I stepped through the void to answer.
51Astraea
I was a star given breath and the night given flesh. A triumphant embodiment of the lunar sky.
My city was crying, my city was in pain, and I crossed the courtyard toward the black castle like a starlight storm to eradicate the poison before it spread any further.
I was Lightsdeath, but I was also in full control of the deadly power coursing through me.
Defeating the God of Dusk was my final task, and then I would let my fate be sealed. Nyte’s blood was so close to my heart now. If I wasn’t harnessing so much power, the agony would be ripping me apart from the inside as though my heart was clawing at my flesh to escape it.
The god stood proudly across the courtyard. Expecting me. I didn’t let that waver my focus.
It wasn’t a surprise to see Notus standing with him.
“You are aware that is not Aquilo you ally with,” I said to him.
Dusk wore the High Celestial’s face, giving him full control of Aquilo Sera’s province and armies. Over a dozen archers held aim with crimson-tipped arrows at me. I didn’t balk at them in the slightest.
“You need to be stopped once and for all,” Notus seethed.
I smiled wickedly.
“I know what fate is now,” I said across the eerie silence before the break of battle. “You created me to govern this world to your order, but the irony of life is that every evil inevitably brings about their own downfall. I am yours. I never abandoned my duty or swayed from my path. It was always supposed to lead me here. You created a means to stop your tyranny.”
“You are but a child to my existence, Astraea Lightborne. I have lived since the dawn of time, my dear. I am fate.”
“You are a god with too much greed. The Dusk that cannot exist without the Dawn, and she is dead.”
“So I have felt.”
His tone was so stripped of emotion, resembling Dawn in many ways as a god incapable of human feelings.
“You’re jealous of what I am. Mortal.”
“All your power, even that from Death himself, will be mine. You don’t have long; I can feel the countdown of your fragile time. It would be a waste for all you are to simply die. This is a gift, Astraea; your legacy will live on when I take over your form.”
“As I told Dawn before I killed her, you cannot have my life.”
I needed the true name of Dusk to kill him, and there was only one person who stood a chance of breaching his mind just enough to hear it.
The smile across Dusk’s face chilled me. Braced me.
“These arrows were never for you,” he said gleefully. “They are for him.”
Every aim shifted a few fractions and the archers fired faster than I could take a breath.
The grunt of pain behind me silenced my world.
Turning around stopped time.
My eyes tracked the arrow tips first. Eight of them pierced him. Three in his abdomen, two in his left shoulder, two in the right. And one… narrowly missing his heart.
Nyte’s wide eyes lifted from the arrows to me and I ran to him.
“You’re okay,” I said, desperate words that made no sense. They were cruel cold lies, yet more words of delusional reassurance spilled from me as my hands held his face.
“Don’t worry about me,” he rasped. His gaze lifted and rage sparked through his agony.
