We've won. It should feel like winning. Instead it feels like something is still coming, a weight settling into place that hasn't finished falling yet. I drop to my knees beside Stellan and the others surrounding Skye, the phoenix nudging my shoulder. "Hey," Stellan pushes out. "Look at Skye."
He's barely conscious, his body limp in Jade's lap, his aura blazing with the pale luminous pink that flooded his eyes before he dropped.
"Any change?" I ask.
"His pulse is strong," Jade says. "But he's gone somewhere. I can feel him through the bond but it's like he's very far away."
I take Skye's hand, feeling his pulse beating steady beneath the pink glow of his aura. The bonds tell me he's alive, that his consciousness is somewhere, but the distance between us and wherever he's gone makes me realize just where he is.
"Mother Nature," Harlow says quietly, confirming my thoughts. "She has him."
That should be reassuring. It isn't. The last time she pulled him under, he came back talking about forces and symbols and a war we weren't ready for. Whatever she's showing him now, on the other side of a battle that left his darkness woven through our essences, I'm not sure I want to hear it.
20
Skye
Theroomisexactlyas I remember it. Walls lined with books that stretch beyond what the space should hold, spines in languages I can't read and a few I almost can, and at the center of it all the tree.
It's different now.
The last time I stood here, the tree was beautiful but restrained, its branches reaching through the ceiling into somewhere I couldn't see, its bark pulsing with a faint pink light that matched the essence flowing through my veins. Now it blazes. Every branch, every root, every twist of bark radiateswith a light so vivid it makes me squint, and the colors flowing through it aren't just pink anymore. Gold and green and deep blue and silver and red and colors I don't have names for, all of them moving through the tree's structure in currents that remind me of blood through veins. The tree looks more alive than the last time I saw it, as though something that had been choking it has been removed and it can finally breathe.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Mother Nature stands beside the tree with her hand resting against the bark, the light responding to her touch by brightening. She’s completely formed, almost as if she’s just a human like me but there’s an ethereal beauty to her, carrying a weight that I'm only now beginning to understand the scale of.
"What happened to it?" I ask.
"The essence that always was has returned." She traces a line of gold through the bark. "Pure now, flowing as it should. The corruption Dmitri spread through the world was choking this for three centuries. Every essence he consumed, every type he eliminated, every person he stripped and devoured, it starved the tree. Starved the world. What you see now is what it looks like when essence moves freely again, every type, every manifestation, light and dark and everything between."
I watch the colors flow and I think about the students at Phoenix Sanctuary who spent years being told their essence was wrong. The shadow-types and the death-touched and the hunger-born, all the manifestations that Dmitri's system marked for elimination. They're free now. The tree proves it.
"So that's it?" I ask. "We won. The system is broken. Essence flows freely. Dmitri is gone… that feels too easy. That can’t be it, right?"
Mother Nature's hand stills on the bark. "You’re right, Skye. That's not it."
The warmth in the room drops by a degree. Not much, but enough that I notice, enough that the sweat cooling on my skin turns cold.
"The entity," I say, because I've been carrying the question since the valley sanctuary and this might be the only time I get to ask. "The presence in the network that helped us, that showed Harlow what Dmitri used to be, that fed us strength when we were traveling. What was it?"
Mother Nature smiles, though there’s a sadness to it. "Balance," she says. "That's the simplest word for it. The force that exists between all things, the equilibrium that makes essence possible. It should have been everywhere, all the time, woven through every living thing. But the moment Dmitri became what he became, the moment he began consuming and hoarding and disrupting the flow of essence, balance withdrew. It couldn't exist in a world that tilted that far toward darkness."
Some part of me wonders why she didn’t explain all this before but there was so much information to consume over the last several weeks, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle it. "But it came back."
"It'scomingback. Slowly. You can feel it if you reach for it, the way the network hums differently now, the way the bonds between you and your mates vibrate at a frequency that didn't exist before the battle. Balance is returning to the world because you removed the thing that drove it away."
She steps away from the tree and faces me, and the warmth returns but it carries something heavier underneath, a gravity that makes my chest tight.
"However, the darkness has not faded, Skye."
"I know. I can feel it. We all can."
"It is inside you now. Inside all six of you. Three centuries of accumulated corruption, absorbed into your essences, woven through your bonds. It will be part of you for the rest of yourlives. It will feed into your thoughts and your actions and your everyday choices. It will press against your balance and test your control and whisper to you in quiet moments."
"And eventually?"
"Eventually it will consume you."
