The knights stood frozen in horror.
The valley had become a storm of fire and unmaking—light folding, burning, glitching.
Ray’s voice cracked. “They’re dying.”
Mezzo stepped forward instinctively—
but Elder Arlo raised a trembling hand, voice shaking.
“Their souls are too bright. The world cannot hold them without their chains.”
The runes cracked.
The mountains groaned.
Stone turned to mist as mana threads tore free of the ground, unravelling reality itself.
Above Rustrows, the sky split open.
Not like clouds parting.
Like fabric tearing.
A wound of blue-white light ripped across the heavens, wide enough to be seen from the outer market roads, from the abandoned factory roofs, from every caravan still lingering at the edge of the Rustrows. Mythics looked up in terror as the sky flashed with Kymara fire.
Brassmane staggered, his mane flickering gold and red.
“If this keeps up, she’ll level the wards!”
Then he coughed.
Hard.
Blood spattered against his paw.
Solas’s eyes went wide. “Lord Brassmane—”
Brassmane wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, refusing to look away from the storm. “I’m standing.”
“You’re bleeding,” Solas snapped.
“I noticed.”
Elder Arlo’s voice was low, awestruck, terrified.
“I can feel it—her mana is alive.”
He clutched his chest.
“It is inside me.”
Inside the maelstrom, Celeste’s and Lumina’s lights merged—one blue-white, one rose-gold—spinning around each other like twin stars about to collapse.
Mezzo’s eyes darted to the altar.
The two runes sat there—glowing, humming like trapped hearts.
“If we don’t stop this,” he said quietly, “it won’t just take Clawdiff. It’ll take all of Caerfaen.”
Ray grabbed his arm. “You’ll die.”
“Better than watching her burn.”
Arcade snapped down his goggles. “Then we go together.”
Pitch half-shifted, fur bristling. “That aura’s tearing space apart. Even your wings won’t fly in that.”
Hughes stepped forward, moss and barklight crawling over his arms.
“Then we make a path.”
He slammed both hooves into the ground.
The earth answered.
Roots burst from beneath the stone, thick as iron cables, twisting upward into a living wall. Bark rose in overlapping plates. Vines stitched themselves through gaps in the air, flowering and burning in the same breath as Celeste’s mana lashed against them.
The barrier of earth and plants strained beneath the storm, but it held long enough for the others to move.
Hughes gritted his teeth, both hands raised as roots wrapped around his wrists.
“Go,” he growled. “Before it decides I’m compost.”
Ray’s flames burst to life around her shoulders. “You heard the goat.”
She kissed her phoenix ring, then threw both hands forward.
Violet-red fire poured into the storm, not attacking it, but meeting the heat, burning against burning, softening the worst of the mana flares before they could cut the group apart.
Mezzo joined her, his red-gold wings spreading wide.
His own fire rolled outward in sweeping arcs, gryphon flame catching Celeste’s wild bursts and turning them aside just enough to keep the path open.
“Never thought I’d be using fire as a blanket,” he muttered.
Ray bared her teeth. “Less talking, more blanketing.”
Arcade’s quills flared, every jagged spine filling with green-white electricity. His whole body sparked like a live wire about to overload.
“Mana discharge pattern,” he snapped, mostly to himself. “Bad idea, stupid idea, probably fatal idea—doing it anyway.”
He drove both claws into the ground.
Electricity ripped from his quills into the stone, dragging loose mana down with it. Bolts screamed through the floor in branching patterns, discharging Celeste’s excess energy before it could build into another killing wave.
Arcade hissed through his teeth as his quills lit brighter.
“Yep. That’s going to hurt tomorrow.”
Skye stepped up beside him, trembling but determined. His forehead gem glowed beneath his fur, and soft moonstone light unfurled from him in ribbons.
The storm was too bright to see through.
Too chaotic to follow.
But Skye’s light did not fight it.
It found the gaps.
A path appeared in faint glowing dust, each step marked in white-blue shimmer through the glare.
“This way!” Skye called, voice shaking. “Follow the light!”
Bonbon whimpered from behind him.
Kirrin swept the little fairy-panda behind her cloak with one arm, planting herself between Bonbon and the storm.
“Stay tucked in, wee blossom,” Kirrin muttered, eyes locked on the torn sky. “And dinnae look too hard at the nightmare.”
Bonbon clutched the back of Kirrin’s coat, ears flattened, eyes huge.
Brassmane turned, blood still wet at his mouth, and roared toward the gathered spectators.
“Everyone out!”
No one moved at first.
His mane blazed.
“Now!”
The crowd broke.
