She kissed his brow, tears falling unchecked. “I love you,” she whispered. “And if you go, I will go with you.”
Thaelyn dropped to her knees so hard the stone bit into them, pain blooming but drowned in the greater agony clawing her chest. She caught his face in trembling hands, pressed her lips to his brow, and salt from her tears mingled with the soot staining his skin.
“I love you,” she whispered, the words splintering as they fell from her lips. Then louder, breaking. “No!”
The scream tore out of her throat, raw and ragged, carried into the empty air. “No! Someone, please! Help!”
But no one came. This part of the battlefield was silent except for the stench of smoke and the smear of blood on stone. The silence pressed in, cruel and absolute.
Her hands shook against his chest, waiting for the rise of breath, the slightest flutter of life. Nothing. A howl rose inside her, a storm without a name, ripping through her ribs and devouring her heart. She had never known such loss, such bone-deep desperation. It hollowed her out, left her reeling. This couldn’t be real. He couldn’t be gone.
Her voice broke again. “If you go, then I will go with you. Do you hear me? I will not stay in a world without you!”
The storm in her chest cracked wide open. Fury and love collided, searing through her veins. Something inside her stirred a vast, ancient, and uncontainable force. It was Aether, and it rose like a tide, unanchored and wild. Not born of fear, or rage, but of love.
She pressed both palms to his chest, her tears dripping onto his tunic. “Come back to me,” she begged, her voice trembling, frantic,breaking apart with each syllable. “Please, please, Thorne, come back.”
The first spark burst from her like a star flaring to life. Then another. Until light erupted from her body in a surge that shattered the night, it spilled from her skin in a torrent of violet-white flame, searing, radiant, and merciless.
The field vanished in brilliance. The heavens themselves seemed to flinch. Nyxariel screamed, her cry reverberating across the sky, wings flared wide in answer to her rider’s storm.
Time itself buckled, caught in the eye of her grief. The ground split with a crack like thunder, fissures spidering outward beneath her knees. Air shimmered, thick as molten glass, bending and warping around her. Her hair lifted in the storm’s pull, haloed by lightning that danced through the strands.
Aether poured from her in torrents of liquid starlight, unstoppable, relentless, wrapping Thorne’s still body in a cocoon of shimmering memory and flame.
Thaelyn bent over him, her forehead pressed to his chest, sobbing so hard her body shook. “Don’t leave me,” she begged, her voice shattering. “You don’t get to leave me. You don’t get to do this. You gave up everything for me, everything. Now I give it back. All of it. Every breath, every thread of soul. Come back to me.”
Her mind began to recall the moments they had shared, all that he had given her. Not just the blade he’d pressed into her hands in the Scorchfield when her grip trembled. Not only the cloak he had thrown across her shoulders when Aether left her shaking. He had given her his patience when he could have crushed her with a single cutting word. He had given her silence when silence was the only mercy she could bear. He had shown her his shadows, the raw and ugly truth of what lived in him, when he might have hidden it behind a prince’s mask. Thorne had given her trust, though trust was the rarest coin he possessed. He had let her see the fractured lines in him, the boy scarred by duty and his father. Thorne was a man forged in fire and darkness, and he had not turned away when she reached back. He had given her the steadiness of Vornokh’s bond, storm to flame, dragon to dragon, until she could no longertell where her heartbeat ended, and his began. He had given her fire when her storms threatened to consume her, shadows when Aether’s light seared too brightly, loyalty when the world would call her a curse. He had given her passion and love. And most of all, he had given her belief. Belief that she was not alone. Belief that she could rise. Belief that she was more than the world dared let her be. Her palm still burned, but the fear steadied. Because this was not hers alone to carry, she clenched her fist around the glow of the sigil, lifted her chin, and whispered, “I will not break.”
Vornokh rumbled low in the clouds above, Nyxariel’s answering thrummed through her bones. The dragons had heard.
The Aether roared louder, blinding, crackling through the air like the voice of creation itself. Her magic answered her grief, her fury, her desperate vow. “Come back to me.”
The words echoed not just from her mouth but through the storm itself, carried on every crackle of lightning, every surge of flame. She gave it everything. Every ounce of strength, every shred of her spirit, every fragile hope she had ever dared to keep.
The cocoon tightened, sealing him within its luminous embrace. And still she poured more, until her body trembled with exhaustion, until she thought she might burn herself to ash.
“Come back,” she whispered one last time, voice breaking, “Or I will follow you into the dark.”
Chapter
Seventy-Two
Queen Elyria stood high on the broken terrace of Aeromir’s eastern parapet, her gown tattered by ash and stormwind, her silver braid loosened by the air’s fury. The twin blood moons had since faded, and now it was an Obsidian Sky. The void was vast and pulsing, casting the ruins in a shade of total darkness, the color of sacrifice. They crowned the battlefield like Gods made flesh, silent, ancient, and watching.
She knew. She had known the moment the Veil trembled and known when the wind tore backward through the stones, whispering with the voices of the dead. Known when Vornokh roared with a sound that had not touched this plane since the First Sundering.
But nothing prepared her for this. Her son, her heart,lay crumpled in the clearing like a fallen star, his chest unmoving, and his blade shattered. Thaelyn knelt beside him, Aether lashing through her like a river too wild for its banks. When her scream shattered the silence, Elyria felt the marrow of the prophecy break and begin to bleed.
"One must fall."
The words had come to her in dreams and risen through the bone-deep tremors of her Sight. But never had she imagined it would feel like a thousand knives slowly piercing her ribs as the darkness curled around Thorne’s fallen body.
Her fingers clutched the edge of the stone battlement. Not forbalance, but to keep from flying down there herself; mother first, not seer. Let them have a moment, she told herself. Let fate breathe before you interfere.Yet her magic pulsed at her fingertips, aching to be used.
Then it came, the crackling surge, black and violent, blooming from the boy she bore in fire. Shadow burst from Thorne’s palms and back like wings of the void itself, unfurling with a keening roar that trembled the ruined towers.
He reached into the place where no soul should reach. The dark world answered.
