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“The tether,” she whispers, reaching for the bond. I feel the echo of it in my chest, watching as she pours her rage and her grief into the barrier.
The wall screams with the sound of tearing metal and tectonic plates grinding together deep beneath the earth. The light turns red, then black, then gold. My grace is siphoned from my marrow; my knees buckling under the strain. Vyxia screams while the fire is ripped from her veins, and Cassia shudders as the void threatens to swallow her whole. But we do not let go.
“Wake up!” I roar, the bronze light exploding from my chest. “Brother, wake up!”
The barrier cracks, starting at Sera’s hands, where a spiderweb of fractures spreads outward, and racing across the surface. The tower groans, and the walls crumble into dust and light.
40. Remiel
My brother hits the ash-covered floor as the resting pad dissolves into thin air, collapsing. A marionette with severed strings thrown from a great height. His skin is translucent parchment stretched too thin over the bones. Veins stand out like black ink on a map where the rivers have run dry.
Sera moves before the dust settles. Her hands press against his chest. Desperate. Sure. The bond mark at the base of her throat flares, a lighthouse beacon cutting through the fog of a storm and calling a ship home. “Breathe,” she says. “Come back to me.”
I step back, my legs trembling. The ritual has scraped me clean, siphoned the grace from my marrow. Beside me, Cassia sways. I move over and wrap an arm around her to pull her against my side. She feels cold. The void she had channeled must’ve stripped her of her heat and left her shivering.
“Is he…” Cassia whispers. But the question dies in her throat.
“Wait,” I say.
Vyxia prowls the perimeter. She watches the sky, her violet eyes scanning the gray horizon. Jareth stands near her. His body is a coiled spring, like a soldier who knows the silence of the battlefield is often a lie.
But this silence stretches. Heavy. Suffocating. A physical weight pressing down on our lungs.
Then the air starts to hum. The fine hairs on my arms stand, and the gray dust on the ground vibrates. It dances in complex geometric patterns, defying the wind. Ozone. The smell of a storm breaking after a century of drought.
“Get back,” Vyxia warns, stepping away from the perimeter of the tower.
Sparks pop in the air. Blue. Black. White. Gold. They arc between the ground and the sky, weaving a cage of raw energy. Kael’s chest hitches, and a large gasp tears from his throat. His back arches off the ashen dust, and his eyes fly open. Black abysses crackling with miniature lightnings.
“Sera,” he chokes out, the name sounding like rust and gravel.
Sera collapses forward. She presses her forehead to his while her hands clutch his shirt. “I am here. I am here.”
His right hand lifts, trembling like a leaf in a gale, as he tries to cup her face. But the static in the air intensifies, crackling around them like a protective shield. “You found me,” he whispers.
“We all did,” she says.
His eyes shift to me. He blinks, and the black-blue depths of his eyes dim to a more human hue. He looks at Cassia. At Vyxia. At Jareth. A weak, crooked grin touches his lips. “The band is back together.”
“Do not talk.” Sera wipes tears from her cheeks with a trembling hand. “Just breathe.”
I squeeze Cassia tighter to anchor her as she leans her head on my chest.
She exhales a breath. “We did it.”
“It is over,” I say.
Yet the static does not surrender to the silence. It metastasizes, spiking until the low hum in the air sharpens into a sonic shriek that vibrates my bones.
“Remiel?” She pulls back and stands aside to look at me while her dark eyes widen.
I look down to see the shadows at our feet evaporating like water on a hot stone. A brilliance so absolute it casts no shades bleaching the gray.
“Move!” Jareth shouts, his voice desperate.
The fabric of the realm does not merely tear but unravels beneath us as two fissures rip open into the foundation of the world to reveal a glaring sterile column of white light.
Beneath Cassia. Beneath Sera.
