T he floors had been flat. There had been no stairs. Yet, somehow, we had been traveling down. When we reached the end of the hallway, I knew

without doubt that we were underground. It was so dark that the light only came from below, seeping up between the cracks in the floor.

Before us was an arched door—the end of the hallway.

Max’s feet slipped, his legs giving out. I was too weak to catch us. We fell to the ground in a pile several feet before the door.

Max was barely conscious. I helped him lean back against the wall, and he had almost no strength to help me. Then I forced myself to my hands and knees, and crawled towards the door. My palm touched something wet, and I looked down to see that shallow, black water lapped up the hallway, slowly encroaching upon us.

I peered through the door.

Stairs led down curved walls into a deep room. The floor was covered in water, black and rippling calmly in a slow, impossible current. At its center was a sapling upon a perfectly circular mound of earth. Black leaves that pulsed with a faint white light sprouted from its young, fragile branches. Something was floating up to those branches from the ground, glowing as if coated in moonlight— more leaves, I realized, after a moment. Dead leaves, rising from the ocean and reattaching themselves to the branches. Withering, falling, rising, blooming, in a surreal, endless cycle.

I never knew death could be so beautiful. And this thing was, indeed, pure death. Even as my magic was drawn to it, every part of my body

recoiled from it. The shards of the heart in my pocket hummed their strange, broken song, as if awakened by the presence of their siblings.

Siblings, plural—because the third Lejara was here, too.

There, standing beneath the shade of that tree, was the Fey king. His palm was pressed to the trunk, his head bowed against it as if in prayer. If he saw or heard us, he did not react at all.

I jerked away from the door, heart pounding. I was shaking.

It is so close.

Ilyzath’s whisper shuddered through me, deeper than sound, and yet farther away.

The end is so close, little butterfly.

The end of what? The end of the violence, or the end of the world?

Goosebumps rose on my skin with Ilyzath’s wordless, gruesome laugh.

Both.

“Help me,” I choked out. It was the only thing I could think to do. “Help me understand what I need to do.”

The stone creaked and groaned, as if straining under a million years of weight. The markings that surrounded Max’s lolling head swirled around him gracelessly. He has found his missing pieces. I must reclaim mine, to seal away such forces too powerful for mere mortal hands. The wounds must be healed, or else, they will devour you all.

Just as Vardir had said. “By Wielding all three. Life, death, change.” A shiver of agreement, slowly fading.

“Then— then how? How do I do it?” But Ilyzath had gone silent once more.

Max’s eyelids fluttered, and he let out a groan. Despite my best attempts at packing his wound, the blood still soaked through the fabric and now drip, drip, dripped into the water.

Even that sound felt like death mocking us.

I tilted Max’s face towards me and kissed him. He barely even had the strength or awareness to kiss me back—let alone to understand that I was kissing him goodbye.

Then I stood and unsheathed Il’Sahaj. My entire body protested. I was wounded badly, too, and carrying Max’s weight this entire time had done little to help my own injuries. But wounded or not, I had no choice but to make my move. Maybe the Fey king would kill me. If he didn’t, the magic that I had to wield almost certainly would.

I turned to the door, laying my fingers over the shards of the heart in my pocket. I took a deep breath—

—And hesitated, as goosebumps rose on the back of my neck, as if I was being watched by a familiar presence.

An overwhelming force struck me, sending me careening into the wall. Pain exploded through my abdomen as my wounds ripped open with the force of it.

I knew who I would see even before I opened my eyes. When you have shared a body with someone, you know them by presence alone.

“Aefe,” I rasped.

She stood before me with her hands clenched into fists. Red and violet blood covered her. Vines grew and died around her feet in rapid succession, climbing up her limbs in frantic bursts before withering into blackened husks and falling away, over and over again.

“You cannot hurt him,” she said, panicked and out of breath. “Do not touch him.”

She raised her blade and I cringed, certain, in that moment, she would kill me.

And yet, she hesitated. When she struck, it was not at my body but my sword, sending it sliding down the hall. I took those precious seconds to drag myself to Max—position myself in front of him, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to protect him. I was barely conscious, myself.

