She tried to focus it, to bottle up the fire and still everything else around her. She let her mind hold the flames, concentrating them into a direct line the way Luxuros had taught her before. She let the Solarian slip into the space in her mind as well, his hatred and fear and vicious pain whirling into a funnel of reds and oranges around her unholy light. His eyes raked over her once more and she let it all break away from her control, pushing it into his chest.
He knew, she realized, from the moment he saw her glowing palms. He knew it was coming, but he also knew there was nothing he could do to stop her.
The fear combusted, sending a ripple of fire and smoke through the soft flesh of his lungs, consuming them. In her mind, he burned from the inside out, the cloud of anger in his chest churning brightly into something like ash, floating down to the forest floor.
His eyes turned on her once more, frenzied as a scream left his lips.
“As!”
Her shoulders shook under his touch, but she was trapped somewhere liminal, not quite hearing him as she watched a tendril of smoke rise from the Solarian’s throat.
He collapsed to the clearing, his knees hitting the floor with a muted thud—so much quieter than she’d imagined death to be.
“Astra,” Luxuros said again, his hands gripping her shoulders tightly. “Come back,” he whispered.
Her eyes fluttered open to a hand clasped over Ameera’s mouth as she took in what Astra had done. She risked a glance to the clearing. The lifeless body of the spy toppled over, smoke still rising and dissolving from his lips.
The horror of what she’d done tied her veins into knots as her vision blurred, searing white at the edges. Everything in her drained somewhere ethereal, somewhere she hadn’t just immolated a man, pulling her energy into another dimension altogether.
“It’s alright,” the commander murmured against her, but she was no longer present to hear his words.
Her mind spiraled in on itself, and she was gone.
“You have to wake up,” Luxuros whispered against her neck as his hands lifted her knees and shoulders. “Please, wake up.” He jogged across the palace gardens, her head bouncing with each step in a way that made Ameera’s stomach churn.
“I’m awake,” Astra tried to say, her eyes unable to prove it. “I’m right here.”
“Please,” he hissed, setting Astra on her bed as the room filled with maidens. Shadows crossed over her as an herbal scent filled her lungs, the smoke sticking to the walls of her ribcage the same way it rose over the Solarian.
She felt sick again.
“As,” Luxuros pleaded, but his voice was distant, slipping away as she fell deeper within herself. Heat consumed her feet and ankles as she fell into a lake of fire, the raw flames licking at her thighs and hands, scraping her flesh.
She opened her mouth to scream, but only smoke came out.
“Astra! Wake up!”
“How long has she been out?”
Nayson’s voice was the first she heard as her eyes fluttered against her cheeks, the moonblossom scent of Lunaria slipping in through her nose, soothing her.
“A little over six hours,” Luxuros said, his voice low, strange.
Scared, she realized.
Scared of what she was.
It came rushing back at once. The twisted expression on the Solarian’s face as he crumbled to his knees, the putrid stench of singed flesh. The wisps of smoke or soul leaving his corpse, perhaps both.
Ameera hovered at her feet, the tides in her chest vacillating from violet terror to navy regret.
“Astra!” Her father’s voice cut through the buzzing between her ears. She blinked as the bedroom came into focus. Several sets of eyes peered back at her as she pushed herself up, the pain in her back jarring any remaining haze from her mind. Nayson clasped her hand between his, scanning every fragment of her as she shuffled to rest against the headboard. “Darling?”
“Did I?—”
“Yes,” the commander cut her off, his head tilting softly at Tula, the High Priestess, resting a hand on the foot of her bed. She was already trying to spin this for Oestera’s ears should the queen return soon. “You fell off your horse,” Luxuros explained.
“Are you all right?” Nayson asked.
