Page 217 of The Reckoning of Starlight

“Next circle,” Serenna gritted out.

“You’re bleeding.”

She blinked hard, clearing the red film from her sight.

“It’s not enough yet.”

Fenn’s jaw tightened, anguish flashing across his face, but he opened another rift.

The next wave of Essence nearly ripped her apart.

The impact seized her from throat to spine, wrenching her wings wide as a piercing tone split her skull. Prismatic light scored the skin of her hands and wrists, burning so near the surface that her flesh began to glow.

“It’s time to strike,” Fenn growled. “Absorb any more magics and I’ll have to carry two bodies.”

Serenna’s fingers closed around her Starshard, and she forced everything else out—the pain, the panic, the sight of Vesryn in Fenn’s arms. Sound thinned first, the battle receding to a muffled roar. Distance collapsed as lake, shore, and sky opened around her.

For one glimpse, she saw everything.

Jassyn and Lykor below as Rimeclaw’s and Blossom’s vast forms vanished through a portal. Cinderax hovering low over the water beside them. Dracovae wheeling above. The wounded falling. The injured dying. Empty spaces where the hatchlings had been.

And above them all, Vesryn streaked toward the king’s glacial light, a white-gold defiance against endless blue.

So terribly alone.

Serenna seized the current and reached for sunfire. Every Starshard behind her converged in her Well, power narrowing into a single point. Prismatic Essence ignited from gem to gem until the crystal at her throat could no longer contain it.

Sunfire erupted, screaming through every vein and bone. Pressure whitened her vision as the power battered against the last limits of her body.

Then the stars began to call.

Their whispers moved through her mind with the slow turning of the blue spiral galaxy, ancient and horribly familiar.

“Return home,” they breathed. “You belong among us.”

Serenna’s wings missed a beat, and some small, traitorous part of her understood the king. How easy it would be to stop resisting and let the chorus guide her upward. To surrender herself to the stars. To trade the ache of flesh for the terrible ease of light. Power instead of despair. To dissolve into the endless gulf waiting beyond the portal.

She ripped her mind from the stars and reached through the bond for Vesryn.

His light tore through the cold brilliance surrounding Galaeryn and crashed into the king, light shearing outward from the impact.

Galaeryn faltered, and the portal shuddered above.

Then the king’s power detonated, striking into Vesryn’s radiance, wrenching at the prince before Serenna could release the sunfire. She felt Vesryn straining against Galaeryn’s ascent while the king stripped him thread by burning thread.

“Hold him,” Serenna pleaded, panic and command colliding.

Heat flared through the bond. Then pain.

Serenna clenched her Starshard until its facets cut her palm and blood slicked the gem. Sunfire thundered through her as every wielder in the sky poured their strength into a single current, all of it bearing down on her Well.

She’d meant to channel the sunfire from below, past Vesryn and straight into Galaeryn. But their radiance had fused, white-gold snared inside the king’s glacial blue. Any blow meant for Galaeryn would destroy the prince first.

Serenna hesitated.

Vesryn had known.

She’d already seen what distance allowed the king. One broken volley after another had collapsed into him, each one leaving him stronger. Cast from here, this current would cross the same fatal span, leaving Galaeryn time to seize it and add its strength to the power already destroying Vesryn.