Across the battlefield, every single Affinite had fallen, hands clapped over their heads, writhing with pain. It didn’t matter whether they were Imperial Patrols, Navy soldiers, or Temple Masters; it didn’t matter whether they were Cyrilian, Bregonian, or Kemeiran, or anything else. Enemies and comrades alike fell to their knees, paralyzed and incapacitated.
Linn trembled, holding herself on her hands and knees. Instinctively, she knew that this was something bigger than them all. Thatthiswas what her Temple Masters had spoken of—the devastation of the Heart of the Gods.
This was what the end of the world felt like.
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and let the blackness consume her in a tidal wave.
The pain was excruciating. Hot tears streaked down Ana’s cheeks; her skin was catching fire, and each breath was the cut of a thousand blades. She could feel it, in the empty space somewhere in her bones where her Affinity once rested; in her left wrist, where the siphon had suddenly become searing.
Clenching her teeth, Ana looked over to the spot where Morganya knelt. Darkness from Morganya’s siphon was spreading up her arms like molten metal against her skin, which had drained from golden-dusk to an ashen gray. Her eyes rolled back, and her cheeks were beginning to hollow out.
“Stop.”The word fell from Ana’s tongue in a gasp.“Please.”
Her aunt did not hear her. Her head was thrown back, mouth gaping open in a silent scream. Molten light continued to pour from the cracked relic, swirling into her skin. A giant fissure had broken the ice beneath their feet; within, the waters of the Silent Seachurned.
And, as quickly as it had come, the pain, the screams, the vortex of chaos vanished. When Ana looked at Morganya again, she was no longer looking at a person.
The woman who had been her aunt was aglow, light shimmering from within her golden skin as though the Deities’ Lights ran through her blood. The place on her wrist where her siphon had rested was bare. She looked more vibrant, more beautiful, and more terrible.
Morganya stood, slowly turning her hands over to examine them. “I am made…anew.” Her whisper cut through the silence, comprising a thousand different voices layered over one another. “I have absorbed the siphon. Nothing physical constrains me now—Iam the siphon,Iam all that the Deities have left us. I can feel it, all the threads of alchemical power, in every Affinite and spirit and fragment of a relic. All mine to command.”
Ana pushed herself to her feet. The sky and sea seemed to rock as she stumbled forward. The siphon onherwrist had nearly turned obsidian, tendrils snaking into her veins on her wrist like lead.
Three moons,came Tetsyev’s whisper in her mind.
Her time was almost over—she could sense it.
“Morganya.” Her voice was small, weak, in the vast space surrounding them. “Stop. I ambeggingyou.”
Morganya turned to her. Her gaze filled with an ancient cruelty and a power so vast, it might have been a god staring from the soul of this woman.
Her lips split into a smile. “I amlimitless,” she said, her voice like a discordant song. Her eyes were feverish, and she spoke as though to herself and to the skies at once. “At last, I will fulfill the destiny I began fighting for so long ago. I will shape the world to become the one of my dreams. I have no one left to fear and nothing in my way.”
“You’re wrong,” Ana said, and, reaching into herself, flung outher Affinity from her siphon. Fire streaked from her fingertips, racing toward Morganya.
Through the waves of heat and blinding light, Ana saw Morganya turn toward her. Saw the woman’s face shift into something resembling delight. In a languid motion, she flicked her wrist—and Ana’s jet of fire froze, becoming a curved arc of ice, the tip whittled down to lethal sharpness. It plunged down.
Ana moved—too slowly. She felt the jolt of the ice pierce her side, felt the impact as she was thrown against the ice, her skull rattling with the force.
The pain came moments later.
“Pesky little tigress,” Morganya sang. “I do not think you are deserving of the power you hold in that siphon. I think I’ll just…get rid of it.”
Lazily, she raised an arm and pointed a finger to Ana.
Pain hit Ana’s left wrist, blooming up her arm and shoulders like fire. Over her siphon, fissures were appearing, glimmering with the same swirl of lights that she’d seen in the skies and the sea and now writhing in Morganya’s skin. It felt as though the siphon had imbued a powerful poison deep in her veins that was now being drained. She breathed in and tasted blood on her tongue; her lungs were filled with wetness from the wounds Morganya had inflicted.
And yet…strangely, Ana felt a surge of relief flowing through her. The fatigue that had weighed upon her seemed to melt away. The air tasted sharper, colder, morealive,and she found it easier to breathe again.
If this was death, it was not so bad, after all.
With a resounding crack, the siphon around her wrist splintered. Its shards turned golden, dissolving into the air, and swirledup in a reflection of the Deities’ Lights. This must be pure alchemical magic—the magek that Tetsyev and Ardonn spoke of. The power that made Affinites, snow spirits, the Deities’ Lights, everything in this world the Deities left behind.
Lying against the ice, Ana could only watch as the Affinities she’d once held in her siphon, rendered as wisps of light, drifted away.
All…except…one.
A sensation of warmth, of wholeness, rushed through her, filling the cracks between her brittle bones. Something swooped into her chest and surged through her veins, into the spaces that had been empty for too long. When Ana breathed in again, the world pulsed to life with the shades of crimson she’d known for most of her life.
