“No.” The word escapes the Arbiter as a whisper. A plea. “We were eternal…”
“You were a lie.” Tyr’s voice carries no mercy. “And lies don’t last forever.”
He crushes the crown-heart in his fist.
Light explodes outward. The Arbiter’s body crumbles—black ice shattering into fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. The citadel groans around us, walls splitting, ceiling starting to fall.
Tyr reaches me in three strides. Lifts me like I weigh nothing.
“Hold on.”
I wrap my arms around his neck, press my face against his shoulder, and hold on.
He runs.
The citadel comes apart around us.
Walls collapse in cascades of black ice. The ceiling breaks and falls in massive chunks. Everywhere I look, the fortress is tearing itself apart—the power that held it together dying with the Arbiter.
Tyr doesn’t slow down. His feet pound against the shaking floor, his arms locked tight around me. When a corridor collapses ahead of us, he veers left. When debris falls toward my head, he twists his body to take the impact on his shoulder.
I feel blood soaking through his shirt. His blood. Mine. I can’t tell anymore.
“Almost there.” His voice is strained. “Hold on.”
A support beam crashes down behind us. The floor cracks and splits. Tyr leaps over a widening gap, lands hard, keeps running.
The crown-forge chamber is chaos. The blue flames have turned wild, exploding outward as the forges lose their containment. Crowns fall from the ceiling like deadly rain—golden circles crashing to the floor and shattering on impact. Every crown the Arbiter ever forged, broken in moments.
Tyr shields me with his body as we race through the destruction. Something heavy hits his back. He grunts but doesn’t stop.
“Tyr—”
“Keep your head down.”
I bury my face against his shoulder and do as he says.
We burst through the entrance archway as the entire structure gives way behind us. The sound is deafening—tons of black ice collapsing, crushing everything inside. The ground shakes so hard I feel it in my teeth.
Tyr keeps running. A hundred feet. Two hundred. Three.
Only when the last echoes of destruction fade does he slow.
He doesn’t put me down. Instead, he lowers himself to the ice, his back against a boulder, and pulls me into his lap. My legs drape over his thigh. My head rests against his shoulder. His arms wrap around me like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip even slightly.
For a long moment, we don’t speak.
The Arbiter’s stronghold is gone. Nothing but rubble and dust where it once floated. The blue fires of the crown-forges have died. The crowns that hung from the ceiling—hundreds of instruments of control—are shattered beyond repair.
We did that.
“It’s dead.” I breathe the words against his throat. “We killed it.”
“We killed it.” His hand covers the mark on my shoulder. The contact sends heat flooding through my exhausted body—not painful, not demanding. Present. A reminder of what we are to each other.
His thumb traces the edge of the mark. I shiver at the sensation, and his arm tightens around me in response.
“I couldn’t have cracked the crown-heart without what the mating did to my sight.”
