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“And that doesn’t fucking matter anyway,” Anise snapped. She and Rion were Werewolves. He was her alpha, and the look he gave her for that tone made it very clear that she best not forget it. As she sunk back in her seat, she said, “I don’t care about Lux right now. He’s a waste of our time—”

“He isn’t though,” Luna said, quieter than the rest of us, gaze off in the distance.

“What do you mean he isn’t?” Anise asked. “Whatever he did—”

“What he did was absorb as many souls as Taeral has,” Luna said. “He’s stronger than each of us.Thatneeds addressed.” She turned to me. “I know you think you’re gonna kill him, but there’s no fucking way you’ll accomplish that when he’s this strong.”

I clenched my jaw and looked away.

She was right. It was all I could think about as I lay in bed last night.

“I’ll make sure he releases them,” Pa said. “Don’t worry with that.”

“Until you confirm that it’s done,” Luna said, “I will worry with that, El.”

“That’s what I’ll handle when I’m finished here then.”

“Alright. Now that the uselessness is out of the way”—Medica stood— “what the fuck are we gonna do now?”

Silence.

For the first time since I’d met my wife, she didn’t offer a solution. There wasn’t one, I supposed.

“With what, exactly?” Cere asked. “The worlds are gone. In half a million years, they still won’t be sustainable for any life form that isn’t eternal.”

“Not the worlds,” Medica said. “The people. What’re we going to do about the people? Their souls? If they’re here when the maalaichte cnihme return, they’ll take them. We need to move them. We need… something.”

“Another world?” Stella asked, turning to me and Véa. “We do have one.”

It took a moment before the obvious realization settled in. “The Land of Light.”

“The Fae Realm, yes,” Stella said.

I saw where her mind was heading, and I may not have loved the idea, but it made sense.

We’d encountered some issues shortly after Fae folk migrated to this world en masse about two thousand years ago. They hadn’t only brought themselves, but their lifestyle, including drakens. That outcome was atrocious.

Humans and drakens were not a good combination. Drakens were accustomed to flying freely, even if they had a master. Humans were not fond of that. The drakens didn’t understand why the humans feared them, and the humans saw them as plentiful meat.

Heylel—Stella’s son, my nephew—had an idea. “Another realm,” he’d said. “That’s what we should do. One realm for the humans, another for the Fae.”

He’d read about it in a book that Stella had laying around. Apparently, someone in distant Angelic history had attempted to create a new world for the humans. It was out of sympathy, the story said, because of their poor treatment on Matriaza.

That Witch hadn’t been successful in any grandeur, however. She wasn’t strong enough to tether the spell to Matriaza itself.

Heylel believed that Véa would be able to tether the spell to this world because she had power over all five elements. With the strength of our souls, plus Heylel’s, he thought we could pull it off. A whole other world within a world.

And we’d succeeded. It’d taken decades, an amount of energy that drained us for the months that followed, but we’d done it.

“That could work,” I murmured.

“It could,” Véa said.

“Fae and humans do not like one another,” Sanvi said. “We’ll start a civil war along with the one we’ll be fighting with the maalaichte cnihme.”

“Not if a few of us are around to keep an eye on them,” Osonia said. “And, to be blunt, they can all go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. This is an act of desperation to save billions.”

“Possibly to save the entire stars damned universe,” Eike said. “If the maalaichte cnihme gained access to our billions of souls, not to mention the billions Lux has, we’d beincrediblyfucked.”