The world was coming apart.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The moment Rhaelle dissolved into stardust, the ritual circle lost its anchor—and went mad.
The glowing glyphs at her feet spasmed, stretched, and then snapped, exploding outward in wild, jagged lines. The ritual’s energy, once contained and focused, surged across the battlefield like a broken dam.
The ground shuddered.
Then tore.
Fissures ripped through the plaza, racing out in all directions. Entire streets split open, buildings folding into chasms as easily as paper. Soldiers—Triarch loyalists and Vharon defenders alike—scrambled for footing, only to be swallowed by the cracking earth.
Screams pierced the air.
Beasts, half-bound by necromantic commands, plunged into the opening rifts, dragged down by gravity and collapsing stone. Some tried to claw their way back up. Shadows reached for them from below, hungry and endless.
Above it all—
The sky broke.
The swirling storm peeled apart, revealing the thing it had been circling: a massive black rift hanging where the heavens should be.
It wasn’t just darkness.
It was absence.
A hole in reality, edges glowing faintly with the shredded threads of magic that once separated Sun and Night. Bits of stone, shattered glass, and debris lifted from the ground and spiraled upward toward it, drawn by a force that had no name.
Ariaxa hovered in the air, caught between sky and earth.
Her wings trembled, their radiant feathers fraying at the edges, as if the void were trying to strip light from them. The veins glowing under her skin flickered, sometimes bright as molten gold, sometimes dim as cooling embers.
Her chest heaved.
Her pulse hammered.
Every breath hurt.
The Sun-Eclipse energy inside her pulsed wildly, straining against the limits of her human body. She could feel the rift pulling on it—like the void recognized her as something made to oppose it, and wanted to unmake her first.
“Hold,” she whispered to herself, jaw clenched. “Just—just hold together—”
Below, the plaza cracked again, a whole segment of the palace courtyard breaking loose and tilting toward the rift. People slid, scrambling, some catching edges, some vanishing into empty air.
“ARIA!”
Her name tore through the chaos like an arrow.
Ariaxa’s head snapped down.
Kaedan was running toward her, coat torn, wings slicked with dust and blood. He shoved past falling stone, leapt over widening cracks, shadows screaming around him like they wanted to hold him down.
His eyes locked on her—wild, desperate, furious with fear.
“Ariaxa!” he roared again.
Her heart clenched.
“Kaedan!” she called back, voice strained.
The bond between them pulsed in frantic rhythm. It felt stretched, thin, like some invisible hand was trying to tear it down the middle. Every time a fissure opened, every time a piece of the world fell upward or down, the bond reacted—
Because reality was fracturing.
And souls weren’t meant to exist inside broken glass.
Ariaxa turned her attention back to the sky—or what was left of it.
The rift was widening.
She could feel the pressure radiating from it, the way it tugged at her magic and her wings, the way it whispered with a formless hunger.
If it grew any larger, it would swallow Vharon. Then Elyndor. Then whatever lay between and beyond.
She couldn’t let that happen.
She couldn’t let Riven’s death, Kaedan’s suffering, her people’s pain all lead to a universe-wide grave.
“Not… like this,” she ground out.
She spread her arms.
Every muscle screamed in protest.
Her wings stretched to their full span, gold-black light catching on the swirling debris. Her crown of runes flickered, then steadied, forming a thin halo above her head.
She lifted her hands toward the rift.
Magic roared to life.
Sun-fire burned up from her core, searing along her veins. Night-shadow surged down from the bond, Kaedan’s essence answering her call even from a distance. The two forces collided in her chest—
Then flowed into her arms.
She unleashed it.
A wide arc of Sun-Eclipse energy surged from her palms, not as a spear this time, but as a net. It spread upward, stretching into a luminous web of gold and black threads that reached toward the torn sky.
When it hit the edges of the rift, the air screamed.
The rift shrank.
Just a little.
Just enough that the pull lessened for a heartbeat. Floating debris slowed. The earth’s cracking staggered.
