Page 153 of Embers of Ruin

“Thorin. Please.” I try to call him back. Damn it, he's so stubborn. Just wake up.

Wake up. Wake up for me, Thorin.

Come back. Come back to me. Come back for me.

The thoughts won’t stop. They loop, mindless and frantic, drowning out everything else.

How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this?

“Thorin.” My voice does not sound like my own. “Thorin, wake up. Now!”

He doesn’t.

Illurine watches in silence, her face unreadable, though sorrow gathers in her eyes like storm clouds over water.

My pain no longer comes out as words. It comes out as an endless, primal sound—a scream torn from my throat, beneath the ember, beneath every version of myself I have ever been. It’s not grief yet. It’s too big to be only grief. It’s refusal. It is every unfair thing that has ever been taken from me finally finding a place to go.

“NO! I REFUSE THIS!” The scream tears out of me and does not stop.

Gold light bursts from my chest in a single violent wave, rolling outward across the kingdom. Somewhere behind us, deep in the heart of the palace, glass rains down from towers that have stood for centuries. The ground shudders beneath my knees hard enough that Onyx staggers, hard enough that even Illurine’s expression finally cracks.

I don’t care. I can’t make myself care about anything except the man lying motionless in front of me, his lifeless eyes staring at nothing. His chest doesn’t rise. He doesn’t answer me, no matter how many times I beg him to come back to me.

I lean over him, my hands shaking so violently I can barely touch him. The golden ember still burns in my chest. The dark ember lies in the grass beside us like the last star in a dead sky. Thorin’s face is pale. Too pale. The veins of the curse have vanished from beneath his skin, and so has every trace of silver. Every trace of black. Every trace of him.

How could he do this to me?

I press my palms flat over his heart anyway, because some part of me refuses to accept the alternative, because the ember in my chest is still burning, and burning things are not supposed to go quietly.

“Give him back,” I whisper, to Illurine, to the gods, to whatever is listening. “You said it was mine to give. Then let me give it to him.”

Illurine says nothing. But she doesn’t stop me either. Gold light spills from my palms into Thorin's chest, chasing the last black flicker of the dying ember, wrapping around it instead of consuming it.

Not gone. Not destroyed. Held.

I feel the shape of the curse beneath my hands—ancient, furious, and alive. Instead of tearing it away, I do the one thing no one has ever done.

I forgive it.

The ground shifts beneath my knees. Not violently. Not like an attack. It is softer than that, deeper, as though something buried beneath Solaris has taken its first breath in centuries. The grass around Thorin's body trembles, and I watch as the blackened tips of the blades fade into green. The rot does not burn away. It loosens. It lifts from the earth like smoke exhaled from a wound, rising in thin black ribbons that unravel into the sky.

Across the valley, someone cries out. Then another. Then hundreds. The sound rolls toward us from the palace and beyond, not cries of fear but disbelief. Lanterns flare gold in windows. The frozen scent of ash thins in the air, replaced by damp soil, crushed leaves, and something sweet blooming where nothing had bloomed before. Beyond the ridge, the dark stain that had clung to the mountains begins to recede, peeling back from stone and root and riverbed. The stream beside us runs clear. For the first time in centuries, sunshine touches Solaris, no longer cloaked by shadow.

Solaris is coming alive, lifting from the darkness that’s blanketed the continent for centuries. I feel it everywhere. In the valley. In the ground beneath my feet. In the far-off fields I can’t see but somehow know are stirring. In villages where mothers will step outside and find dead gardens bursting with life. In rivers that will remember how to run clean without rot clinging to it. In children who will wake from nightmares without the curse whispering beneath their doors.

For one moment, the whole continent exhales—and beneath my hands, so does Thorin. His chest rises as color creeps back into his face by slow, agonizing degrees, and when his eyes finally open, the gray is gone. Silver flickers back into being, faint and exhausted but unmistakably his.

“Thorin,” I sob, and this time his name doesn’t break in my mouth. This time it sounds like a beginning.

He looks up at me as if he cannot quite believe I am real, as if some part of him expected to wake somewhere far darker than this.

“Lyra,” he rasps.

“If you ever do something like that again, I will kill you myself.” Onyx’s voice is rough, but he means every word of it. He bows before Illurine, and she smiles at all of us before dissolving into nothing.

Thorin looks to his brother. “In this life and the next?”

“In every lifetime, brother.”