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‘Holy shit…’ Wilder muttered, words Torj himself would usually say.

He felt Thea at his side, following his stare from the Bear Slayer to Wren. ‘Incredible,’ she whispered. ‘She let him wield her power.’

And then the moment was gone, swallowed up by the rest of the battle still raging on. Talemir and Dratos chose that moment to land before them. The determination blazing in their eyes was all the confirmation Wilder needed.

Facing Thea, he grasped her hands in his. ‘We have to go to the cliffs now. There, you can end it.’

Thea gave a single nod. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘What about Wren?’ Talemir motioned to the flashes of light atop the walls.

Wilder shook his head. ‘Her magic is needed here. She needs to defend what’s left of our forces.’ He turned back to Thea and cupped her jaw, forcing her eyes to meet his. ‘You can do this. You were forged with blood and steel, with lightning and thunder… You were made for this war, made to end it, and you will, for all of us. When I first saw you spying on the Warsword meeting atop the cliffs, I sensed it in you even then.’

Tears lined Thea’s eyes. ‘What?’

‘Greatness,’ he told her.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

THEA

Wrapped in shadow, Talemir and Dratos took Thea and Wilder to the edge of the world. A red dawn bled into the horizon, illuminating the cold, hard lines of Thezmarr’s black cliffs, hemmed in by jagged mountains and savage seas. Below, giant waves barrelled through the clouds. Thea could taste the storm on her tongue as her boots hit the rocky terrain.

Darkness rippled from the ledges above, and Thea didn’t hesitate to start towards it. She was ready to unleash her wrath upon the monsters who’d taken her sister from her, who’d all but ripped the world in two. She was ready to end this madness once and for all.

Thea recognised where she was instantly. The caves where Cal and Kipp had almost died, where a storm had raged and brought her to her knees, the weight of her power nearly overcoming her. It was where Wilder had first witnessed her magic, too, and asked, Who are you?

Now, she knew. She was Althea Embervale, Warsword, storm wielder, heir of Delmira, enemy to Jasira Fairmoore and the reapers… And she would be the end of them.

At the mouth of the cave, shadows lashed out, but Thea was ready. She seared them with her lightning and called upon the storm. Rain came down in a torrent, lashing back at the darkness, beating it into submission, revealing Princess Jasira beyond.

The stench was overwhelming, as was the hissing of reapers and wraiths behind her. ‘It’s the reaper lair,’ Thea told Wilder and the others. ‘The one Anya was searching for. Destroy the monsters within. Her Highness is mine to finish.’

Jasira didn’t even try to stop the warriors as they pushed past her into the cave at Thea’s orders. Instead, she licked her lips and studied Thea, as though she were a hunter and Thea her prey.

‘You truly think you can best the Daughter of Darkness? I was prophesied to end this world.’

‘Perhaps you were…’ Thea said, taking a step towards the princess, her hand brushing against the hilt of her sword. ‘And perhaps I was prophesied to start it anew.’

We are all daughters of darkness. Audra’s words came back to her as an echo, and there, atop the jagged cliffs, Thea summoned her magic, that kernel within blooming into something savage, something fierce. She had brought lightning and thunder down on the fortress and its monsters, but here… here was the truest monster of all.

Ignoring the lash of Jasira’s shadows, and the screams of the reapers within the cave, Thea tipped her head to the sky, and conjured her storm. It roiled within her, and answered her call from beyond the cliffs, dark clouds rolling in, rain pelting down.

She met Jasira’s gaze and her storm eclipsed the darkness, fracturing the sky into a thousand pieces with brilliant bolts of lightning. Their heat cracked stone, shearing through rock and earth and shadow. Waves gathered in the violent seas below, breaking against the cliffs in giant deluges of white foam.

Thea mastered it all.

The prophecy hummed in her mind, a reminder, a promise.

In the shadow of a fallen kingdom, in the eye of the storm…

Her storm raged, a war song of vengeance for the midrealms. This tempest was like no other; it was her masterpiece – a rich tapestry of wind, rain, lightning and thunder, all of it surging not only with her power, but with Anya’s too. And when she could hold it in her body no longer, when it was on the brink of bursting from her chest, her hand gripped her sword.

A daughter of darkness will wield a blade in one hand…

Thea channelled her power through her entire being and unsheathed her Furies-given Naarvian steel, sending the lightning right down the blade.

And rule death with the other…