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Roots darted with every footfall, twisting and coiling around my legs as I stormed through the ever-shifting labyrinth.

“Blasted witch,” I cursed, shooting out of the sinking cloud in a burst of braided vines.

She never understood boundaries.

Another corner.

And another.

“Let me in,” I shrieked at the maze, forcing the strands of my magic apart from the ones still tangled with my sisters’. I whistled low, summoning the delinquent shards.

Obey, you refractory beast.

The glinting barrier dissolved into smoke—doors and hedges vanishing to reveal moon-white hair and a wall of gold.

“She’s awake,” I breathed, just as Mene’s milky irises flared back to silver-sparked cobalt.

Cross-legged on a bed of stars, she swiped her hand before each of us. A gauzy blanket of cosmos shimmered into place.

Dots of light blinked into the air—achingly slow—as the worlds of the Celestos floated around us. One by one, each of the creations we had helped bring into being appeared, until finally, the last emerged.

Wrapped in an aura of every color, its core shimmered with an iridescent shift.

“Lux ! ” I cried, a strand of my emerald hair slithering to slam alongside my hand against the gilded wall encasing my sister.

I looked to Mene, seeking reassurance, but her gaze had already faded—white and unseeing, lost in the stars of the worldly plane.

Snarling, I shaped my nails into claws and tore at the ward, dragging the long, gleaming horns that curled from my temples down its seams as I screamed.

“Lux — no more ! ”

The tear widened enough for me to see her gleaming gold-spun hair spilling over cheeks bronzed like sun-warmed metal. Glinting strings stretched in every direction. The metal spheres draped across them whirred in time as the device orbited her barrier.

“Stop this. Now !”

White-feathered wings burst from her back as her head snapped up, sunlight pouring through the chasm I’d carved. It pierced everything.

“It’s time to come out, sister!” I shouted over the onslaught of her power, the raging song rising and falling with the light pouring from her. “It begins.”

Her enclosure collapsed in an instant.

Scorched feathers rained down as the melody died. That blinding brilliance faded. Her eyes returned to their usual hue.

“The century hasn’t aged you a day, sister.”

She didn’t smile. Not even a flicker of amusement danced on the power humming through the room.

She only tilted her head, wings trailing behind her.

The Auriery still spun before her—thousands of gleaming worlds drifting through its radiant web.

“It begins,” I repeated, as the globe in Mene’s floating tapestry pulsed, spinning in time with our sister’s weave.

Roots crept into the room, curling across the floor in a mirrored map of both their visions.

“The Songbird sings again.”

END OF BOOK 1