My veins ignited violently. Silver fire ripped through them. Violet chased it, coiling like living flame. Shadow threaded the edges — not corruption, but gravity.
My back bowed so violently I thought my spine would snap. A scream tore from me — raw, animal — and the ocean answered with thunder.
The ruins cracked. Coral exploded outward. Stone arches split down their centers as shockwaves blasted through the water in concentric rings.
My eyes burned.
Light poured from them.
Not reflected.
Generated.
When I opened them, I did not see the ocean.
I saw constellations.
Ancient patterns burned across my vision — maps I had never learned yet somehow knew. Stars connected across my skin, blazing into existence like a sky dragged down into flesh.
Every fracture line became a star path.
Every breath pulled ozone and frost and something metallic and ancient into my lungs.
The poison fought. I felt it recoil as light scorched through my bloodstream.
It tried to devour.
The power devoured back.
The crescent on my brow pulsed once more — not separate now.
Integrated.
Complete.
Silver.
Violet.
Shadow.
The ocean folded back from me.
The power did not feel foreign anymore. It fit. Perfectly.
As though I had been walking the world with a hollow carved out of my skull — and someone had finally returned what was stolen.
And it hurt.
Stars above. It hurt. Beneath the agony — beneath the lightning splitting bone and skin and soul —
There was rightness. This was not magic entering me. This was something snapping back into place.
The sea knew it.
The Sentinels who had held me did not. Their grips faltered first — fingers spasming as silver fire surged through the water. One gasped. Another tried to tighten his hold.
When the shockwave hit. It detonated outward from my body in a violent ring of pressure. The Sentinels were ripped from me as if struck by a god’s fist. Their bodies hurled backward through the ruins — armor cracking, spears spinning from their hands. One slammed into a coral pillar hard enough to split it. Another vanished into a plume of shattered stone and sand.
