“Blood,” Cypherion answered.
In response, given that Tolek and I were both now weaponless, Rina pulled her dagger from her thigh. Twin to the one he had launched at the queen—the final in the set Cypherion had gifted me. Tol accepted it from her.
I held my hand between us, and for the second time in our lives, Tolek angled a blade at my flesh. This was so different than last time—when he’d been fulfilling his own worst fear.
We’d lived through another nightmare in this cavern. One that would echo for days, years. A slice to my palm to unleash a prophecy-fulfilling magic was trivial.
Only flinching slightly, Tolek dug a shallow cut. It stung, the blood welling, and one by one, I pressed the wound to each emblem in the order we’d returned them to the stone.
My heart pounded in my ears with every drop.
Paint the shards with vengeance, Damien had said to me so many months ago, following the Battle of Damenal.Awaken the answering presence.
He wanted me to learn the power waiting within me, had told me to master it but not allow it to be stronger than my own will. For this—to use it to absolve the curse.
With a breath and a desperate wish that we were doing the right thing for the warriors, I smeared my blood across the shard of Angelborn glinting against the worn stone.
“Blood,” I said, gathering a surge of Angellight in my palm, “and magic.”
Then, I blasted each emblem with a hit of golden light.
And the statues that had stood for centuries, buried in the heart of the Mystique Mountains, cracked.
Blurs of gold streaked into the air, formless masses with spots of misty lilac and stormy silver. Ocean blues and the burning of a firebird’s great wings. The strands of magic wrapping through me tugged toward their sources.
Toward the essences of the Angels that had been locked away.
Toward theirspirits, now taking shape of limbs and wings and bodies, as Bant’s had in the cell of a mountain camp all those months ago.
With one final burst of almighty light that sent us all stumbling back, those spirits became solid, ethereal bodies of the Seven Angels of the Gallantian Warriors. The Primes who founded our clans, who graced us with their magic.
I could barely make out their forms through the blinding white rays, but the seven strands of Angellight within me sang like strings of a harp being plucked.
At each added note of that melody, my body burned hotter.
Hotter.
Hotter.
I cried out, the light from the Angels intensifying.
Every muscle, every damn fiber of my being, throbbed with a pain worse than anything I’d ever felt. It blazed more intensely than the fire of the Spirit Volcano, twisted my being worse than any loss I’d suffered.
Magic whirled before me and through my bones. In flashes, I was detached from this place, instead on the bridge between the realms where constellations fell from the sky and winged beings soared. Or in the dream world where I’d last seen Damien. But with another blink, I stood back in the cavern.
To ground myself, I separated the light of each Angel in this form, tracking each string they called to.
There was Ptholenix’s burning fire, and Valyrie’s counter of cool starlight. Gaveny, a swirl of teal tinting the gold, as wild as a roaring sea, and Xenique, whose dark depths sang with the Godsblood she’d gifted my mother’s family. Damien and Bant—those two burned brightest of all, twin whips of light lashing within me. Each a string on that delicate instrument of power.
But it was Thorn’s—Thorn’s swirling mass of clouded silver that I’d seen in the pit, fractured as the crown that bore his name, that didn’t only play a string of my magic, but tore it.
He reached within me as he’d been trying to before and ripped the threads of my magic at the seams.
And with another echo of that keening wail, Thorn unlatched a final lock within me. He mangled, severed, and frayed some bolt that had been tampering the wild, myth-born magic and had my muscles igniting even worse than before.
It shredded skin and bone.
Unleashed something I hadn’t realized was deep within me.
