Page 322 of The Edge of Darkness

I was ablaze, burning, raging.

Niall’s voice came into my mind, a tether to ground me.

Auren, he said. Do it!

I kept my aim on Lyceius, but turned my head, and beheld my mate, who was watching with awe, and pleading at me with his eyes—eyes that were lining with tears.

He wanted me to use his power—he wanted to help—but I refused to let him empty his well for this.

In my mind, his shadowfire still sat before my stone wall, waiting quietly, patiently. I acknowledged it, then left it there, safe and untouched.

I set my focus back on Lyceius, thrusting more light into my assault, watching as it illuminated the fear in his face.

Niall’s frustration and distress rippled down the bond, and then his voice sounded again, in a tone different from anything I’d ever heard from him before.

Do it now! he yelled, firm and final. It was not a suggestion, but an order from my High Lord. From my mate. The desperation that lined his words shattered my resolve. It danced across the wall in my mind, and prickled down my spine, driving me into action. My essence moved of its own accord, obeying his command. It scooped up the bundle with gentle tendrils of light, and cradled it for a moment, as if to say, Thank you, before absorbing the offering.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Niall’s power rushing toward me. It looked as if I was channeling it from him, siphoning his offering in physical form. It funneled into me, wrapping around my limbs and chest like armor, black as the night, as if it were protecting me. Then, shadowy tendrils leaked forth, intertwining with wisps of my light, before branching out like dark flames toward the shredded scraps of Lyceius’s power. They swirled around him, snatching up every fragment of inky matter and forming a spinning bundle at his back—a black orb. A blot in the world.

The shadowfire was helping me cast him out.

The mating bond strained, and I sucked in a sharp breath as my heart pounded harder and faster than should have been possible. The talisman hummed against my forehead, a matching sensation to the thrumming in my chest.

Stars and ash, I said to myself in my mind, though my voice didn’t even sound like my own. It was many in one—a chorus of every facet of myself. An echo of a soul nearing its rebirth.

“Auren, wait!” Lyceius yelled, glancing over his shoulder in fear. “We can talk this through!”

I didn’t waste my breath on a response.

The more Lyceius tried to fight, the more his power was being stripped from him, leeched from his very being, and absorbed into this strange sphere-like void that was growing bigger by the second.

When he realized that there was nothing he could do, that my power had overcome his and he had lost, he cried out. “Stop this madness!”

The whirling mass devoured the space behind him, full of its own gravity and substance. It felt like a place made of endings—of death. A sound ruptured from the fallen god’s throat as he attempted to escape the sphere’s pull, but his feet continued sliding backward through the dirt.

The dark flames of Niall’s shadowfire began to sputter out, drifting away on the wind, tendril by tendril, leaving my light to command the giant mass.

I dug deeper, drawing more power from my well, and channeling it at Lyceius, and while I did so, something brushed against my senses, a semi-familiar presence that was far more potent than I’d felt before. Like a wild animal, it drew near, then skittered away again—ever-fleeting.

It was the Aether. Except now, I could see it. In this state, in whatever plane I currently existed on, the Aether shimmied on the wind, a fluid form of iridescence, similar to how it had appeared upon Aremis’s skin. It hovered around me, palpitating near my light. Then, it shimmered along the beam, following it to the void that was descending upon Lyceius.

Time for a new age of the gods, it said, and I couldn’t tell if it was in my mind, or if the Aether had spoken for everyone to hear. Time for great powers to rise, and fall.

The mass spun faster, and the Aether danced around it, sinking into its orbit, reinforcing its form. There was a rim of my light encircling the sphere now—where my power was holding Lyceius’s hostage, caged in a warped confinement of space and time.

The fallen god’s eyes were wide with terror as he struggled to break free from the sphere’s hold. When the last of his corrupt power was wrenched from his possession and sucked into the black mass, Delyth’s words echoed in my head.

Cast. Him. Out.

In my mind, I envisioned Lyceius being swallowed up by the force—by the prison made of his own vile essence. His ultimate end. His own personal oblivion.

With one final push of my strength, the talisman hummed against my forehead, and the sphere pulsed as it began tearing the fallen god apart. Piece by piece, he was devoured. Skin was flayed from flesh, and bones were dissolved into dust, until his dying screams disintegrated like ash on the wind.

I reeled my light back to me as I beheld the giant mass, which was now so void of light that it seemed like a rip in our reality—an impossible blackness.

The Aether shimmered over the sphere one last time, and I heard it laugh as though it were finding joy in the ruination. A moment later, it hummed through the atmosphere and slid alongside me. May the gods bless you, it praised and hissed once again, before disappearing into the void.

A roar like a raging waterfall overwhelmed my ears as the ominous sphere wobbled, unstable and wild, and began collapsing in on itself, devouring its own existence. Then, when it was no bigger than a grain of sand, it completely vanished with a blinding flash of light. The event sent a pulse of power out across the land, shaking everything to its core. The earth quaked, and I was thrown backward as the rush of pent-up energy skirted over the realm.