CHAPTER 286: CHAPTER 288

The night after Esthara didn’t feel like victory.

They had left the plaza in ruins—steam curling up from shattered ice, Hollowborn corpses dissolving into black ash—but the air was still wrong. Too still. Too cold. As if the Gate’s closing had only locked the wolf in the room with them.

Kael’s arm was heavy over her shoulders as they moved through the frozen streets. He’d insisted on walking, and she had let him—for a while. But when his steps began to stagger, when his breath turned to ragged gasps that came too slow, she stopped arguing.

"Sit," she said, steering him down onto a slab of fallen stone.

"I can keep—"

"Sit." Her voice cracked like ice breaking.

He did.

She knelt in front of him, hands braced on his knees. The stormlight under his skin had dulled, but it still flickered in places—thin threads of lightning that ran along his veins.

"Tell me," she said. "How bad?"

Kael tried for that infuriating smirk that used to make her want to kiss him and hit him in the same breath. It didn’t reach his eyes. "I’ve been worse."

"You’re lying."

His jaw flexed. He didn’t deny it this time. "It’s... not just the bond anymore. The poison’s in my core now. I can feel it in the storm—it’s part of it."

Her stomach tightened. "And if we do nothing?"

"Then the storm wins." His gaze dropped. "And there won’t be anything left to stop it from burning through everything—especially you."

Thorne approached, his breath clouding the air. "If you’re going to have this conversation, have it somewhere we’re not three paces from a cursed Gate."

She ignored him. Her mind was moving too fast. The priestesses’ warning from the Council came back, unbidden—about an ancient rite. One that could cleanse the bond completely. One that demanded more than blood.

Her bloodline. Fire and Moon both.

She’d dismissed it then. Now it was the only thing she could see.

By the time they reached the nearest Flameborn outpost, Kael was half-conscious. His weight against her was steady now only because she kept him upright.

The priestess who met them was young, no older than Lyra had been when she first learned to summon flame. But her eyes—dark, grave—held no uncertainty.

"You know what must be done," the girl said, as if Lyra had been expecting her.

Lyra’s hands tightened in Kael’s coat. "The Trial."

The priestess nodded once. "Fire and Moon together. Only your blood can call the storm out of him without breaking what you share."

"And the cost?" Lyra asked.

"You lose the magic, you lose the memory of the one who carried the storm."

The priestess’s gaze flicked briefly to Kael. "He will be nothing to you."

That night, she sat alone beside his bed.

The outpost’s fire burned low, shadows curling along the walls. Kael slept in uneven fits, his hand twitching when the lightning inside him surged too close to the surface.

Her fingers brushed the back of his.

If she failed, she would wake a stranger in his eyes, and he in hers. No history. No bond. No reason to stand between him and the storm.

She told herself she could live without him if it meant saving him. She didn’t believe it.

When dawn came pale and brittle, she stood at the edge of the ritual circle. The air shimmered faintly, the runes carved into the stone floor glowing with alternating flame-gold and moon-silver.

Thorne waited just outside the ward. "Once you step in, you don’t step out until it’s done," he said. His voice was gruff, but his eyes—storm-dark in their own way—were steady on hers. "You sure?"

"No."

He huffed something like a laugh. "Good. Means you’re thinking straight."

She stepped into the circle.

Kael’s voice, hoarse and strained, came from behind her. "Lyra—"

She turned to look at him one last time. Not at the storm, not at the pain—at him. The man who had fought at her side, burned with her, loved her like it was war and peace all at once.

"I’ll see you on the other side," she said.

If she remembered him.

The runes flared, light swallowing her whole.

The world tore away.

It wasn’t falling or flying—it was the sensation of being unwoven. Every thread of her was yanked in a different direction: her fire pulled one way, her blood another, her bond stretched so taut she thought it would snap.

There was no sound, only the taste of metal and salt and smoke in her mouth, as if she were breathing in a storm made of old wounds.

When the pressure broke, she was standing.

Not in the outpost. Not anywhere she knew.

A black sky boiled overhead, thick with clouds lit from within by dull, angry lightning. Beneath her feet, the ground was split—veins of molten gold running like rivers through ash. The air smelled of frost and burned cedar, of moonlight striking a battlefield long after the bodies were gone.

This wasn’t just a place. It was a memory. Or a warning.

A voice spoke from the dark.

"You would burn yourself for him."

She turned.

Vaelora stood at the edge of the gold-veined chasm, silver eyes glinting like cold steel under the storm. But here she was not entirely the enemy Lyra had seen in flames—she was younger, whole, almost beautiful in a way that felt dangerous to look at too long.

Lyra didn’t move. "This isn’t your trial."

"Everything is my trial, little queen." Vaelora stepped closer, her feet leaving no mark on the ash. "You think this circle was built by your priestesses alone? Fire and Moon together—that is my making. I am the bridge you walk."

Lyra’s hands clenched at her sides. "Then I’ll walk it through you."

A faint smile. "You will walk it into me, whether you see it yet or not."

The ground cracked. For an instant, Lyra saw Kael through the split—his body on the ritual floor, lightning and fire writhing under his skin like two beasts trying to devour each other. His face twisted in agony.

She lurched toward him.

Vaelora’s hand closed around her arm—not hard, but final. "Every bond has a price, Lyra. Yours is the memory of him. I can take that pain from you before it is ever cut."

Lyra yanked her arm free. "I don’t need your mercy."

"No," Vaelora said softly, "but you crave it. And that craving... is the beginning of becoming me."

The sky cracked with lightning so bright it burned away the horizon.

Somewhere beyond it, she thought she heard Kael’s voice—ragged, breaking. Calling her name.

She stepped forward into the gold-lit chasm, even as Vaelora’s laughter followed her, warm and cold all at once.