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The ground ruptured, and light met dark met light—
Hunt whirled to Bryce, a shield of pure lightning crackling between them and the fighting. His voice was partially muffled by his helmet. “We need to get out of here—”
“No,” Bryce said, eyes on the Asteri.
“That’s not the plan,” Hunt growled, reaching for her elbow, intending to fly them away from the battlefield if she wouldn’t teleport them. They needed to destroy the firstlight core, or else all this would be pointless. With it still functional, the Asteri could run back to the palace, regenerate their powers, their bodies. “Bryce,” Hunt warned.
But Bryce drew the Starsword and Truth-Teller, starlight and darkness flowing down the black blades. She didn’t unite them, though. At least there was still time to stick to the plan—
Polaris burst through the fray, eyes burning with white light fixed on Bryce. “You should have run when you had the chance,” the North Star snarled.
The air seemed to pulse with the power from those blades, from Bryce. Like they knew the time to unite had come at last.
No running, then. Only adapting.
So Hunt rallied his own power, rising to meet his mate.
Polaris launched herself toward them, and Hunt struck: a blast of pure lightning at her feet, warping the very stone there, opening a pit for her to trip into—
Bryce teleported. Slowly enough that Hunt knew she was already tiring, despite the extra power from the star, but then she was there, in front of Polaris as the Asteri hit the ground, and only Hunt’s lightning shield kept the blast of power from frying Bryce as she lifted the sword and the dagger above her head.
Polaris’s eyes widened as Bryce plunged the blades into her chest. And as those blades thrust through skin and bone, the star in Bryce’s own chest flared out to meet them.
It collided with the blades, and both sword and knife blazed bright, as if white-hot. The light extended up through Bryce’s hands, her arms, her body, turning her incandescent—
Into a star. A sun.
Polaris screamed, her mouth opening unnaturally wide.
The slowing of the world when a great power died was familiar to Hunt from Micah’s death, from Shahar’s, from Sandriel’s, but this was so much worse.
With the helmet, Hunt could truly see everything: the particles of dust drifting by, the droplets of Polaris’s blood rising upward like a red rain as Bryce shoved her blades deeper and deeper—
The demon princes were turning toward them, their Asteri opponents with them.
Gone were the princes’ humanoid skins. Creatures of darkness and decay stood there, mouths full of sharp teeth, leathery wings splayed. A great black mass lay within Apollion’s yawning open mouth as he surged for Octartis—
The Asteri male flung up a wall of light.
The brimstone missiles from the shoulders and forearms of the mech-suit hybrids sparked again, ember by ember by ember, and Hunt could see with perfect clarity as the spiraling missiles launched into the world, toward the panicking Asterian Guard.
A deathstalker raced past, one galloping step lasting an age, a lifetime, an eon as it seemed to balance on one foot mid-stride.
And Bryce was still there, falling with Polaris, those two black blades meeting in the Asteri’s chest, Theia’s star uniting them in power and purpose—
Debris skittered toward Bryce, toward Polaris. Like whatever was happening at that intersection of the blades was drawing the world in, in, in.
To the portal to nowhere.
A primal chill sang down Hunt’s spine. Theia had been right; Aidas was right. That portal to nowhere, opening somehow inside Polaris, was dangerous not just to the Asteri, but to anyone in its reach.
He had to stop it. He had to shut it fast, or else he knew, instinctively, that all of them would perish—
Time dripped by as Polaris contorted in pain. Bryce’s hair was sucked toward the Asteri, toward the blades and wherever they were opening to—
Too slow. Whatever Theia’s star was summoning, the portal was opening too slowly, and every second that it yawned wider threatened to swallow Bryce, too.
He’d been made by Hel to help her. To end this. Helfire and starfire: a potent combination, Bryce had said in Hel.
