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It was a choice between letting Holstrom die or keep trying to make it to Bryce.
And because he knew his mate would never forgive him if he abandoned Ithan, Hunt grabbed the wolf and launched into the air, dodging falling blocks of crystal and stone and metal.
He had no idea where they landed, only that it was on the rim of a giant crater that had not been there before. It reminded him of the news footage he’d seen of what remained of Asphodel Meadows—he could only wonder if Bryce had done so intentionally.
But as Hunt shook the blood and dust from his eyes, he saw what lay at the crater’s heart: a gaping void. Stars beyond it.
The force of the void yanked him inward, tugged him toward it—
“Go,” he ordered Holstrom. “Get as many people as you can out of the way.”
Because on the other side of the portal that Bryce had somehow opened into the stars, there was a wall of impenetrable darkness. Hunt could just make out the glowing figures being sucked toward it.
Bryce had opened a black hole in the middle of Midgard.
Had she done it with the blades? Or had the joining of the Starsword and Truth-Teller merely given her the idea of how she might capture all the Asteri at once, rather than picking them off individually?
It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered, because there was a fucking black hole on the other side of that portal, and the force of it was so strong that this side of the portal was being sucked toward it, too—
But that didn’t matter, either.
Because there, among those glowing lights of the Asteri … that was Bryce’s starlight.
And she was headed to that black hole as well.
* * *
Bryce knew she should be dead. There was no air here, no warmth.
Maybe it was the Horn in her flesh, the Made essence of her, that kept her alive—just enough.
It had been a gamble. But she’d seen what the Starsword and Truth-Teller had done to Polaris. They had created a void that had sucked the Asteri in—the only sort of prison that might destroy a being of light. The only force in the universe that ate light, so strong no light could ever escape it. A portal to nowhere.
To a black hole.
Wasn’t that the unholy power that Apollion possessed? The power of the Void. The antithesis of light.
The only thing that could kill a planet in one bite. Destroy the Asteri, and Midgard with them.
The Asteri knew it as well—they’d always known it, and employed it for their kill switch, to be activated upon destruction of the firstlight core.
So she’d met their black hole with one of her own. A bigger one. A black hole—a void—to eat other black holes.
Because Bryce couldn’t let that happen to Midgard. She’d opened her portal to her black hole only wide enough for those who were right next to the core to be sucked in with it.
And now she was here, careening through space with the Asteri.
Light poured from the glowing beings around her, their screams silenced from lack of air. Behind her, the only light snuck in through a sliver she’d left behind … a sliver she still needed to close. One small window to Midgard. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not yet.
She let herself look at that sliver of light, of blue sky. The last trace of home.
I believe it all happened for a reason. I believe it wasn’t for nothing.
Ahead of the Asteri was the glowing mass that was the firstlight core, the black, growing hole in the heart of it …
The light stretched and bent as it was pulled into the yawning maw of the larger black hole. And then was gone.
