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“Be careful, Jezzie,” I said, pulling her to me.

“You, too.”

Then, she was gone. The flying forms in the sky, their burning constellations, and the comforting blue glow went with her.

And in her place, as if it had been waiting for me to be here alone again, the pressure mounting in the air popped. I cried out as it shattered my hearing, my knees weak again.

The sky exploded with a scene like a mural gifted with movement. Two forms painted the vast gray expanse, both radiating golden light, but one had something like black ink seeping from his skin.

Glorious wings beat at their backs in time with the heated accusations they hurled. I couldn’t hear them, could only see the rage lining their features, but I was certain who they were. This was the feud that echoed through millennia—the one our mortal warriors were still fighting.

Damien and Bant.

The inky substance swirled around Bant, and he lashed out, whipping into the void. Like Kakias’s stolen power but sharper and deadlier.

Then, the mural swirled, their forms blurring and fading into the cloud-streaked sky.

Three different forms stood in a field of wildflowers. The space between cracks of lightning dimmed the scene, and when it flashed again, four more joined them. Wings undulated at their backs, light burning along the feathers, unique to each of them.

The Ascension played out before my eyes, sacrifices made, unheard words spoken.

Heat ripped down my back with each Angel’s contribution, shredding along my spine. My vision spotted, and when it returned, that legendary scene was gone. Replaced by wind whipping around a warrior as he kneeled on a cliff before a winged form.

As he bled and bled and bled.

And the Angel did nothing to stop it.

Darkness swallowed up the mountain—my mountains, I realized. Exactly as they were today. And in this realm with the powers of eternal beings consuming me, I could see Kakias’s power burning toward the war camp.

It swallowed up the moving mural, flooded the air, and even descended on me. It ate at that hollow spot where I thought my spirit belonged, and I screamed out against it. It seemed to smile in return.

Unnatural—it was so fucking unnatural; the battle of Damien’s and Bant’s powers obliterating my senses. Mine and Kakias’s—two warriors born of warring Angels.

No one was meant to withstand the assault ripping through me. I wasn’t meant to contain it, wouldn’t survive it.

But as I watched Kakias’s power flood toward my mountains, I knew I had to stop it—I had come here to stop it. To save my people who didn’t even know what madness soared toward them.

So as the realm unspooled with feuds of eternal beings, I fought. The war was within my blood and bones, it had been all this time. I pulled the threads of power I’d gathered from each emblem, their light within me, and wove them together as I had against the queen. I sewed them through the hollows and voids I’d earned from a tarnished spirit and desperately pushed.

If I’d conducted power on our plane, it reasoned that here, among magic and myth, wherever it was I’d been transported, I could do more. That I could defy and destroy the darkness shooting around me, the one I’d ingested, and wreck Kakias’s magic on the mountains as well.

And that unwelcome presence—I needed it out of me. I needed to obliterate it.

I had to go back to Gallantia.

I had to go back. Pressure hit my limbs, a tightness in my chest. I’d promised. I’d promised I’d go back.

Promised someone with chocolate eyes and hands that knew my body like his own. Someone who was my soothing sanctuary, who would tear the stars from the sky and rearrange the constellations if I broke my promise. Who was home.

And this love between us could withstand any storm—would uphold any promise.

My vow as Revered meant I’d tied my life and spirit to the protection of the Mystiques and the cause of our clan. But if I was shredded by pure ether, would I truly be a help to them? Surely I could do more, I could be more for my people by beating this power, ensuring the end of the queen, and unraveling the rest of the Angelcurse.

And—selfishly—I had only recently realized what it was to live. And that was because of Tolek. I’d been lost for so long; I was only learning to balance my responsibilities as ruler with my personal joys and desires. I wasn’t done living with the man I loved.

It was the thought of him, of all of them waiting for me, that drove me as I tunneled into the Angellight deeper than I thought possible. As I ripped up the threads of each Prime Warrior from within myself. Siphoned the ethereal power from every particle of air in this gray realm until the plane held no light, but I did.

I contained it all, fed from the source. It was in each expansion of my lungs and flex of my muscles. It was a part of me waiting to wake.