Page 137 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Lykor had never belonged anywhere. He’d carved a life from survival and spite, and none of his defenses knew how to withstand a place claiming him as its own.

The figure glided closer. Its shifting features settled into a face that might’ve shared blood with the king.

It raised one hand toward him.

Far away, the earth shuddered again.

A deep rumble rolled through the chamber walls. Stone ground against stone, shaking crystal dust from the vaulted ceiling overhead. The figure paused, its head turning toward the sound.

The wall opposite Lykor buckled.

A fracture knifed through the crystal, fissuring until roots wrenched it wide. Slick with sap and violent with new growth, they rammed through the breach.

Crystal burst. Whole sections tore from their joints and crashed inward, spilling soil and shattered stone into the chamber. More roots hammered after them until the structure peeled open around their passage.

A finer tendril found Lykor’s ankle. It circled once and tightened, gentle as fingers testing for a pulse.

The figure snarled and lunged.

It seized Lykor’s face. Essence poured through his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Filling. Drowning.

Magic flooded through every channel the king had carved. When the presence reached for control, Lykor went under.

CHAPTER 37

JASSYN

The island Jassyn had chosen for the council hung at the Aetherveil’s eastern edge, a shard of ancient stone where the world gave way to wind, cloud, and the long fall.

He kept to the center of the isle, where illusion maps hovered above a table he’d coaxed from the rock that morning. His shaman blood had spoken through living things—root and branch and bloom. Blossom had taught him to reach deeper, into the bones beneath, until the rock shuddered awake under his palms.

Without her, the earth had fallen quiet, stripped of the deep hum that had once traveled with her footsteps and the flowers that had opened in her wake. Jassyn pressed his palms flat to the table, searching the bedrock for an imprint of her passage.

He peeled his hands from the stone before grief could calcify. Not here. Not now.

Druid and wraith scouts had delivered three reports since dawn, each one redrawing the human army’s position in the Everglow Rainforest. Their findings became turquoise threads weaving from Jassyn’s fingers, moving away from the dark scar of the Falling Star Crater, which Lykor had studied with such savage stillness that morning.

“Do we approach the crater from the northern ridge or the lake?” Kaedryn asked, wings furled tight to her spine. Her guildmasters waited beside her, their arguments suspended on his answer.

“The ridge,” Jassyn said, weaving the luminous route over higher ground. “The lake puts us in line of sight of the Drowned Spires.” He glanced at Koln. “Send a squad of wraith after nightfall to scout the crater’s rim. I want confirmation of what’s waiting there before we commit any forces.”

Koln nodded, adjusting his eye patch.

Trella banked over the island, wings thundering hard enough to lift Jassyn’s curls. From the saddle, Zaeryn cast down a leather satchel on braided ropes of force and released it without breaking the dracovae’s turn. Trella wheeled back toward Naru, where another ranger circled above.

The conversation closed over the interruption. Kaedryn turned and started disputing supply routes with her guildmasters, their words sheared by the wind. Koln opened the satchel and muttered as he rifled through Zaeryn’s report before laying the newly recovered Starshards across the table. Each had been salvaged from the defenses dismantled among the upper islands.

The sun burned low, copper deepening to crimson along the horizon. Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn still flew the upper currents with the rangers, searching for Veyrix until the failing light grounded them. But finding the dragon wouldn’t matter until they claimed another Heart.

Jassyn’s illumination flickered, his fingers stilling over the map’s crater. The absence he’d kept buried under reports and formations all day widened like a fissure through every careful calculation.

He glanced up and scanned the crown isle, cataloging rangers, druids, and magus.

No Lykor.

Jassyn turned back to the map without seeing it, his hands closing into fists. Lykor said he was going to check the perimeter before seeking out Fenn. That had been hours ago.

Everything collapsed into a single fact.