I pulled down her collar, seeing we were out of time and the blackness wasno longer just a vine crawling toward her heart. It reached its destination and started to spread over the left side of her chest like the veins in a translucent black rose.
“I claim you, Astraea. In every lifetime, I love you. Till kingdom come.”
I kissed her one last time, and with my mouth on hers, I took her hand and reached through the mirror.
PARTFIVE
TheStars andNightItself
The realms were breaking without the Dusk and the Dawn, and the bonded souls responsible now faced judgment in the Hall of the Gods. They were also perhaps the only hope to restore balance.
Astraea Lightborne; the star-maiden. Godkiller. Lightsdeath. The Daughter of Dusk and Dawn come to take their place. Is that the destiny you embrace?
“Yes.”
Rainyte Azreal Ashfyre; the lost first son. Nightsdeath. The Realm Walker come to sacrifice himself to stay with his Maiden. Is that the destiny you embrace?
“I do.”
So their punishment shall be their blessing. The tale of two souls that defied time and killed gods would live for eternity in the legends of men. Such triumph wrapped in tragedy.
Such a tale… that was not finished.
53Nyte
I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t care.
All I could do was stare at my vacant hands, in complete denial about how Astraea had drifted away from me like stardust. I knelt here alone when seconds ago she was cradled against me.
I had been wrong.
“Give her back to me,” I said through a breath, barely able to speak from the grief building in my throat and wracking a chill through my body. “Please.”
“Rainyte.” A feminine voice spoke my name.
It sounded familiar, echoing around me like an embrace I didn’t want. The delicate resonance hung in the air like a half-remembered dream, wavering and unsteady, as though it were a fragile thing that could vanish at any moment.
I didn’t care. She was not the one I wanted to turn around and see.
“Give her back!” I yelled, tightening my hands into fists and doubling over with the agony.
“My son.”
Those two words softened my hard breaths. I couldn’t understand why I was facing my mother. Was it truly her or the call of my reaching subconscious that brought the Goddess here?
Straightening, I didn’t even know whereherewas. There was no beginning and no end to the vast bright canvas around me.
My body felt fragmented, as if pieces of me had been scattered beyond reach. I turned, and there she was—the flaming-haired fae, her figure hazy and ethereal, flickering with an otherworldly glow. She looked like she was made of light and shadow, less a solid form than a lingering spirit, the ghost of the being she once was.
Her face held a quiet sadness, a centuries-old weight that spoke of choices and sacrifices I couldn’t begin to understand. She’d once been bound to a sacred duty, but she had abandoned it long ago, forsaking the realm she’d swornto balance and protect to chase a love on land that had turned to dust in her hands. Again and again, the life on land had betrayed her, and yet here she stood, unwhole but unyielding, a relic of her own defiance.
I was one of those betrayals—a harm done to her. Both in the way I was a love taken from her and how I’d almost been the hand to end her once and for all when I’d traveled back to the land I came from during my death-like curse.
“Mother,” I said, still finding the term so unusual.
I had her eyes, of course. She was not just the origin of these bright golden irises but the shape of them too.
“My boy,” she whispered.
