Page 154 of The Reckoning of Starlight

She sank her awareness into the wind, but the vortex ground against her hold until the strain bit through every joint. Her grip broke, and she dragged Essence through her Starshard instead.

Fenn’s and Vesryn’s gems flared with hers. Prismatic light lashed between them, closing the circle.

She honed their gathered magic to a spearpoint and struck.

A punch of force detonated outward. The funnel buckled from the blast, a breach ripping wide for a single wingbeat.

Fenn didn’t wait. His claws locked around her and Vesryn, and the world tore sideways.

They snapped through. The wind spun shut, sealing the breach like water closing over a sinking hull.

Serenna’s wings swept for resistance and found none. She dropped before lurching into a hover, every muscle still braced against the gale raging behind them.

That flare of Essence had burned bright enough to betray them across half the Aetherveil. Serenna scanned the horizon, but saw nothing beyond the storm that had swallowed more of the south, its dark edge creeping closer.

The island’s summit spread before them, vast and suspended above a shifting floor of cloud. At this height, the sky burned an unforgiving blue, the sun stripped of haze and merciless over a place the realms had forgotten.

Crystal had grown through the earthen isle like coral in a reef, the same Aelfyn architecture that had chained Cinderax under the lake and sealed Skylash inside the Maw.

At the center of the island, the dragon waited.

Serenna stopped breathing.

Entombed in crystal, Veyrix was twice Skylash’s length. The prison had seized his serpentine body at the edge of flight, haunches braced and wings pinned tight to his flanks, every line of him still straining toward the leap.

His jaws gaped open, fangs bared around a silent roar, its violence trapped forever in his throat. Crystalline eyes stared unseeing.

That was the worst of it. They remained open to a sky he could never reach, its endless blue laid before him as another cruelty.

Wind still moved around him. Currents bent toward his body and died, seeking the dragon the Aelfyn had trapped a millennium ago.

Serenna couldn’t look away. She leaned toward him with the wind, grief folding through her as her boots struck the glassed earth, Vesryn and Fenn dropping down beside her.

Vesryn circled the dragon, drawing the Heart of Stars from the pouch at his hip. The relic blazed between his fingers, the full spectrum of his talents spilling through his palm.

They gathered in the dragon’s shadow, where silence held the shape of a scream.

Vesryn ignited Essence. Power ruptured through his Starshard, and Serenna felt the summons tug at her gem, his magic seeking hers. She reached back without thought, opening to the pull as Fenn’s magic joined the current.

Their circle flared to life as Vesryn raised the Heart toward the dragon. His magic burned brighter, each surge tightening in his control before he drew in more power.

Illumination began its climb beyond any safe threshold, past the place where light became heat, where heat became starlight that didn’t belong to this world. Pressure packed behind Serenna’s eyes as prismatic radiance trembled around the Heart.

She tensed, her body remembering the Bramblemaw den. How the stars had descended in the Aelfyn tomb, that terrible looseness of her soul lifting from her bones while Vesryn clawed her back from the gravity of the spiral. Every instinct screamed to pull away, to smother the circle, to stop the magic before it consumed them.

Instead, she fed their current harder.

Essence whirled through the linked gems, and the force narrowed to a white point in Vesryn’s grasp.

Sunfire erupted from the Heart.

Vesryn’s jaw locked. Veins of white and gold seared into the crystal encasing Veyrix, flooding through the Aelfyn’s chains. The prison groaned. Hairline fractures raced outward, weeping radiance through the ancient cage.

Glass shattered, shards catching the sunfire’s glow as they spun away. A tremor traveled through Veyrix’s obsidian scales, stuttering along a body held rigid for centuries.

Then lightning split the sky.

Vesryn killed the sunfire as the bolt cleaved the magic between the Heart and Veyrix’s prison. The backlash slammed through Serenna’s Starshard and buckled her knees. Fenn caught them both and warped clear before the next strike burst the glassed earth where they’d stood.