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Of course, I would have preferred him by my side.

And hewouldbe back at my side, before long—I wouldn’t be marching into any battles without him.

But I could only fight so many things at once, and knowing he wasn’t suffering made it easier to focus on the bigger picture alongside my brother, for the time being.

“I don’t think we can wait for Equinox,” I told Bastian. “The Aetherstone may be easier to manipulate during that time period, but I think the pressing thing is to get into Nerithys and do what we can, while we can. The longer we wait, the more time Lorien has to lay traps and further destabilize things.”

Bastian nodded slowly, the movement heavy and resolute. “Agreed.”

The decision hung in the air like a stone.

“We’ll only be two days early, if that,” I muttered. “Close enough, right?”

“Let’s hope so.”

I hugged my arms against myself, searching the sky for the moon that had been lost within the foggy darkness. “Will the other Noctarisan leaders follow us into battle?”

“Most will, I think. They have no real choice, after all. This is…” He trailed off, inhaling a sharp breath, as if that stone in the air had landed on his chest.

The end,I finished in my head.

But neither of us said it out loud.

It went without saying, really. What else could we do, now, aside from march to our inevitable ending, whatever it was? Lorien had made his intentions clear. Either we stopped him, somehow, or the world we stood in was finished.

A terrible feeling squeezed my heart as I thought of Tarnath, of all its people smiling and waving at me. Of the army I’d raised, and how hard they’d been training and trying to organize on my behalf. Of the palace and its people—Aveline, Brynn, Eamon…all these things that had started to feel the tiniest bit like my true home. My true life.

All of it in danger of just being…gone.

“I’m sorry I led him here,” I said, quietly. “I’m sorry I brought this end upon you all even sooner than you’d feared.”

Bastian shook his head. “Thalia led you here—and on my orders. We missed the danger right under our noses, too, and Thalia is the most discerning person I know. No one could have seen the truth about Lorien; there’s a reason he has survived for all these centuries. A reason he managed to murder Calista all those generations ago. He’s a cunning snake.”

I kept my eyes on the distant crack in the ground, unconvinced.

“We knew there was something strange going on with the Light King and his brethren, besides,” he insisted. “We should have investigated the whole situation more thoroughly to begin with.”

I tilted my face toward him. “I did wonder about that. When I first met Thalia, she seemed surprised that Aleks and the others were awake and with me, but not particularly surprised that they were all in this world.”

“We found them all shortly after their fall—well, we found Aleksander and a few of his soldiers, anyway. The one you called Zayn was nowhere to be seen at that point. Aleksander was close to death, as were the others with him; we assumed they all wouldperish in the decaying air of this world, given a little bit of time. Especially once we took Luminor.”

“So, you took the sword and left them for dead?” It seemed a cruel choice, even if Aleks and the others were clearly in league with the Light Keepers—clearly enemies.

Bastian shrugged, though the movement was heavy, making him seem less indifferent than he was trying to appear. “Traveling outside of this palace and its immediate surroundings is dangerous enough on its own; we didn’t need to drag the extra weight of them with us.”

The back of my neck prickled at him calling Aleksextra weight, but I held my tongue.

“Their deaths should have been quick. They shouldn’t have been able to survive for years like they did…and when some of themdidsurvive, we opted to secure the area and occasionally send people to study the magic at work, instead. Our curiosity got the better of us, I guess.”

“How different things might have turned out, if you’d killed them,” I mused.

“Yes; I think about that often.”

I leaned over the wall, staring again at the fissure in the distance. Imagining all the different paths this world could have followed, as if they were branching cracks in the ground—some far more destabilizing than others.

“I still have a lot of questions about what Lorien was doing over the past seven years,” my brother said. “How he came and went, how much of his power is tied into Luminor and Aleksander. But, in hindsight, the fact that you ended up being drawn into the grove where they all were should have made us all wary.”

“…Because the Vaeloran are always connected and drawn to one another.” Recalling Lorien’s words—how he had felt me the moment I was born, I shivered.