Her.
And then there was nothing.
Caelira
I screamed, my throat felt like it was bleeding.
The bond tore open with it, pain and certainty crashing through me all at once. Atlas’s presence flaring bright and then wrong. The world narrowed to that absence, to the place where he should have been standing and wasn’t moving.
No.
I was already dropping to my knees beside him, hands shaking, breath tearing out of me in broken gasps that wouldn’t steady. His eyes were open but unfocused. His chest didn’t rise.
He wasn’t breathing.
The realization hit like a blade driven straight through my ribs.
He had stepped in front of me.
For me.
Oh Gods!
The bond screamed.
A living thing inside me shrieked in agony and rage, raw and unrestrained, ripping through every barrier I had ever learned to hold. Power surged with it, violent and incandescent, and I shaped it.
The storm answered.
Not as wind or rain, but as judgment.
Lightning struck in rapid succession, silver-white and blinding, striking the field again and again, the air splitting open under the force of it. Bodies dropped where they stood, Ember Court soldiers thrown back, burned through, erased in flashes of light that left nothing but ash in their place.
My eyes burned.
Silver flooded my vision, bright enough to hurt, power poured through me faster than I could contain it. The ground cracked under my hands as I rose, stormlight crawling over my skin, lightning branching down my arms like veins of fire.
The clouds twisted to my left.
A dark funnel dropped from their belly, lowering fast, wind screaming as it reached for the field.
Not the Storm Court.
The thought cut through the chaos, sharp and absolute.
The storm obeyed.
The funnel shifted, widening, redirecting, tearing through Ember Court lines while Storm Court banners snapped untouched at its edge. Rain and debris whipped past them without landing. The world bent around my will.
I barely felt it.
All I could feel was the hollow where he had been.
The absence.
The silence.
I made myself look away from Atlas.
