I know she expects this. She’s engineered even her own death like the last step in a ritual she planned decades ago.
Her eyes spring open in response, gaze pinned on me, as if she’s not done yet.
“Lara,” she gurgles. “Get to Lara.”
Her body goes slack, muscles unwinding from the grip that kept her here.
I withdraw my blade, wiping the blood on her robes as I unfold her to the ground. The light leaves her eyes, and the Final Gate takes her.
But one word echoes in my mind:Lara. Lara. Lara.
The name carries weight—heavy, ancient, wrong.
Not because I know it.
Because I don’t.
A name erased is more dangerous than a name remembered.
Even in death, she pulls strings and dances on the edge of allegiance.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
ELYSSARA
The castle shudderslike a living thing dying in slow motion.
Mavyrn’s chambers rattle like thunder, and the furniture shakes, rasping across the onyx floors.
“Whatisthat?” I breathe, my heart racketing against my ribs.
Stone dust rains from the ceiling, tasting of ash and blood.
Kael’s palm wraps around my wrist in urgency, pulling me from the chambers with a desperation he rarely shows.
He drags me down the halls, our boots crunching through a river of shattered glass and flame.
“They’ve breached the castle walls.Fuck!” Kael grunts.
The floor lurches, the stones scream, and still, we run.Fast.
Mavyrn’s eerie words of Lightborne barriers, puppets, prophecies andLarastill crawl through my veins like some insidious creature, but I thrust it aside as the castle crumbles around me.
The prayer chamber lies three levels below, but every stairway we come to is cracked open like a wound—jagged and broken.
“Faster,” he says, his voice all gravel and command.
Another blast tears through the hall. The air ripples, light turned weapon.
“Caelorian cannons,” he explains between pants.
Elandor told me about them, but experiencing them goes beyond myth. They’re sacrilegious. A weapon that requires no courage to wield—a coward’s invention.
The noise hits bone-deep, a frequency that makes teeth ache and magic stutter.
“We’re almost there?—”
The floor ahead gives out with a deafening roar. A yawning pit swallows half the hall, a fiery void between us and the carved arch that leads to the chamber below.
