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It was difficult to believe that they were the same breed of aethermancer who had killed Alaric’s grandfather and nearly destroyed Kesath.

Alaric pushed these thoughts that bordered on treason to theback of his mind, but that only allowed more space to recall Talasyn’s body, how she had fit against him like a missing piece.

He stopped a few paces behind her as she approached the Light Sever slowly, so slowly, as though she were in a trance. If it was anything at all like a Shadow Sever, the magic would be tugging at her and her heart would be lifting like that of a mariner spying the gleaming shores of home.

But, only a breath away from the radiant pillar, she stopped. She looked back at him, her chestnut hair blowing in an unnatural breeze. She seemed unsure, almost frightened.

Her lips were still swollen from his kisses.

“It’s all right,” he said thickly over the roar of the Lightweave. How strange it was, to be sought out for reassurance. How new it was, to be looked at as anything other than a conqueror. “Just walk into it. You’ll know what to do once you get there.”

Talasyn nodded, holding Alaric’s gaze for a few moments before turning back to the Light Sever. Buthisgaze remained fixed on her until she vanished from sight, her slight figure swallowed up by magic.

To enter a Light Sever was to dive headfirst into an ocean of sunshine.

And it was—wonderful.

Talasyn was submerged in light. It warmed every inch of her skin and flowed into her veins. It bathed her soul in radiant splendor.

And yet it was also a rush to the head, magnified. It was her aethermancy in its purest form, the rapture that swirled through her so intense that she was almost terrified of it. Of how much her heart could hold.

But fear was a fleeting, paltry thing in this place. She felt as if she could do anything. Shecoulddo anything.

Sheunderstood.

From afar, the nexus point had looked like a solid columnof light, threaded through with aetherspace’s silver fumes. Now that she was right in the thick of it, Talasyn saw that it was composed of thousands,millions, of fine golden strands. She touched them and they sang like harp strings. She coaxed them in any direction that she wished, all of it shifting and shining and dancing in luminous tapestries everywhere she turned.

And from each string, a memory unspooled.

Alaric had once predicted that the heart of a nexus point could tether an aethermancer more strongly to the past, and he had been right. Moments long forgotten, things she hadwantedto forget— they were so much more solid now. They came flooding back to her with sharp clarity; they came to life in whorls of aether’s thread. Scenes from her childhood, no longer diluted by time. A lullaby in what she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was her mother’s voice, clear and pure. Hunger pangs in her belly and her fingertips made of ice in the winter. Her boots hitting the ground after her first aerial battle, quickly followed by a splash of vomit, and Khaede patting her back in wordless reassurance. The first time Sol ever spoke to her, marking their beginning as amiable moons in Khaede’s orbit—and the ending of that story, his body unmoving on the airship deck.

And then she saw Alaric. Not the man she had left waiting in the courtyard, but the skeletal figure with the snarling wolf’s mask and the clawed gauntlets that she’d fought at Lasthaven. The Shadowgate swirled around him, etched in distant lightning, the air cold with the oncoming rains. His crackling blade was tinted crimson in the glow of the eclipse, as red as the blood of everyone who’d died.

“It’s over,” the apparition said, the words drawn up from the deep well of the past, his voice so strangely soft. At the time, she had puzzled over that tone, unused to anything but lethal calculation from the Kesathese prince. Now she knew him better.

It’s over. He had been imploring her to surrender as the Allfold’s last bastion fell to the hurricanes.

But he had been wrong. It wasn’t over, yet. Not for Sardovia. Not for Nenavar. Not for her.

Show me,she thought.Teach me how to not strike first. I want to learn to take the blow. I want to protect everything I hold dear. I won’t let the Shadow fall.

Be it World-Eater or Night Empire.

And the Lightweave hummed and raged. It did as she commanded.

Light magic is evil,Alaric’s father had told him when he was a boy.It is the weapon of our enemies. It burns and it blinds. This is why we destroyed the Light Severs on the Continent; they fueled those who sought to steal our stormship technology and bend us to their will. The Lightweave cannot be gentled or appeased. It won’t be content until it has cast its harsh glare over everything.

Alaric had always believed that, and he could still see it here and now on Belian in the way that the Light Sever seared his skin and eyes even from across a distance. It was too sharp, too unforgiving. Nothing at all like the soft coolness of the Shadowgate.

He reviled this form of magic—heshouldrevile it—but—

—when the Light Sever finally began collapsing in on itself, folding down from the heavens and back into the earth—

—when the girl in the middle of the fountain turned to him with golden eyes and golden veins running throughout her olive skin, the strands of chestnut hair escaping her braid suffused with light as well—

—when she held up her hand and conjured a solid, blazing shield, not teardrop-shaped like the ones of the Continent but long and rectangular and forked with prongs atop and at its base, like those the Nenavarene wielded—

—he could only think that she was beautiful. Every part of her was beautiful.