But Jezebel wouldn’t be deterred. “Unless you’re truly so sacred of it, do it! Unless you’re scared of what the Angels may do and want to hide instead!”
My armor was cracking, power ebbing closer to the surface.
I wasn’t. I wasn’t one to hide. I wasn’t one to run. And as those truths settled into me, I screamed.
And light burst from my skin. Searing and all-consuming. Uplifting but not devouring.
This. This was the Angellight from the battle against Kakias, the pulling of different hollows of my spirit, each tethered to a thread of magic in the emblems. The euphoria, the fulfillment, it all flooded me.
Gold light filled the cave and pulsed against my skin, begging me to use it.
A fearful thought broke through:I don’t know how.
It is in your blood, a voice echoed—a voice I knew, but I couldn’t place. Not in this haze of burning.
Searing.
It didn’t singe the brush. Didn’t melt the sand. If anything, it seemed to feed life deeper into the earth. To restore weeds withered in the cave corners and crystalize the soft grains beneath my boots.
Even the khrysaor and Sapphire looked curiously at it, neither attracted or repelled. And Jezebel?—
Jez had erected a precautionary silver-blue shield before herself and Erista. But unlike in the inn, this light didn’t hunger for hers.
As our eyes locked, she dropped that wall, a ring of charred earth left where it had been.
And still, my Angellight did not harm her. It didn’t lunge, didn’t lock around her throat. Did nothing but slowly, curiously, slip across her skin with affectionate licks of greeting.
“How does it feel?” Erista asked, eyeing the gold shimmering up Jezebel’s arm.
I tugged at Damien’s thread, warmth gathering in my chest. “It feels how it used to. The safe version.”
“Can you do anything with it?”
With another pull on Damien’s string, I sent it shooting toward my pack. It dug within, spilling the five emblems across sand that glowed like diamonds.
The gold light wafted the emblems to me as if on a breeze. I crouched down, running my fingers over each, luxuriating in the distinct presence of each connection.
It was the newest one, though—Valyrie’s heart—whose pulse beat the loudest. I scooped up the carving and felt into the shrinking hollows of my spirit.
“There,” I muttered. A bead of power swirled like the depths of the cosmos, unspooling within me. It stretched out, longing to meld with its five counterparts.
I latched on to it and pulled, feeding that source into the power within the emblem. It fueled me in turn.
Until a might like the stars flooded the cave, darkness and silver stars shimmering through my Angellight in a canopy across the rocky ceiling.
“That’s Valyrie,” Erista gasped, constellations reflected across her awed face.
“It is,” I agreed.
An instinct screamed in my bones, wanting to be united with this emblem as it had the others.
My gaze flashed between the fated lovers in my palm and the magic painting the ceiling. Then, I took my dagger from my thigh. With a prick to my finger, I smeared a streak of crimson across Valyrie’s heart.
And her magic reared up, shooting stars and trails of white fire among those cosmos. Jezebel released a laugh, and I tugged on the other threads of light. Gaveny’s turquoise-tinted tides and Ptholenix’s burning fire frolicked with the constellations, the colors of Angellight tangling in the air. Thorn’s silver storms rioted through them, and Damien’s and Bant’s brute forces cracked like lightning strikes.
Together, they forged a new world around us. The crystallized grains of sand rose into the air, swarming among the light, shadows painting them deep maroons.
And through me, that empowering sensation I’d come to associate with Angellight flooded. It burned and ignited all my deepest hollows, restoring my magic.
