The dead didn't just look at me.
They recoiled.
Shadows shivered off their skin. Heads tilted back. Empty eyes widened with something I had never seen in them before.
Fear.
The violet fire curled up my arms in tendrils of living starlight, flickering with a pulse that matched the humming inside my veins. Beneath it, ordinary fire burned—hot, familiar, orange-gold. And beneath that, deeper still, water-light shimmered in cool ribbons, circling my bones in steady, patient currents.
Three forces.
Three rhythms.
All mine.
Yet still incomplete.
My boots hit the cracked stone where the new bridge had formed—a grotesque spine built of shadow, jagged rocks, and the fused bodies of the dead from both sides. It pulsed with a hunger, a wrongness that crawled up my legs the longer I stood on it.
The darkness paused mid-formation beneath my feet, as if unsure it should keep building with me standing on it.
Bad choice.
I raised my hand.
Violet flame surged, threading together with white-blue water-light. The energy poured out of me in a cascade—neither pure fire nor pure water, but something between them, older than both and brighter than either. It seared down through the bridge with a sound like glass screaming.
The shadow-stone beneath me convulsed.
Then it melted—collapsing into glowing dust that blew away on Tadewi's winds.
The span buckled under my feet; I leapt forward as chunks of bridge dropped away into the void. Dead spilled after them, flailing uselessly as they vanished into the clouds below.
A roar split the sky.
Raiden.
The bond surged—pain, exhaustion, stubborn defiance, and then a sharp flare of fierce relief.
I barely had time to register it before the sky itself split, and a massive black blur stormed out of the clouds.
Raiden's dragon form slammed into the front ranks of the dead like a meteor.
Lightning exploded out from his scales in jagged streams, frying a swath of corpses so wide the battlefield lit up in blinding blue-white. Bodies—human, beast, and things that had never been either—convulsed and dropped smoking to the bridge and terraces.
From the other side, Tadewi descended.
Her massive orange form sliced the air, wings throwing up hurricane winds. She hit the line directly opposite Raiden, talons tearing through the dead, her roar scattering them like dry leaves.
For one wild heartbeat, the three of us moved together—storm, sky, and something new.
And then the dead remembered they outnumbered us.
They surged.
Beasts with bone masks and rotting fur, twisted things with too many limbs, humans whose mouths were stitched with shadow, eyes empty and glowing faintly red—
They poured forward in a tide.
"I'll take center!" I shouted, my voice raw but steady.
Raiden answered with a bolt of lightning that cut across my path like a burning promise.
Tadewi's voice ripped through the sky, layered with dragon and woman both. "WIND TO THE FLAME—CLEAR HER WAY!"
Currents slammed into motion around me—sharp, powerful gusts that shoved the dead away from my path, opening lanes just wide enough for me to move.
"Thanks," I muttered, and ran.
The first beast that reached me was twice my height, its skull warped into antlers made of bone and shadow, dripping darkness like tar. It lowered its head and charged.
I didn't dodge.
I planted one foot, fire sparking around my fingers—and then pulled water up from the blue pathway in my veins with my other hand. Light-blue currents answered, swirling up my arm.
Flame in my right.
Water-light in my left.
Violet where they met.
I slammed both palms together in front of me.
The energies collided, fused, and burst forward in a cone of violet radiance that hit the beast full in its warped skull.
It didn't just burn.
It unraveled.
Shadow peeled away from bone. The antlers splintered, breaking apart like ice under a hammer. The thing's scream shredded into nothing as it collapsed into glittering dust, scattering over my boots.
I staggered a step from the recoil, heart pounding.
That… that was new.
No time to bask.
Three more dead lunged at once—two human-sized, one a monstrous thing that had probably been a bear once. Its jaws dripped black.
I spun, letting instinct and muscle memory that didn't belong to me guide me.
Heat traveled down my right arm in a tight, focused stream. I flexed my fingers and flicked.
Three small, precise bolts of ordinary fire shot from my fingertips, punching perfectly through each human corpse's chest. They fell without a sound.
The bear-thing roared. I ducked under its swipe, skidding on cracked stone and ice, then reached down into the floor with my left hand.
Water-light answered in a rush.
I pulled.
The cracked veins beneath the bridge erupted, sending a geyser of freezing light straight up into the beast's jaw. It snapped shut on the rush of magic; ice instantly coated its skull from the inside out.
Violet fire sparked along my palms, lacing over the icy shell like glowing netting.
The beast froze in place, half-lifted, then exploded into shards of ice and ash.
