Page 216 of The Reckoning of Starlight

“I know.”

The words cut through the numbness keeping Serenna’s wings in motion. A sob rose, but she bit down until blood salted her tongue, forcing grief into pain she could still use.

Anchor the stars behind me.

“We don’t have much time,” she whispered, refusing to waste his sacrifice.

Before she broke, she turned from the prince’s body and took in the surviving wielders. They wavered over the lake like constellations with stars ripped out, their centers empty of dragons. Along the shore, the battle still raged through smoke and shattered light.

Serenna reached for Vesryn through the bond, his presence racing beyond her grasp. Whatever impossible shape ascension had made of him, every spark of it was bent toward the king.

“She-elf.” Fenn’s soft words cut across the wind.

Serenna inhaled sharply, sensing his unspoken question. The nearest circle held its formation, Starshards blazing, power churning between its wielders with nowhere to go.

“We gather what’s left.” Serenna hauled Essence through her Starshard. Prismatic light burst between her and Fenn while Vesryn’s gem stayed dark against his throat.

Fenn’s arms tightened around the prince’s body. “And him?”

Serenna’s wings missed a beat. She couldn’t look at Vesryn’s slack hand, the same hand that had been warm in hers moments ago.

“We stay together,” she forced out, swiping at her face to clear her vision.

Fenn’s eyes flared as he nodded.

Wind tore at Serenna’s face as her wings beat through air gone heavy as water, stripping the last tears from her cheeks. Vesryn’s light burned at the edge of her awareness, already gaining on Galaeryn’s slow ascent.

He’d reach the king before she was ready.

“Pass me control!” she shouted as she closed the distance to the nearest circle.

The five wielders angled toward her. Prismatic light flared from gem to gem as Serenna reached through her crystal. Their current surged into her Starshard and struck all at once, wrenching a hiss from her teeth and knocking her wingbeats out of rhythm.

The wielders assembled behind Serenna and Fenn, their power converging on her until the gem at her throat burned hot against her skin.

“The next,” she rasped.

Fenn opened a portal.

Lake, smoke, and sky vanished, then snapped back as the void cast them beside another ring.

The wielders were ready. Prismatic light arced between their gems, then stretched across the open air toward Serenna.

She caught the offered power.

The second wave crashed harder, bleaching her vision white. Serenna clenched her teeth and hauled it into the Essence already swelling her Well, forcing the separate currents to hold as one.

Fenn tore another portal through the sky, and the wielders swept next to the first group flying behind them.

Serenna gathered another circle into the formation. Then another. Druids, magus, wraith—whoever still held the sky above the lake—opened their Wells to her and joined the growing ranks.

Each new current struck deeper than the last, every Starshard linked to hers widening the prismatic wake around her. Heat flashed against her scales in luminous veins, smoke lifting through the seams.

Galaeryn had risen far above the lake, his ascent unbroken as the portal waited overhead. Vesryn’s light tore after him, a white-gold star closing fast on the king.

Another circle joined her, and pressure exploded behind Serenna’s eyes. The horizon pitched sideways before she wrestled her wings level. Scales clamped tighter over her arms, unable to shield against the amount of power searing her from within.

Fenn caught her elbow without slowing, Vesryn braced in his other arm. “You can’t hold any more.”