A shared crown.
Together we unleash it.
Not a blast.
Not a spell.
A final judgment.
The wave slams forward, and the world goes white-hot—then black—then clear.
Idris doesn’t burn.
He doesn’t scream long enough to be satisfying.
It is as if Nightfall itself reaches out with an invisible hand, grips his essence, and erases him.
Wipes him from the ledger of creation like a mistake corrected with finality.
His evil doesn’t scatter into the air.
It doesn’t poison the soil.
It is dragged down—down into the deepest bowels of existence, into the raw places where matter is unmade and remade, where rot can be rendered into something useful, if the universe is merciful enough to bother.
And then he is simply… gone.
Silence falls so fast it hurts.
The SoulTakers around us freeze mid-strike.
Their bodies shudder.
Their eyes—those dead, hungry voids—flicker, and one by one, they crumple like puppets with their strings cut.
Not slain.
Released.
The mind-control bonds snap, the stolen souls inside them spilling free in shimmering threads that rise into the air like fireflies returning to the night.
The survivors among our people stare, stunned.
A sob breaks somewhere. Then another.
A miner drops to his knees.
A soldier laughs like he doesn’t remember how else to breathe.
The mess that remains—the bodies, the broken ground, the shattered wards, the grief waiting like a mouth—will have to be dealt with.
Later.
Because right now I turn back to my viyella.
My Oona.
She’s there, breathing hard, eyes bright with exhaustion and fury and that impossible courage that makes me want to kneel.
