawed up her spine. Heat thundered outward, warping breath, scalding earth. Vesryn’s shouts dissolved beneath the roar in her ears.
Serenna’s awareness of the chamber wavered, nearly lost as white-gold radiance overwhelmed her sight. She blinked hard, but Vesryn’s silhouette was already dimming, drowned in the tidal shimmer fountaining from her hands. Her chest clenched, refusing to let the earth claim him.
She gathered the sunfire, but the blaze turned inward before she could hurl it, tearing through her first. She no longer stood in the eye of the eruption.
Shebecameit.
Searing pulses scorched across her vision until even shadow fractured. The world shattered into shards of silver, white, and blue. Yet a cradle of celestial light opened behind her eyes as an ancient spiral of stars unfurled, both memory and place at once.
Ahome, stirring an ache of belonging so fierce it nearly broke her.
The same galaxy Vesryn had once shown her on a quiet night on Centarya, the waterfall rushing around them as he spoke of the Aelfyn. And now, in the space between heartbeats, she felt it calling.
Destiny.
Body burning, mind unraveling, the chamber fell away. Serenna tilted toward it, pulled like a planet into orbit. Even her name slipped loose as the light devoured everything but the constellations in her mind.
She reached for the stars.
And somethingreached back.
Power without a name seared through her, unmaking and rewriting—starlight molding her into something else.
Distantly, she felt her knees buckle as Essence bled from every pore. She broke open, magic cascading like a flood. Her mind unmoored, drifting beyond the weight of flesh.
Not death, but an inevitable becoming.
And something waited beyond, whispering promises.
“You are not whole.
But you could be again.
Ascend the Starpath. Return to us.”
The blaze drowned everything, yet faint beneath it, a voice broke.
Vesryn. Far away. Calling her back.
