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Strong arms closed around me a moment later—my brother.

“LET ME GO! I have to help him!”

Bastian held tighter, dragging me backward.

“NO!NO!” My screams were lost within another violent quake, within the clatters and crashes of falling stone that followed it. Every attempt I made to fight my way free made the agonizing pain in my shoulder worse, and soon I was blacking in and out, losing entire moments to that pain.

Somehow, I found myself on the bridge, tumbling over the edge of it and into the waiting arms of someone down below—Captain Voss, I realized, after surfacing from another moment of blackness.

My next slice of clarity came far too late; we were already at the portal. Its energy washed over me, soothingly cold and familiar. The energy of Noctaris. Of home.

But I couldn’t go.

No, Iwouldn’t go—

I managed to twist back toward the Aetherstone’s chamber, just in time to see light-filled cracks forming all over its walls. It was breaking. Collapsing.

I screamed again as someone pushed me forward, and then I was falling, lost in a haze of pain, hoping the impact with the ground would kill me quickly.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Nova

I was still screamingwhen I hit the ground in Noctaris.

The pain was the only thing that eventually managed to silence me. It took so much of my strength as it rocked through my body, that soon I no longer had the energy to scream, or even to whimper.

But I did not die, however badly I wanted to.

My brother arrived soon after me, Grimnor clutched in his hand, blood and bruises covering him. He set the blade aside and dropped to his knees beside me, gathering my battered body carefully to his.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t reply. I just let him hold me, numbly watching as the rest of our army returned.

One after the other, they staggered in. Two of them carried Zayn’s still unconscious body. They were followed by Thalia, who came immediately to my side, her steps uncharacteristically unsteady and her eyes bleary with emotion. She laid a handful of things she’d collected at my feet—my knife; my remaining, unbroken bracelets; a single shard of Luminor’s shatteredremains. She pressed a hand to my cheek, a warm, wordless gesture before she turned her back to my brother and me and proceeded to stare off into the distance, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

I watched the fading portal for a few minutes, until I couldn’t stand to look at it—at anything—anymore, and then I buried my face against Bastian’s chest and I wept, no longer caring about appearing strong.

I want to die.

Please, just let me die.

The minutes passed. I kept breathing. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done within an entire lifetime of hard, cruel things, but I kept going.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

“Nova…look,” came my brother’s voice.

The heaviness in my limbs felt almost insurmountable, but I managed to lift my head.

And I sawlife.

The portal had faded away entirely, but a new energy was settling over the land all around us. It drifted down from a periwinkle sky like a fine mist, making everything it fell upon shimmer. Some of those shimmering things slowly began to glisten with their own inner light, with their own waking energy.

In the distance, a massive tree bloomed on a hilltop, its flowers unfolding into a bright display of white and gold.