Aefe didn’t move for us. She only stood there amidst her churning magic, her shoulders heaving, staring—as if she was trying to understand something about us and failing. Gods, she seemed so different now than when I last saw her. She had an almost childlike face. Huge, sad eyes. They looked even sadder now.

She peered through the door, and when she saw the king standing there, she went very still.

“What is that?” Her voice was so, so small.

I answered the only way I knew how. “Death.” “I do not— It does not feel—”

Her breathing was rapid. She pressed her hand to her chest, squeezed her eyes shut, then looked to me abruptly.

“It would kill you. Why would you go down there?”

Funny. She was confused about that as Reshaye, too, the day she gave her life for mine.

I clutched my abdomen. Dripdrip dripdrip dripdrip. Now my blood and Max’s both drained to the water, tinting the black around us red.

“Because if he does this, it will end so much more, Aefe,” I said, softly. “It will end everything.”

She turned to the door again. She looked so torn—like she wanted to run there, but something was holding her back. Every expression on her face was so loud, every emotion so vivid. She turned sharply back to me.

“I do not understand,” she choked out. “I have never understood.”

I didn’t know why I did this. Perhaps it was just because there was nothing else I could do. But I reached out my mind towards hers, opened myself to her emotions and thoughts.

I had to brace myself against the force of them. Gods, it was— it was just so much. An explosion of hurt and betrayal, five hundred years of it. The rage at everyone who had damaged her. The bitter agony of grief. The terror of powerlessness.

I dug deeper. And there, at the core of it all, was something I did not expect to ever find in Reshaye’s heart—love.

She had experienced so much pain. But this love was the greatest torment of all.

My brow furrowed. “You want to save him.” “Do not tell me what I want,” she hissed. “Why aren’t you going to him?”

“I—”

The plants around her feet lived and died faster, crumbling before they even had the chance to reach for her flesh.

She did not speak. Yet I felt her reply in my magic, too loud to remain within the boundaries of her mind.

She did not go because she was afraid. She was afraid of the truth.

“Because you know you can’t,” I whispered. “You know you can’t save him.”

The blade moved so swiftly that I didn’t notice it until pain flared across my cheek. The black knife was embedded in the stone right beside my eye, Aefe’s face so close that our noses almost touched.

“Yes, I can,” she said. “Who are you to tell me what I cannot do?”

“Someone who knows you. Someone who understands loss.”

“You know nothing about me.”

Her emotions washed over me—complex, layered, yet somehow innocent and simple. How had I not understood her better when she was a part of me? She was just… lost. A soul adrift, like I once was, torn from world after world, belonging nowhere and everywhere, yearning for connection.

“This isn’t love, Aefe. Love is selfless. If he does this, he’ll be repeating what was done to you. Maybe his intentions were good at first. They always are. But he’ll destroy everything. The world is harsh, but it doesn’t deserve that. Not mine, and not yours.”

“Yes, it does,” she snarled. “Maybe letting it all die is the only justice.”

But beneath her rage, I saw the truth. I knew she didn’t believe it. “What good is justice if there’s no one left to witness it?”

Her eyes flicked past me to Max. Anger, then grief, then regret rippled through her emotions. I knew she was thinking of another version of herself—one that had destroyed needlessly out of twisted, misplaced anguish, leaving five innocent children dead.

The world hurt her. She hurt the world. The cycle went on, and on, and

on.

“I see you, Aefe.” My words slowed. My consciousness was fading.

“You can do more than destroy. You can be more than death.”

This would be either the best or the worst decision I would ever make. I reached into my pocket and closed my fingers around those shards of alabaster.

Change.

People could change.

I pressed them into Aefe’s hands.

“End it,” I rasped. “Fix what has been broken. Make something more.” Those enormous violet eyes flicked to me, first wide with confusion,

then bright with anger. She snatched the shards from me and stood abruptly. “Stupid child,” she hissed. “You have always been an innocent fool.”

She let me slump to the ground. Max was no longer moving. And no matter how desperately I tried, I could not crawl after her as Aefe turned away, joining her king beneath the canopy of death itself.