Page 219 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Unable to stop it, sunfire raced through the power Galaeryn had amassed over centuries, unmaking the magic that held his ascension together.

The king hurled himself toward the portal.

Blue light peeled from him as he fled, exposing the body he’d try to carry into the stars—flesh, crown, all of it—while Serenna and Vesryn had left theirs far below.

Serenna felt an infinitesimal rupture inside Galaeryn’s power as a sudden silence, the place where obedience had always risen to meet him gone still.

His ascent slowed, silver light cracking across his skin. Along the widening fissures, his flesh dissolved into fragments that lifted away and scattered into the dark.

Then his fury sharpened, and the magic around him pulsed with it. Serenna understood. If he couldn’t rule the stars, he’d make a grave of the sky.

Galaeryn went still under the portal. The light spilling from his ruined body reversed, pouring back into his flesh, centuries of stolen power compressing into the body already disintegrating around him.

Pressure crowded around Serenna as Galaeryn drew the wreckage of his ascension inward. The sunfire between them shuddered with it, and the pull raced backward through the current still joining her to the circles below.

The Wells jolted through Serenna’s awareness. She felt the lives at the far end of every connection and understood what his collapse would take with it if she left them open.

Her sunfire already burned through Galaeryn, dissolving his flesh. The king was fading.

Serenna severed every path beyond herself and let the Starshards go. One by one, the Wells vanished from her awareness, the prismatic connections between the gems going dark far below.

She’d chosen this death and refused to let the king dictate theirs.

Vesryn’s presence settled against her, tender as a hand seeking hers in the dark.

Serenna held him close as Galaeryn drew the last of his power inward.

Down near the lake, she sensed Fenn plunging after the body she’d left behind. His panic tore through the bond, raw and furious, all claws and fangs and love refusing grief.

Serenna opened the bond to Fenn and let him feel everything she had no time left to say.

Then sunfire burst from Galaeryn, every fissure in his body flooding with light.

The world flashed white, and Serenna vanished into starlight.

CHAPTER 57

LYKOR

Lykor stood on the lake’s shore with Jassyn at his side, mud clinging to his boots. Beside them, the rift he’d torn open for Rimeclaw and Blossom sealed behind the dragons, ferrying them beyond Galaeryn’s reach before the king could drive another leash through their skulls.

Seconds.

That was how long the victory of freeing Rimeclaw lasted.

Sunfire flared high above the Drowned Spires. Galaeryn’s ascending light cinched inward, compressing until his form became a single point against the dark.

Then the sky detonated.

Light ripped outward in an expanding ring. The blazing front raced across the lake, widening as it clawed toward every horizon. The king’s portal convulsed overhead and vanished inside the eruption.

The lake’s surface flattened ahead of the blast, smooth as polished steel. Behind it, water heaved upward in boiling walls.

Night vanished. Light scoured every shadow from the shore—every soldier, every wing, every lifted blade.

Lykor’s vision went dark. Pain lanced behind his eyes and sank into his fangs. His body moved without waiting for permission.

He slammed into Jassyn and drove him down into the mud, covering him as frost exploded from his palms. Ice vaulted over them in serrated plates, each shard driven into place by the only thought left clear enough to survive the impact.