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"Welcome home, little witch." A pause. "I have been waiting longer than any of them know."

A funnel of glass and red sand spun up around them, herding them towards the centre of the broken plain. Idonea braced herself. She cut her palm with her dagger and let the blood circle her feet.

Vinea stalked the perimeter, immense, swaying with each step.

"So much power, and you fear to use it. Let it break you, child. That is what you're made for."

Lysander pulled himself upright. The sword Lance had dropped was at his foot. He picked it up and stood, and even on this plane, even bleeding, he looked at her the way he'd looked at her in the village, in the chamber, in her own bed.

"Stay with me!"

She turned to him. She didn't have time to answer with her mouth. She nodded and hoped he understood every word she couldn't say.

Vinea brought his paw down.

The obsidian fountained upward, arcing into the storm, and rained back down as glass shards the size of arrowheads. Lance went into the air and worked. He knocked them out of the sky before they could pierce her, his wings cutting through the falling glass too fast to track. Some got through anyway. Her skin opened in bright cuts along her arms, her cheek, her collarbone.

She reached for the relic's power and pushed.

The Nexis pushed back. The Eitr wouldn't go where she sent it. The plane was eating her working as fast as she could make it.

A claw came through the air where her head had just been.

She twisted aside.

Lysander struck.

Steel met flesh. His blade went across Vinea's flank. The impact rang the way iron rings when struck against stone. Sparks of lightning jumped from the wound. Vinea recoiled, more annoyed than hurt.

"You cannot win here," the daemon said.

He raked his claws across the air. A wall of lightning came at them.

She pulled the violet-black Eitr down her arms the way she'd pulled it in the void with her mother. It met Vinea's lightning — daemon-substance shaped into light, not mortal-storm lightning — and the two annihilated where they touched. The shock rang through her bones. The lightning broke, and the cloud above it dimmed.

The storm went still. The world shook.

On her hands and knees on the obsidian, fingers in the molten cracks, copper and salt in her mouth — her chest hurt. She did not, for a second, remember what plane she was on.

Her glasses were gone. When they had come off, she couldn't say.

The Nexis blurred at the edges of what she could see. Shapes had soft borders. Vinea, when she looked up, was an outline of teeth and the suggestion of weight. Nellith was a slim dark figure, recognisable only because Idonea knew her silhouette.

Fighting without them was now necessary.

Lysander dropped beside her. His hands closed on her shoulders. "Don't let her in your head."

She looked up at Nellith.

"My poor child," Nellith said.

But Nellith hadn't moved. She had stayed on the far side of the broken plain with her arms folded. For the first time, her mother looked old.

The storm came back at once.

Vinea's tail lashed. New trenches opened in the obsidian. "You're finished," he said. "But you can choose how you die. Scream, and I will make it quick."

Lysander's voice was at her ear, low and steady. "Don't hold back, witchling."