“Please, love,” I whisper. “I beg of you. Come back to me. Don’t leave me here to face this end without you by my side.”
Then I rise. Time rushes forward once again.
The fear that once clawed at my chest recedes, replaced by something steady. Focused. Certain.
Dagda surges again as I shield us. Then I reach down deep inside me and draw on everything, every divine drop, every inbred shred of magic, and all the knowledge of the world I’ve gained. All the remaining life that as a Horseman lives inside me, and I push against Dagda.
He retreats like before, gathering his strength only to unleash another wave—hotter and more violent.
This time, I do not resist.
I do not push.
I do not fight.
I open myself.
I drop my guard entirely and invoke the highest authority in the known universe—not as a plea, but as a right granted by covenant and purpose. My power has always been to pull and to push, to unmake and to return. To siphon life and send it where it must go.
And so I draw—pull on Dagda’s great power. I pull every bit of it into myself, funneling it through the architecture of my being, the way I have drawn from creation itself countless times before.
And it works.
I draw every divine drop, every dying ember of his rage, every fragment of power he has already spilled too freely to reclaim. By the time Dagda realizes what I am doing, it is too late.
He has given too much of himself away.
With his essence and my God-given design, I become something else entirely.
Something capable of ending a god.
And something—if I am right—capable of giving life back to where it was taken.
The light starts in my chest.
Not as an explosion, but as pressure—dense, impossible, alive. It pushes outward through bone and muscle, through veins that were never meant to hold this much divinity. I feel it bleed through me, feel my form begin to glow as my aura ignites and spills into the world.
The air bends.
The ground releases me.
I lift from the earth without effort, as though the land itself understands resistance is pointless. My cloak disappears. My true form breaks free from its human confines. My great wings unfurl and expand. Luminescent light spreads outward rapidly from me into the forest. Heat coils beneath my feet. Embers spiral upward, caught in the pull of my rising power. Wind answers me instinctively, wrapping around my body in hot, unruly currents that hum with recognition.
I am no longer just standing between destruction and salvation.
I am becoming the Fír itself.
Justice. Light. Truth. Natural order.
The answer comes to me as if spoken from God’s lips.
Not simple Fír—but Fírdor.
The gateway to such things. The threshold through which truth, justice, and order are known.
I draw one breath.
Just one.