Mythics, hybrids, traders, clan watchers—everyone not bound to the Trial fled from the valley edge, stumbling over grass and stone as the old wards screamed overhead.
Brassmane looked to Cosmo. “Get the dispelling runes.”
Cosmo hesitated. “Those are for sealed entities.”
Brassmane’s eyes burned. “Do I look like I asked what they were for?”
Cosmo ran.
He tore across the outer ridge, boots skidding over loose stone, one hand pressed to the satchel at his hip where the emergency dispelling runes were kept. The air shook with every pulse from the arena, each burst bright enough to turn the ruins white around him.
Halfway to the ward stores, he stopped.
Something was wrong beyond the valley.
Cosmo spread his dragon wings and launched himself toward one of the old watchtowers, claws scraping against rusted metal as he climbed the last few feet by hand. The tower groaned under him, ancient beams complaining, but he hauled himself onto the upper platform and looked out over Rustrows.
His breath vanished.
In the distance, beyond the broken factories and caravan lights, the candy zombies had gathered.
Not one pack.
Not one wandering cluster.
Hundreds.
Maybe more.
They stood at the edge of the old industrial roads, tiny and huge and twisted shapes alike, all facing the same direction.
Rustrows.
The arena.
Celeste.
Their mouths hung open.
Their eyes burned lime-green and yellow in the dark, pupil-less and fixed. They were not charging. Not yet. They were watching the mana tear open the sky as if someone had rung a dinner bell only they could hear.
Cosmo’s wings twitched hard behind him.
“What is this…?”
Then Celeste’s mana pulsed.
The light struck outward in a silent wave.
Cosmo doubled over.
For one impossible heartbeat, he felt his core.
Not sensed it.
Felt it.
A burning shape inside his chest, dragon-bright and trembling.
And beyond it—
others.
Every Mythic in Rustrows.
Every core in the valley.
Every frightened pulse.
Every old mana signature.
And then, horribly, the zombies.
Hollow places where cores should not answer.
Wrong lights.
Hungry lights.
All of them turning toward the same source.
Cosmo staggered, claws scraping across the tower rail. His foot slipped. For one sickening second, he nearly pitched over the edge before his wings snapped open and caught the air.
He slammed back against the platform, panting, one hand clutched over his chest.
“What the stars…” he stuttered.
Below, the zombies remained still.
Watching.
Waiting.
Cosmo looked back toward the arena, horror spreading cold through his ribs.
“What the stars was that?”
Back in the arena Solas seized Brassmane’s arm. “Stop this. Call them back. They’ll die in there.”
Brassmane’s jaw clenched. “They are already in.”
“Then pull them out!”
“I can hold it.”
Solas stared at the blood on his mouth. “No, you can’t.”
Brassmane turned on him with a roar that shook the grass flat.
“I can hold it!”
The storm answered with a blast of white fire.
Hughes’ living barrier caught it, bark exploding outward in smoking shards. He grunted, stumbling to one knee, but forced more roots from the ground.
Ray and Mezzo poured flame into the breach.
Arcade discharged the overflow through his own body, electricity whipping from his quills like frantic green chains.
Skye’s guiding light flickered, then strengthened again as he forced the path to stay visible.
Every one of their cores blazed.
Red-gold.
Violet.
Green.
Navy.
White-blue.
Even Hughes’ earth-green core shone through his chest like an ember buried under moss.
They were fighting the light itself.
And losing.
Elder Arlo saw it then.
Not only the storm.
The threads.
Celeste’s core was reaching for them all.
Blue-white strands shot through the chaos, wrapping around each hybrid’s mana like desperate fingers. They were not chains, not quite, but they pulled with terrifying need. Celeste was dragging them toward her, whether she knew it or not.
A drowning star clutching at every orbit.
Arlo’s face went pale.
“She is pulling them in.”
One of the Elders beside him gasped. “Wise one—”
“She’s distressed,” Arlo whispered. “Her core is calling for every bond it knows.”
Another Elder stared in horror as the threads tightened around Mezzo, Ray, Arcade, Pitch, Hughes, and Skye.
“She is going to kill them.”
Solas went still.
Then his hand moved.
He tore a mana gun from the belt of one of the wardens—a long, brass-and-silver weapon marked with suppression sigils.
Ray’s head snapped toward him. “What are you doing?”
Solas lifted the weapon, eyes fixed on the burning centre of the storm.
“I can get a shot on her if it gets too much.”
The words turned the air colder than any spell.
Arcade snarled, electricity bursting from his teeth. “You point that at her and I’ll fry your nervous system.”
Solas did not lower the gun.
