Ellery attempted to numb herself, but she couldn’t staunch her emotions. With Domenic, she never could.
The kiss became annihilation, her defenses stripped away, her heart bared and bloodied between them. He had excavated every piece of herself she’d buried, and this was her reward: to feel each moment of the battle to come, to bear the full grief and guilt of his demise. It would hurt until she followed him to the grave. It would be agony.
At least she could spare him suffering. She could make it painless. Quick.
Slowly, she reached for Iskarius. Until a searing heat flared against her, and she jolted away from Domenic as he, too, drew Valmordion.
They backed away from each other, wands raised.
They fired their first shots at the same time.
LDOMENICWINTER
Like two stars colliding, the end began.
Magic exploded across the grove, and wherever the ice devoured, there was fire to melt it, then water to douse it. Back and forth, their battle waged. The trees leaned in close as if to watch, even as the leaves were wrenched from their canopies, as the weight of icicles snapped their branches from their boughs and flames scorched their bark until they warped and crumbled into cinders. Uncontained, their duel could make a wasteland of the world.
Domenic had always known his power to be great. Yet to feel it and to witness it were two separate things entirely. With a single moment of distraction, he could carve a gorge across the continent. He could shatter the very sky.
I will shield Gallamere,he promised.
Her death will be painless,he promised.
I will save everyone,he promised.
Yet as the storm beyond the eye worsened, as spell after spell was thrown, still neither he nor Ellery had come close to achieving a killing blow. It was too much to manage all three.
Anguished, Domenic let the sanctuary he’d cast over the city fade. He apologized to Ellery in his heart. For all his vast, devastating power, he was still making promises he was doomed to break.
He could keep one.
LIELLERY
WINTER
Ellery bled. A gouge oozed from her left palm from when she’d fallen and braced herself. Her shoulder throbbed where she’d slammed it, so much her arm quivered as she aimed Iskarius. For all the power at her command, she was still human. Her bones could still break. Her muscles could still give out. Her body could only take so much.
And yet each time the debris settled, the smoke cleared, she frantically searched for him.
It was a terror each time she spotted him. For all Domenic also bled and heaved and staggered, he still lived, still fought, his power as formidable as her own.
It was a relief, too.
LIIDOMENICWINTER
Across Gallamere, Domenic felt the effect of his enchantment’s end.
The streets were deserted, cars left abandoned with frost splayed over windshields and water frozen in exhaust pipes. The power citywide had long since gone out. People crowded in makeshift fortresses of apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals, bundled in layers and carrying what little they could afford to deem precious. With today’s promise of the dawn of Summer, firewood supplies had all been freshly, measuredly depleted—and so they burned all manner of flammable refuse scavenged in the storm’s early hours: books and newspapers, furniture and fence posts. Victims of frostmaul already lay curled upon sidewalks, in subway stations, even in homes where the cold had crept through the subtle cracks of thresholds and windowpanes. And despite Domenic’s command that Sharpe shelter the Order magicians, there were too many ghasts to truly abandon their defenses, all converging on the Citadel.
In the storm, no one could see the battle unfolding upon the summit. Even the magicians nearby could only glimpse a dim flash of light, hear the whisper of explosions.
Until, with a deafeningboom,a crack cleaved through the earth and split the mountain apart.
LIIIELLERY
WINTER
They wrought ruin around them.
