Like Niko and I, the sky is a dichotomy of the beginning and the end. Of birth and death.
I close my eyes, as my magic threads into the star, gently at first, like tendrils of gossamer. And when it touches the center, the well of power behind my heart explodes in a shimmer of sparks. I gasp aloud, as a pulse of something electric, originating both from inside me and out, radiates in the sky between us.
The shockwave reverberates through the island, its force sending me stumbling back into Niko. The cold of his death washes over my skin, the small bite of pain the only thing keeping me tethered to earth, as the magic drags at my heart and reorders its beat; pulls at my blood so fiercely, I’m sure it’ll all spill from me. The star and myself entwined are an explosion of light and color—one that threads through my bones, winds around my ribcage until I can hardly move.
Until I’m fully immersed and can no longer feel the divide between us.
Because the wards were never a path to travel, or a gate to be opened and closed at will.
I am the star, so Iamthe ward.
The realization pulses through me. I am the second star, the imagination of the world. I hold its dreams, its light, its innovation in my blood.
“Open, Willa,” Niko murmurs near my ear.
Words are beyond me. There is no language, no sentiment to capture the pure power spiraling through me. Birth and death and every possibility between. The endless potential of dreamsexpands not just before me, butinme. Intangible; too wild, too ethereal, to ever hold. It now blooms inside me, fed by the pump of my heart.
Once, I’d despised the sound of it. The never-endingtick, tick, tick,thumping against my chest eternally. I’d felt betrayed by its beat, betrayed by the universe for its inability to just give up.
But maybe this is what the agony had been for.This land,thismoment. In the sprawl of people and time, this is what I was born for.
So, I do what Niko asks, not because he asks it, but because the rightness is in my very being. My soul, my heart, my bones.
I open.
And so does the universe. Worlds upon worlds, all tied together by the link of imagination, built on the foundation of dreams. Thousands of pathways, rotted and dusty with unuse, flare to life. And just like the soil at the Grove, vitality spills through them. Like the universe has awakened at my touch.
“The wards are now yours, Willa.”
Mine. The world ismine.
I turn, blinking at Niko as the freedom of the wards pulses wildly through me. The freedom I’ve always longed for—that I’ve scraped and bled and crawled for but could never reach—is now mine. Because of Niko.
There are so many emotions in the depthless black of his eyes, it’s impossible to pinpoint just one. He’s gone entirely still, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides, his mouth pressed into a thin, white line. Even his death is suspended in frozen ribbons around him.
Like it’s taking every ounce of strength he possesses to hold himself in place.
To hold himself back fromme. With sudden dread, I understand.
He’s not only gifted me freedom—he’s expecting me totakeit. Now that the wards are mine, I can leave Letum, leavehim,whenever I choose. Something near devastation crashes through me, even as I struggle to keep hold of everything I’ve felt in the past few days.
Why would he let me leave when he told me I was his?
“Are you…” I clear my throat. “Are you telling me to go?”
Though I struggle to keep my voice unaffected, there’s a pathetic waver to it. A fracture that I hate. It’s too hard with the star’s power rampaging through my veins to keep hold of any but my most primal thoughts. The ones too deep to float away in the presence of such strong magic. The ones grounded into the depths of me.
And Niko—he’s rooted into my soul.
“You should.” His words are guttural, hardly more than a grind of his teeth.
Hot anger rises to wash away my hurt, to shroud my heart and keep it from shattering entirely. “Why?” I grit out venomously.
“Because you should,” he snaps again, his body still planted firmly in place. “That is all I have to offer you. Go back to your world, Willa, before you’re forced to make a decision as a hero instead of a coward…a decision that traps you inside of it forever.”
His eyes are icy and sharp, the ruthless gaze of the Carrion King. “The island needs an anchor. A magic that will give it life instead of death. Go before you’re as trapped here as I am. Eternally. Irrevocably.”
Niko’s mouth thins in disgust, the same disgust I’d glimpsed when he first beheld me in the throne room all those weeks ago. I thought it was for me, but now that I’ve seen the parts of Niko he shields from the rest of the world, his hatred exists in a new light. His revulsion was never for me—it was for himself.
