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“We have to,” she whispered. “I will come back to you, Tether or no. If we sever it, we’re free from the gods’ interference. If they can’t control us, they can’t stop us from rebelling. We could end this for everyone,” she pleaded.

“I can’t live with myself if something happens, Leona, I can’t ? —”

Leona cut him off with a desperate kiss, her hands clutched around the blade between them. When she pulled away, everything had changed within both of them.

The choice to do what is right, not what is easy, rolled through them like a Summer storm.

“You have to do it,” she rasped. “Selenia said the Solar heir had to choose heart over head.”

Solan glanced at Oestera. She nervously twisted her fingers together over her womb, deep purple dread climbing up over her spine.

“It’s what she said,” she confirmed.

Solan turned back to Leona, his eyes welling with stinging tears, lips trembling as he spoke. “Tether or no, I will choose you in every lifetime, Leona.”

She smiled reassuringly. “This is neither first nor last for us, my love.”

The Solar King held her gaze as he wrapped his hands over hers, curling around the handle of the blade. For a moment, neither moved. Time ceased. He held his breath as they communicated a lifetime’s worth of words in a single glance, the blade shining in the sunlight as Solan rotated it.

He carved gently through the invisible tie, both of their breaths catching as he worked.

When it sprang free from the tension, Leona’s eyes widened as a clipped scream escaped her throat.

Solan’s hand clutched at his chest, her breath cutting short as her body collapsed into a heap on the floor.

No sooner did she hit the floor did Oestera’s scream follow, a guttural wail that sent shivers through Astra’s chest as Leona lay lifeless.

“N-no,” Solan stuttered, his eyes wild and searching Oestera’s for an explanation. “What-why?”

“Solan—” she started, but a seismic shift shattered the room, a loud thunder brewing as Solan’s hand covered his mouth to suppress the horrified shock that echoed in his chest.

“No!” he shouted again through clenched teeth, throwing himself over Leona’s body. The rage inside of him broke every rib, every tangled vein, every muscle. It burst from his chest, a light so hot even Astra felt it from decades away.

“You took her from me,” he roared.

“Run!” Astra shouted at her mother, Oestera’s face frozen in horror. “Run!”

She could have sworn Oestera’s eyes flashed to her.

Oestera came back to herself, Solan’s devastation pouring out of him in a hurricane of strained screaming and dangerous light.

She twisted toward the door, moving as quickly as possible as others in the hall began running, all in the same direction.

The Rift.

Astra could see it overhead, shimmering in the midday glow. Dozens of Solar courtiers ran from the fearsome rumbling in the palace’s heart. A shoulder checked her as she watched the Rift reflect the Sun.

Astra’s head jerked back, shocked to feel someone in this state. Her eyes locked on the silver stare of Selenia for a mere moment, weaving her way through the crowd. For just a heartbeat, they looked at one another before she disappeared into the whirring mist.

“Oestera!” a voice cried over the crowd. Her mother’s head whipped around to find a raven-haired woman’s wide-eyed stare burning into her.

“Oestera!” she cried again, reaching for her from across the courtiers as we rounded a corner and landed on a sunstone platform. The panicked faces of dozens of linen-wrapped bodies fell away into the Rift.

Oestera gasped. “I’m so sorry, we didn’t know,” she said with no explanation, an understanding passing between them.

She yelled over the courtiers again, “He won’t go without the girls!”

Oestera shook her head, standing on the edge of the platform, courtiers pouring between them.

“I’ll take him!” she yelled over the roar of screams as a bright white light moved over the horizon of the palace, making it hard to watch them. Astra tried to search through the crowd to understand who they meant, but had to narrow her eyes as the light barreled toward them.

She could hardly see her mother’s face as she screamed over the bronze heads of the Solarians.

“Give him to me!” A small voice screamed the names of the three princesses Astra recognized from history texts.

The Solarian princesses who would never make it into the Rift.

Oestera shoved past Astra, leaping into the colored mist as the light overtook them completely.

Astra tumbled with her, the lamenting of the woman on the platform echoing off her chest.

Astra watched in horror as her mother’s body flung against the edge of the mist, her hands desperately grappling for a thread. Her fingers wrapped around a ruddy brown line to the Earthen Court.

Home, where she’d been hiding from the fallout of eloping for five years. To her father. To Lunelle. To the modest manor Selenia would pluck her from in just a few days to take over the throne.

The Flare had consumed many in the Rift. Astra needed to move. To grab a hold of something. If Selenia had seen her, could the light destroy her all the same? She pushed herself over the flailing bodies of courtiers who reached for a thread, any thread.

Below her, the young boy’s body floated, his eyes closed. He needed to move. She needed to move. She could feel heat prickle against her arms.

The boy was still breathing, but barely. Gripping his hand, Astra shoved his fingers around the first thread she could find, sending him flying across the Rift. Her hand ached with the heat, an electric sting brewing beneath her skin.

She blinked hard, willing herself back to the surface of the present, pushing herself up, but she couldn’t move.

The light was too bright, too hot. She couldn’t breathe.

Astra was stuck, the heat of The Flare evaporating the breath from her lungs, her consciousness slipping away.

Leona and Solan were not warring enemies. They were Tethered.

“Astra!”

Selenia told them they could sever it and break the curse.

“Where did you go?”

Solan hadn’t murdered Leona in cold blood—he’d been trying to save them.

“Oh gods.”

Everything they knew was a lie. They were rebelling, too.

“No, no, no, no, no.”

Oestera was there. She knew.

“Wake up!”

The Flare was Solan’s grief, not an attack on the courts.

“Come back to me!”

They were Tethered.

“As!”