Hope flared in Ariaxa’s chest.
“I can do this,” she whispered through gritted teeth. “I can—”
The rift fought back.
It flared, raw and hostile, pushing against the net of her magic. Her power rebounded down her arms, burning her skin from the inside out. Her fingers spasmed, nerves screaming.
Her wings faltered.
Her light dimmed.
The net held—
Then fractured.
Pieces of it snapped, whiplashing back into her like barbed cords. Ariaxa gasped, convulsing mid-air, her magic lashing through her nerves like molten acid.
“ARIA!”
Kaedan’s voice again.
Closer now.
She didn’t dare look.
If she faltered—
if she lost focus—
the rift would rip open even further.
Her entire body shook as she pushed more power into the net, desperately trying to stretch it across the gaping wound in the sky. Every cell in her body screamed.
Too big, her mind whispered.
Too much.
She ignored it.
She thought of Riven.
Save him. Save them all.
Her teeth ground together. Tears streaked down her cheeks, evaporating into steam before they fell.
“Close,” she hissed at the rift. “Close, damn you—”
It didn’t.
Her magic was slowing it.
But not sealing it.
“ARIA!”
This time, Kaedan’s voice was so close she could feel it shiver along the bond like his hand had grabbed her heart.
“Kaedan, stay back!” she shouted, still holding her arms toward the sky. “I can’t—hold this—and protect you at the same time—”
“Then don’t protect me,” he snarled.
She heard stone cracking, saw—out of the corner of her eye—a chunk of courtyard tilt and then fall away into the void like a ship slipping off the edge of the world.
“KAEDAN!” she choked. “For once in your cursed life, listen to me!”
“Not happening,” he growled.
Another fissure split the ground, running straight toward the place he’d last been standing.
The bond jolted.
Instinct screamed at her—turn, look, run to him—
She couldn’t.
If she stopped, even for a second, the net would rip. The rift would widen.
Thousands more would die.
Her arms trembled violently. Blood—glowing faint gold—dripped from her nose.
Her power started to stutter.
“Come on,” she begged herself. “Come on, Ariaxa. Hold. Hold.”
If she could just buy Kaedan enough time—
just hold the rift long enough for him to escape—
The bond surged.
Someone grabbed her wrist.
His fingers, familiar even through the raw blaze of magic, clamped around her like an anchor in a storm.
Kaedan.
He’d made it to her.
He stood on a ledge of broken stone that had once been part of the palace steps, body braced, wings half-open in the howling wind. Gravel shifted beneath his boots as the ground trembled dangerously.
His eyes met hers.
Red and gold, wild and burning.
“Together,” he shouted over the roar. “You don’t carry this alone.”
The bond snapped taut.
His shadow poured into her arm, amplifying the net, bolstering it. Her magic flared brighter, the web of light pressing harder against the edges of the rift.
For a moment—
It worked.
The rift shrunk another inch.
The pull weakened.
Ariaxa’s breath hitched with relief.
“Kaedan,” she panted, “if you keep feeding me—if the bond burns out—”
“Then we burn out together,” he shot back, voice hoarse. “I told you. Equal.”
NSFW heat cut through the terror — the way he said together felt like a vow in a different context, one whispered against bare skin in a quiet room.
But there was nothing quiet about this.
The earth gave another violent lurch.
The fractured stone beneath Kaedan’s boots cracked straight down the middle.
His grip on her wrist tightened instinctively.
“Kaedan—”
The entire platform he stood on detached from the main courtyard. For a frozen heartbeat, it hung in the air with them—
Then dropped.
The world tilted.
Stone fell.
So did Kaedan.
His hand yanked hard on her wrist, dragging her down with him, net of light and all.
Ariaxa’s wings snapped open in reflex, magic flaring in wild, panicked bursts.
The bond screamed.
The rift roared.
And as debris and bodies and chunks of Vharon tumbled into the churning void, Kaedan reached her, grabbed her wrist — and the ground collapses beneath them both.