It topples …drops.Slow at first, then faster, chafing the sky while my knees threaten to buckle.
My Other pushes so close to the surface a familiar numbness threatens to pull me under. She stops on the precipice, watching through my eyes like she’s peeking over a windowsill. Together, we trail that little wonky moon as it makes its final journey, pitching past the arched horizon before its distant collision shakes the world.
A rough sound moves up my throat, more beast than fae but very much belonging to both of us.
Clode shoves me from behind.
I stumble into a gusting clamor that threatens to pick me up and toss me off the mountain. Drop low to claw into cracked clefts in the stone, innately disturbed by the deafening bluster. Like an exhale that never stops to inflate again.
But there’s something else.
An echoey undertone that clogs my brain so full I want to compact down and cry. Instead, I snarl, trying to work out if Clode sent me through the wrong tunnel or if she has, in fact, grown to dislike me enough to torture me, when a splitting sound rends through the squalling racket.
The ground beneath me slips away.
I plummet with it, screaming. Not with fear, but frustration.
Clode absolutely just coaxed me out here so Bulder could toss me down the mountainside.
Assholes.
All the breath is punched from my lungs as I collide with something hard, leathery, ice cold, and …moving.Undulating beneath me like—
“Líri …”
I open my chest, let her presence flood me. She laments, the sound tapering to a giddy honk while I gain purchase, settling my feet against her wing buds. I manage to curl my fingers around her reins before she banks away from the deluge of rock and snow that’s falling toward the thick, fire-lit smog that’s started to gather across the plains.
She cuts from side to side, then shoots up, as though she’s about to power us beyond gravity’s grip, offering me a daunting view of the plains, pocked with hundreds of fiery collisions as far as the eye can see. Shock waves undulate through the dense and dusty cloud of exhausts rising with each ferocious strike the ground endures.
My heart crushes at the sight, panic rising. Finding it hard to believe thatanything’sgoing to be left by the end of this.
Líri flicks around and halts with a forward tilt of her body. Tilling her wings, she drops her head and neck, allowing me an unveiled view of the mountain’s flattened peak. What appears to be the epicenter of the rippling waves.
I squint through the gale to its core, heart stopping at the sight of a light-blue gown I recognize. Long pale hair whipping in the surge.Kyzari …bound within the broad, muscled embrace of a winged being the likes of which I’ve never seen.
Protective rage has my upper lip curling back from my canines, but then I look deeper.
Harder.
See the tender way he’s cupping her cheek; the yearning in the soft slants of Kyzari’s face; the gentle tilt of her head as she looks up at him, lips moving with words I can’t hear, though I canseethe intent in her gaze.
Love.
With deeper observation, I realize those ripples are undulating not just down into the mountain’s crevices and across the plains, but alsoupward. Toward the remaining moons still precariously perched in the sky, some threatening to wobble … free—
“Fuck.”
The moons … They’re falling because ofthem.The strange energyrippling from the doting pair is shaking the atmosphere with enough might to dislodge the moons, ripping them to the ground with catastrophic force.
My heart jolts in synchrony with another pitched plummet.
My daughter is destroying the world …
“Creators,” I murmur, something almost leaning forward and whispering in my ear. Telling me the moons willkeepfalling until the sky is empty if something doesn’t change. If that strange, blustering clamor doesn’t dissipate.
I tense my jaw, flatten against Líri, and nudge her forward. She presses her wings close to her sides and dives—body sleek, powering headfirst toward Kyzari, straight into the surging current that threatens to strip the skin from my bones, each breath a gasped battle. Despite it, Líri keeps strong and streamlined … until the blare packs a raging punch and snatches her wings from her body, prying them wide enough they catch like a sail, tossing us sideways.
Líri doesn’t cry out in panic or pain, but with every frantic jolt, she releases a raginghonk,like she’s chastising the sky. Telling it to leave her alone.
