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The Noctaris orb was still glowing steadily, yet faintly. A start, but only a start—it needed more.

I needed to do so muchmore.

But the blood on Aleksander’s face kept flashing in my mind. He’d looked prepared to fight to the death.

But I wasn’t prepared tolethim.

I started toward him at the exact moment he and Lorien collided in their most violent show of magic yet.

I shielded my face from the explosion of light and dark that followed, covering my eyes as the room was engulfed in a dark cloud shot through with twisting bolts of white-hot power. The floor shook. The walls rumbled, shedding tapestries and layers of dust and bits of the ceiling, and between that rain of debrisand the mass of magic, I couldn’t see more than an arm’s length in front of me.

The settling haze was so disorienting that, for a moment, I didn’t realize how perfectly silent everything was becoming.

I could hear my own heartbeat. I could hear the hum of the Aetherstone, and a crack splitting through the beams across the ceiling, and the shower of dust causing a weak cough that sounded oddly far away.

I backed away from the Aetherstone, reaching for the knife sheathed at my hip while simultaneously letting shadows rise from my skin and wrap me in a protective cage. I tried to make that cage into something formidable—only to realize, then, that I’d given too much of my power to the orb, too quickly, and now I couldn’t force my magic into something solid no matter how hard I tried.

Lorien erupted from the haze, slamming a light-wrapped hand into my shadows.

He broke through my defenses quickly, catching me by the throat and throwing me against the wall. I stayed on my feet, dazed as I was, but my vision split—three different Loriens followed up his initial attack.

I dodged the wrong one.

His hand slapped across my jaw, knocking my head sideways into the wall. Black dots swam in my vision. I slumped to the floor. I saw nothing else for a long moment—but IfeltGrimnor moving toward me.

At the last instant, I managed to reach out, to possess my sword for a heartbeat, making it veer aside and miss my chest—barely.

Lorien was thrown off balance for a few steps. I was too stunned to make much use of it. I was able to scramble to my feet and put a bit of distance between us, nothing more, beforehe was upon me again, scourges of his light reaching out and snapping at my legs like the teeth of hellish hounds.

My head throbbed and my limbs ached, but I twisted around and somehow brought forth precise strikes of my own, whipping my shadows around his magic and jerking until the light waned and scattered.

Looking back to the path ahead, I realized I was out of space to move. The walls rose up before me. The haze lingered behind. I couldn’t see Aleks. I couldn’t see the Stone or the platform it stood upon—I could barely see Lorien, even though the sound of his breathing told me he was still close.

He’d slowed, moving with more deliberate steps—a panther stalking its prey. As our gazes met through the fog, he tossed my sword aside and focused on gathering magic into his hands. He drew from the mass of it already hovering all around us, whipping all the lingering energies into a renewed frenzy before taking a more exact hold on the jagged lines of heat flickering through it all.

He summoned more, and those lines became like the solid cage I’d been trying to make with my own shadows—bolt after bolt wrapping me up in a burning embrace that sank into my skin, paralyzing my muscles, numbing me to the point that I didn’t realize, at first, that I was being lifted several feet off the ground.

Then I was flying, careening across the room.

I hit the door hard enough—wrapped in enough of Lorien’s violent magic—that the ancient wood cracked as I collided with it. An entire section of it splintered away, falling with me to the hard stone floor.

Chapter Fifty

Nova

Daylight and dustfiltered down over my battered body.

The opening my collision had created was large enough that I could have crawled through it—could have gone for help, maybe.

But I couldn’t make myself move.

I couldn’t even find the energy to speak.

The sounds of clashing steel and thundering voices drifted up from somewhere, and I vaguely remembered the battle waging below. My brother. Thalia. All the soldiers who were desperately fighting down there. The last hope of our dying world.

I’d failed them.

With a painful twist in my gut, I realized that Lorien had been right to taunt me earlier.