At last, the warmth of his magic extinguished, and he was gone.
She’d won.
Yet although it was Domenic’s life that had ended, not her own, Ellery still felt as if she’d taken her dying breath alongside his.
LVIDOMENICWINTER
He suffered.
Merciless, agonizing cold seared across his skin and clotted the blood in his veins, and the ice entombing him tightened its grasp while his insides froze and bulged, and the scream he’d cried out crystallized into a sheath across his lips, and the frost stabbed needles into his eyes and his broken heart battered his ribs like an ice pick and the terror, thefailure,lashed through him, a storm of its own, until the heat within him sputtered, then waned, then finally, hopelessly snuffed out. For all that he’d sacrificed, for all that he’d agonized twisting himself into someone greater than he was, he’d ignored a simple possibility.
His destiny was a terrible one.
LVIIELLERY
WINTER
The instant Domenic’s heart stopped, Valmordion ignited.
Flames erupted across the wand’s shaft, and as its core flared, so too did the center of Domenic’s chest. Golden light radiated outward, brighter and brighter, until he was a molten silhouette.
Then they both shattered in a blaze of magic.
Ellery had no time to react. Shrapnel thorns and jagged ice stabbed into her skin, and her flesh burned from the explosion’s searing, roaring heat.
She careened back, her wails scarcely audible over the debris thudding atop the pulverized cobblestones and the ground rumbling beneath her. Blisters swelled upon her cheeks. Her neck. Her shoulders. Ellery frantically cast a healing spell, but although the burns stopped spreading, they didn’t mend.
Sunspots spun dizzily in her vision as she blinked at the scorch marks where his body had stood seconds ago. But Domenic and Valmordion were gone.
Gradually, the vortex surrounding the eye began to slow. The darkness dissolved like smoke, and true pristine sunlight poured into the grove, beaming through the alban’s branches. Above, the foreboding clouds thinned, then dissipated, revealing a cerulean sky. The barrage of winds diminished into a gentle breeze. And the temperature rose, brutal, frigid cold lifting into a crisp chill.
The scurge was gone.
She’d defeated the cataclysm.
Ellery stared at the leaves on the alban. They had turned to silver. To Winter. She felt the rustle of every root throughoutAlderland, from coast to coast, and knew that she had not just transformed Gallamere into Winter’s territory—she’d transformed the entire country.
But she felt no pride at her victory, only a distant relief.
Then a tide of grief swept through her, overwhelming, unbearable. She doubled over, whimpering. Her burns throbbed in agony. But after the brutality of Domenic’s demise, it was an agony she deserved.
In the absence of the storm, sound infiltrated: the roars and shrieks of winterghasts, the wailing of sirens, and human screams, a horrifying cacophony.
Ellery jolted upright. The cataclysm was gone, but the battle for the city was far from over. Which meant she couldn’t break, not yet.
She ran through the ruins of the grove, then inside the Citadel and down familiar corridors, all deserted. Pain lanced through her with every breath, alongside the stench of scorched flesh and singed hair. Finally, she burst outside again and skidded to a halt atop the entranceway stairs.
Ellery scarcely recognized the Gallamere sprawled before her. Skyscrapers decapitated by the storm’s winds. Rooftops torn off and scattered. Smoke pouring from gouges in the buildings. Ice floes drifting in a dead man’s float across the river. City streets crusted in dirty snow.
She took in the nearby carnage in grisly detail. Frostmaul-riddled bodies slumped across the steps where she and Domenic had given their first press conference. Exhausted magicians dueled with winterghasts down the length of Main Street, the trees that had once lined it snapped in two, the great gates at the end wrenched violently open by claws.
Ellery picked out familiar magicians in the fray; Tej Kumar speared a ghast with a ray of sunlight conjured from his training wand, fighting back-to-back with Demelza, who blocked a monster’s blows with a luminescent shield.
“Ellery!” Glynn rushed to her, clutching Aetherium. His glasses were cracked, one sleeve of his jacket torn and bloodied. She struggled to process careful, measured Glynn wounded in battle. “The scurge is gone! Does that mean you and Barrow—” He cut off, eyes widening as he took her in. “You need a healer. You look…”
“N-no,” Ellery rasped. It hurt to talk. “I already tried.”
“What could possibly.…” Glynn sucked in a horrified breath. “DidValmordiondo this? And you’ve survived, but Barrow’s not here. Oh, Ellery…” He surveyed the city, as though noticing for the first time that despite the lack of a scurge, it was still cold.