"Nice," I panted. "I could get used to this."
A familiar curse carried over the din.
"LYRA!" Muir shouted from a lower terrace. "IF YOU'RE GOING TO SHOW OFF, AT LEAST DO IT WHERE I CAN SEE IT PROPERLY!"
I risked a glance down.
The terrace below was chaos.
Muir stood at its center, arms coated in jagged ice up to the shoulders, breath fogging in front of his face. Every time a section of the stone cracked, almost toppling onto people below, he slammed his palms out and froze it back together, ice racing along the fractures in bright lines.
Between each repair, he lashed out—whips of water cutting through undead bodies, instantly freezing into spikes that impaled anything too close.
Revik fought near him, back-to-back with two Skyguard soldiers, blade a flash of deadly silver. His movements were vicious, economical—every swing took something's head or arms. A corpse-beast lunged for his throat; he ducked under, drove his sword up through its jaw, then kicked its limp body off the terrace without breaking rhythm.
"LEFT!" Muir barked.
Revik didn't look. He just stepped aside.
Muir sent a spike of ice through the space Revik had just moved from, skewering three half-rotted things in a row.
"YOU'RE WELCOME," Muir called.
"FOCUS," Revik snapped—though I heard the rough edge of affection under the word.
A bellow dragged my attention back to my own battlefield.
Another wave of dead approached, this one denser, crawling over the fallen bodies of the first like maggots. The darkness itself bled between them, trying to knit another smaller bridge beneath the one I'd already destroyed.
"Oh, no you don't," I snarled.
I jumped, wings snapping open with a rush of air. Pain flickered through the memory of the earlier damage, but the relic's healing held—the limbs were solid, strong.
The wind shifted to meet me, Tadewi's power lifting me higher, then angling me toward the half-formed shadow-span.
"Clear me space!" I shouted.
Lightning cracked across the sky in answer.
Raiden swept in low, his dragon form a streak of black-blue against the bruised clouds. He opened his jaws and unleashed a sheet of lightning that erased the front rank of dead in a sizzling line, leaving only charred outlines behind.
The bridge shuddered as fewer bodies pressed against it.
I dropped, altering the angle at the last second, trusting those strange primal threads to guide me.
Violet fire bloomed in my right hand.
Water-light gathered in my left.
Ordinary fire wrapped both, hot and wild.
Three rhythms.
One strike.
"Stay gone this time," I hissed.
I drove my hands into the shadow-stone.
The effect was instant.
The bridge screamed.
Soundless—but I felt it vibrate through my bones, through the mountain, through the ancient magic that had been used to shape it. The violet blaze ripped through the core of the structure, devouring the darkness binding it together. Stone cracked. The bodies fused into its sides shattered. Shadow peeled away in strips, flapping like torn banners before disintegrating.
I poured more into it.
The primal threads inside me flared, each one singing with power—fire, water, something stranger that connected them to the spaces between.
"Bridge to what?" I'd asked before.
To this.
To unmaking what should never have been.
The shadow-bridge collapsed.
Not partially.
Not slowly.
It was like cutting a ligament the entire limb depended on.
The middle section imploded, falling in on itself before plummeting into the roiling clouds below. Anything standing on it went with it—dead, stone, darkness. The remaining ends crumbled back to nothing, leaving a gap so wide not even the dead could leap it.
I staggered as the magic snapped back, my vision flashing white. For a heartbeat, the world tilted.
Then wind steadied me.
Raiden's dragon form swept in close overhead, the edge of his wing passing just above my head like a shield.
"SHOW-OFF!" he roared down in a voice layered with static.
"YOU'RE ONE TO TALK!" I shouted back.
Below, the dead faltered.
Without the bridge knitting the field together, their forward momentum stuttered. The front ranks lost cohesion. A few mindlessly threw themselves into the gap and vanished into the churning storm below.
"PUSH!" Tadewi thundered.
She dove, orange wings snapping tight to her sides before she flared them at the last moment, crashing into the dead like a living avalanche. Her tail swept entire clusters from the terrace edge; her talons carved paths through the mass, wind blasting any too close off the mountain.
On the lower terrace, Muir lifted both arms high.
Ice spears erupted from the ground, impaling an entire line of dead, then snapped off cleanly. He swung his arms in a downward arc; the spears followed the motion, ripping free of the ground with their undead cargo and flinging them into the void.
"THAT'S MORE LIKE IT!" he shouted, voice cracking with exertion.
