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The daemon moved.

Idonea missed the strike. The unmistakable impact of bone hitting stone rang out, a sound to haunt her for the rest of her life. Lysander folded, and her scream stuck behind her teeth.

The relic was a thousand voices now, every one of them hungry.

Balmo crowded close to her elbow, its claws digging into her sleeve. "If you have trick. Now would be time. Daemon will not wait."

"What do you want from me?" Her voice came out flat. "Do you want me to use it? Is that what you have been waiting for?"

Nellith's eyes shone. "That is the only way you win. The only way you live."

Vinea's gaze returned to the relic in her hands. The viper at his wrist hissed in time with his breathing.

"Let me in." His voice was a pressure against the walls of the chamber, and the walls bent inward to meet it. "Let us in. The old world is dying. It is time to begin again."

Lysander pushed himself up onto one elbow. Blood ran from his temple into his eye. "Don't do it." His voice was ragged. "Don't become what she wants."

She tried to look at anything but her mother and the daemon. Dyota came into her mind. The long road that had brought her here.

For a single moment, she wondered what would happen if she dropped the relic. Walked away. It'd be easier, letting someone else do it.

Balmo's claw caught her elbow. "Balance, witch."

Vinea surged.

"Now."

The chamber air ruptured, stone fractured. Reality itself broke around her. A million voices pressed against her thinking, every one of them wanting.

In the last moment before she could no longer choose, she looked at her mother.

Nellith smiled. "Show them."

And Idonea, out of spite, or hope, or having never once learned how to quit, fed the relic her name.

There was no falling. Only a wrench, like a tooth pulled.

She landed, and the Nexis received her.

The ground was split obsidian, the cracks bleeding orange and gold from inside the stone. Under her boots it was neither quite rock nor quite liquid; it shifted when her weight changed. The sky above was black, threaded through with lightning that didn't move the way lightning moved. The air smelled of burnt iron and old copper.

Lysander rolled to his knees beside her, cursing. Lance came down from somewhere overhead with Lysander's sword in his jaw and dropped it on the stone. The blade rang.

Nellith was there. So was Vinea.

They were not what they had been in the chamber.

Vinea's true shape had come out of him. He stood twice the height of the chamber-form, his mane a moving thing made of weather rather than fur. Lightning ran between his horns in slow arcs. His claws scored the obsidian when he set his weight, and where the claws struck, fresh lava welled. The viper in his hand was the size of a man's leg now, hissing the way a kettle hisses approaching boil.

Nellith floated. Her feet were not on the ground. Her eyes were slit, the way Lance's were. Her hands ended in claws. Light around her made the shadows behind her wrong.

Balmo cowered behind a spire of fractured crystal, every tooth showing. Coming to the Nexis hadn't been its plan.

The relic's power leaked into Idonea's arms. She hadn't unlocked it fully. Enough to tempt the daemon. She held the rest behind her teeth.

Thunder cracked above. A bolt of white-gold lightning fell between her and Lysander, the heat of it sucking the air from her lungs. The obsidian liquefied where it struck. She leapt clear. Her boots came away tacky.

Vinea's voice rolled across the plane, everywhere at once.