T he darkness was oppressive, the hours until dawn endless. The only light arose from Max’s fires and the torches along the barricades, which

illuminated screaming faces in slashes of crimson. When our own dead began to move, it seemed too nightmarish to be real.

Our defenses had nearly fallen apart. The Fey were making strong headway, cutting through the tide of corpses, though they too struggled against the sheer mass of people. Max ran through the lines of Aran soldiers that still held, roaring commands and encouragements, voice increasingly hoarse. The weight of exhaustion pressed down on our shoulders.

Despite our best efforts, our defenses were starting to collapse.

Crack!

The sound made Max and I freeze. We watched in horror as a third wave of Fey warriors crashed over our banks. Worse, these were magic users—they broke down our Solarie walls of earth as if they were nothing.

I let out a strangled sound. We were done.

Between the corpses and the Fey, there were just too many of them. Max and I looked at each other, and I could see the same horrible realization in his face.

He swallowed and tightened his grip around his weapon. Flames shuddered to life again along its length. In turn, I lifted Il’Sahaj. At least we would go down together—fighting until our last breath.

Then I caught sight of something strange in the distance, approaching through the pass leading into the city—something that looked different from

the rest of the decimated landscape. A string of… light? Of gold? It was nearly impossible to see in the darkness.

I blinked blearily at it, then grabbed Max’s arm. “Max. Look!”

His brow furrowed. At first, he didn’t seem to know what he was looking at, either. Then he saw what I did:

It wasn’t just light. It was a distant row of torches, thousands of them, illuminating gold armor and matching banners that waved a silent greeting. The banners were too distant to read, but I knew what they bore—the insignia of the Roseteeth Company.

Max nearly fell to his knees, letting out a laugh of exhausted, delirious euphoria. “Fucking Brayan. I have never loved that bastard more.”

The Roseteeth worked fast. They poured into the city from the north. Brayan had been right—they were incredible warriors. Their arrival split the Fey’s focus, pulling our enemies in multiple directions. Did it turn the tides? It was too early to tell—in the thick of something this bloodthirsty, this dark, what did “winning” even look like? But with the addition of these forces, now we were, at least, surviving. I knew that much, and knew it was more than we could have hoped for minutes ago.

Eventually, Max and I fell back behind one of the few remaining fortifications. We were both breathing so heavily we could hardly speak. My muscles screamed. I was injured somewhere, but at this point I didn’t even know where.

“Until we kill Nura, this will never end,” I panted.

Max nodded, unable to speak. He was bleeding, too. How badly had he been—?

“Maxantarius!”

The figure came out of nowhere. My sword was already inches from his throat when a high voice shrieked, “Wait!”

Max conjured flames and Vardir’s terrified face flickered into the light, lips trembling, knobby hands raised.

“I came to help! I came to help!” “And how is that?” Max demanded.

“I— I— I—” He swallowed hard. “I was wrong. I miscalculated. I didn’t understand. Not until now! Not until now, I didn’t understand, I didn’t—”

“Vardir!” Max snapped. “Tell us what you have to say, fast, before we decide to stop being so patient.”

“That! And— and that! It is bad, very, very bad.”

I followed his pointing finger—to the red smoke rising from the Towers’ ruin, and then to the gold smoke emanating where the shore met the surf, near the naval base.

“You know what that is?” I said.

“I didn’t, I didn’t realize for the longest time, but it’s so obvious, actually—” He laughed, high and frantic. “It’s bleeding.”

“Bleeding?” I pressed.

“We’ve disrupted the natural order,” Vardir said. “We pinched and pressed and stabbed and dug—”

“Get to the point, Vardir,” Max growled. He had to pause to stab an incoming corpse soldier. Encroaching violence grew louder from behind the barrier. Any second now, we would be overrun. We couldn’t just stand here. “Yes, bleeding! Bleeding! Like flesh!” Vardir pinched his own sagging skin, as if for emphasis. “Magic is made up of layers, you know, more powerful and volatile the deeper you go. But what happens when you puncture so many holes in the flesh of magic? What happens if you tear out what makes it whole? That is what we have been doing, most of all with the Lejaras. We have been tearing and tearing the barrier between the layers of

magic, and today, we have pushed it over the edge.”

I barely had time to cut down a corpse before it wrapped its hands around Vardir, who was so absorbed in what he was telling us that he didn’t so much as flinch.

My head swam. The buzzing beneath my skin, coupled with the chaos, made it difficult to understand what Vardir was saying.

“The underlying structure is compromised,” Vardir said again, more pressingly. “The structure of magic itself.”

“Which means… a collapse?” I said.

Vardir nodded, a grin spreading over his face. “It is fascinating. I didn’t know such a thing was possible!” The grin soured. “Terrible, of course. Terrible. It would mean the end of— well, everything, mostly. Unless the wounds are closed.”

“Closed?” Max now had to raise his voice. Fighting surrounded us again like a rising tide of blood.

“It is about balance, you see. One would have to wield all three Lejaras at once. Creation, change, death. Balance them to each other again. And then, close the gaps. Cut off the flow of magic between layers—all of it. And in doing so, destroy them. Simple.”

Simple, he said. That made me want to laugh.

I thought of how it had felt to Wield just the change magic—how utterly all-consuming it was. The thought of Wielding all three at the same time, and using them to do something so… so intangible…

Max kicked another body off his spear. “Vardir,” he said, between heaving breaths, “that sounds fucking ridiculous.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Vardir said, brightly. “It might kill you, but I assure you, it is very possible. Though…” His brow knitted. “You probably couldn’t do it just anywhere. Few locations could withstand and channel the use of all those magics at once.”

Max and I exchanged a hopeless look, interrupted when a blade nicked my shoulder from behind and Max, without hesitation, reached past me to skewer the Fey soldier responsible.

Then he said to Vardir, “Why are you telling us this instead of your queen?”

“I did try to tell her. But sadly, I think she is beyond listening.” “So you came to us? Why?”

Vardir looked offended. “Well I’m not a madman, Maxantarius. I’m a man of science. I don’t want the world to end—”

I saw the strike coming before Vardir did—Vardir, shockingly oblivious, didn’t even recoil when the axe came for him.

I struck down his attacker, one of Nura’s death soldiers, a split second too late. By then, Vardir was twitching on the ground, nearly decapitated, lips moving as if even in death he still had more to say.

Slowly, even those movements ceased, and he became just another corpse.

I thought of the surgical scars that now adorned Max’s body and wished that Vardir had suffered more. But there wasn’t time to feel satisfaction in his death. Max and I had to fight our way out of the enclave fast, and by the time we cut through enough bodies to stop and catch our breaths, my hand was burning.

We pressed our backs to a wall. I knew we were thinking the same thing. What Vardir had suggested sounded at worst ridiculous, and at best

impossible. And yet… the man, as much as I hated him, was undeniably a genius when it came to magic. If he was right— if there was a way to simply end the connection of deep magics to this world—

A stab of pain in my palm jerked me from the thought. I looked down to see the wayfinder was glowing again, brighter than it had even before, specks of gold trailing fast from my wrist to my ring finger.

My head snapped up. A new spark of light arced to the sky—further inland, now, than the one that was at the coast.

“Her,” I murmured. It was all I had to say. Nura.