Revik cut down another corpse trying to crawl past Muir's flank. "Keep breathing," he snapped at him. "Or I swear I'll drag you back here just to yell at you."
"Romantic," Muir muttered.
I almost laughed.
Almost.
But the dead weren't gone.
They never stop.
They regrouped on their side of the chasm—filling every inch of available space, a sea of bodies packed shoulder-to-shoulder, climbing over one another to get closer. The darkness behind them, the true shadow, slithered and coiled, withdrawing just out of reach.
"Lyra!"
I turned as Raiden landed.
He shifted mid-leap, lightning peeling away from scales to reveal skin. He hit the ground on one knee, armor scorched, hair damp with sweat and blood. His chest heaved like he'd been holding the storm inside him for hours.
"Rai!" I rushed toward him, every instinct screaming to check him over.
We met in the middle, boots slipping on bloody stone.
"You're safe," he breathed, eyes scanning my face, my shoulders, my wings. His gaze lingered on the faint scars where the membrane had been shredded before. He exhaled shakily. "Thank the gods."
The bond pulsed, threading warm and bright under my breastbone. Relief, concern, awe—his. And underneath, something deeper and older I still didn't quite know how to face.
He reached for my face.
And I let him.
His palm cupped my cheek, thumb brushing a smear of ash and blood from my skin. His hand was warm—perfectly warm, that exact balance between the heat of fire and the tingle of lightning.
I leaned into it, eyes closing for just a breath.
"Lyra," he whispered, my name breaking slightly in the middle. "You—"
My hand came up on its own, curling lightly around his wrist; a tiny spark jumped between us where skin brushed skin.
The world narrowed to him—his scent of ozone and smoke, the rough scrape of stubble along his jaw, the storm quiet in his eyes for once.
The war fell away.
For one suspended heartbeat, it was just us at the end of the world.
He leaned in, forehead almost touching mine, something unspoken burning on his tongue—
Then he went still.
Everything in him locked.
His eyes slid past my shoulder.
His hand fell away from my face.
"Rai?" I murmured. "What—?"
I turned.
And saw why.
The battlefield had gone quiet.
Not silent—the wind still howled, distant screams still echoed from other terraces—but where we stood, the dead had… stopped.
Every corpse, every beast, every monstrosity had frozen mid-step.
Then—
Slowly—
They began to move again.
Not toward us.
Aside.
They parted, shuffling back in both directions to clear a path down the center of their ranks—a straight, unnatural corridor of bare stone leading into the densest part of the darkness.
Shadow peeled away from the edges of the gap like curtains drawing back from a stage.
Cold crawled up my spine.
"What are they doing?" I whispered.
No one answered.
Even Tadewi had gone still, hovering above on massive wings, eyes narrowed.
The darkness at the end of the cleared path condensed—pulling in on itself, swirling tighter and tighter until it formed a single, tall shape. Shadow clung to it like a cloak, dripping down to the stone in tendrils.
A figure began to walk forward.
Each step was deliberate.
The dead closest to the path bowed their heads as he passed.
My heart hammered faster the closer he came. There was a wrongness in the air around him, but not like the others. Not mindless hunger. This felt… aware. Focused. Old.
The bond slammed a sudden spike of emotion through my chest that wasn't mine.
Shock.
Disbelief.
A grief so sharp it bordered on physical pain.
"Raiden?" I whispered.
He didn't answer.
The figure crossed the midpoint of the dead ranks.
The shadows around him thinned just enough for the light of Raiden's lingering storm to catch on metal.
Black armor—polished and cruel, edged in deep red. A cloak of tattered darkness trailed behind him, never quite touching the ground. His hair was black, streaked with iron gray, tied back from a hard, scarred face. His skin was the warm bronze of Fire Nation blood, now drained and shadow-touched.
But it was his eyes that stopped my heart.
Molten gold once, maybe.
Now burning a deep, corrupted red.
His mouth curved in something that wasn't quite a smile as he climbed the last few feet onto our fractured terrace, the dead ranks spreading respectfully behind him.
He stopped a short distance from us, taking in the scene—the broken bridge, the smoldering corpses, the dragon above, the prince beside me.
His gaze settled on Raiden.
Recognition flickered there.
Something inside Raiden broke.
I felt it.
His knees nearly gave out. His hand tightened convulsively around the hilt of his sword before falling uselessly to his side.
His voice, when it came, sounded like a bone being snapped in half.
"…Father?"
For a moment, he looked… young. Not a prince. Not a warrior. Just a son looking at a ghost.