“If she kills them, you’ll wish I fired sooner.”
Brassmane lurched toward him, coughing blood again.
“No one fires.”
“She is tearing them apart!”
“NO ONE FIRES!”
Brassmane slammed both hands into the ground, sunfire exploding from his palms into the ward lines. Arlo joined him, staff blazing silver-blue. The other Elders followed, every chant rising into a frantic chorus as they gave the barrier everything they had.
The valley shook under the effort.
For one heartbeat, the storm slowed.
Only one.
But it was enough.
Mezzo saw the gap.
“There!”
He spread his burning wings.
“CEL—!”
He launched himself into the maelstrom.
The air split around him. Fire burned through his feathers, pixelating them into dust. His wings flickered between memory and flesh, red-gold light scattering from him like sparks from a dying forge.
A wave of Celeste’s mana slammed into him.
It nearly hurled him backward.
Mezzo cried out, twisting midair, talons scraping against nothing as the blast shoved him away from her. His arms broke into fragments at the edges, skin and light glitching apart.
Ray screamed his name.
Hughes forced another wall of roots up behind him, catching some of the backlash.
Arcade poured lightning beneath him, grounding the surge for half a second.
Skye’s light drew a trembling line straight to Celeste.
Mezzo gritted his teeth.
“Nope,” he gasped. “Not today.”
He forced himself forward.
Burning.
Cracking.
Dissolving.
He reached her.
Celeste hung in the centre of the storm, blazing, chained, screaming in silence. Her body was pixelating now—hands breaking into golden squares, tail flickering in and out of existence, wings glitching like broken glass trying to remember the shape of sky.
Then her head turned.
Her eyes opened.
They were glowing white.
Not blue.
Not iridescent.
White.
Empty and endless, like all the stars in the world had gone blind.
Mezzo froze.
For half a heartbeat, Celeste did not look like Celeste at all.
Then her mouth moved.
“Don’t—come—closer—”
Her voice was barely hers, breaking through static and light.
Mezzo swallowed hard.
Then smiled, even as the mana stripped feathers from his wings.
“Like hell I won’t.”
He forced himself closer and grabbed the stabiliser rune from his belt.
He pressed it toward the back of her neck—
and it slipped.
The world slowed.
The rune bounced off her shoulder, tumbling, sizzling, falling into a widening crack in the ground.
Mezzo lunged for it.
His fingertips brushed it.
But another surge threw him backward.
“NO!”
The stabiliser vanished into the fissure, swallowed by white fire.
He couldn’t reach it.
He couldn’t fix it.
He couldn’t save her that way.
His hands—blistered, bleeding—closed around Celeste anyway.
Her mana scorched him instantly.
His arms pixelated at the edges.
His feathers disintegrated into red ash.
Still—
he held her tighter.
“I don’t care about the damn rune.”
Celeste shook, glitching like a broken star.
“M-Mezzo—! You can’t—”
He pressed his forehead to hers, burning skin to burning light.
“I believe in you.”
His voice was breaking.
“You can do this. You. Not a rune. Not a chain.”
The light flayed him.
His silhouette fluctuated.
His breath hitched.
But he did not let go.
“I’m here, Cel…”
His voice was fading now—
like smoke thinning in sunlight—
but the grip of his arms stayed solid even as his hands pixelated around her.
“You’re not alone.”
His forehead rested against hers.
“Not this time.”
The light around Celeste and Lumina twisted tighter.
Blue-white.
Rose-gold.
Two stars collapsing into each other.
Then Celeste’s mana poured outward.
Not as flame.
Not as lightning.
As a flood.
It rushed from her core in blinding streams, striking every soul close enough to touch the storm. Mezzo gasped as the light slammed into his chest. Ray doubled over, fire bursting from between her fingers. Arcade staggered, claws scraping sparks across the stone. Pitch snarled through his teeth, both hands pressed over his heart. Skye cried out, the hidden gem beneath his fur flashing so brightly it showed through his forehead like a little moon. Bonbon whimpered, her tiny body glowing bubblegum-pink in Kirrin’s arms.
Their cores lit one by one.
Red.
Violet.
Green.
Navy.
White.
Pink.
For one impossible heartbeat, they were all connected.
And outside the Trial, every Mythic in the valley felt it too.
The elders clutched their chests as if an invisible hand had reached into them. Daroganwyr gasped. Famdderwyddon dropped to their knees. Brassmane stumbled, his mane flaring gold. Solas’s wings snapped wide, neon light streaking through every feather.
Arlo’s eyes widened.
“It’s touching the cores—”
Then the world exploded.
White light devoured everything.
