Fifty

Safire heard the blade come down. Heard the horrifying sound of splitting flesh and bone, and felt her heart split with it.

“Eris . . . ,” she whispered, and suddenly it didn’t matter that eight Lumina had her surrounded, or that they were closing in.

She needed to get to Eris.

Safire scanned the rain-drenched soldiers, her blood humming, ready to fight. All she had to do was disarm one of them. She did a quick scan and chose the youngest one—likely to be the most inexperienced—and had just lunged for him, fists swinging, when the storm took a sudden turn.

The ground shook. Lightning struck the meadow in several places at once, blinding her for the second time, the charge raising the hair on her arms. When her vision cleared, all eight Lumina soldiers were dead on the ground. And someone stood beside her.

Safire looked up to find Eris, her pale hair twisting about her face in the storm, her green eyes glowing. “But you . . .” Safire looked down, her heart stopping. Not only did Eris have a missing right hand, the wrist had already healed.

Safire started to reach for her when a sudden scream shattered everything. Both of them turned toward the sound. A shadow blacker than Kozu now stood across the meadow, growing bigger, gathering the dark around it, absorbing the power of the storm. Lightning flickered through the shadow, illuminating the silhouette of a man.

Unsure and afraid, Safire reached for Eris’s left hand, holding on tight.

“The Shadow God is free,” murmured Eris. “He’s come to make things right.”

Leandra fell to her knees before him, begging. Her scream was followed by another sound—the horrifying crush of several bones at once.

The lightning and thunder stopped.

The darkness broke.

When Safire looked again, someone was walking up the path and into the meadow. She stared determinedly toward the god of shadows, like he was the only thing she saw.

“That’s my mother,” whispered Eris, more to herself than to Safire.

At the sight of her, the Shadow God seemed to remember himself. He turned away from the empress, lying broken in the dirt, and began to walk toward the woman.

He halted suddenly, trembling. As if he—a god of chaos and destruction—was about to weep.

The woman didn’t stop. Her pace quickened as she called his name.

He took a step toward her. Then another. With every step he took, he became less of a shadow and more of a man. Finally, the woman closed the space between them. They stood there, staring at each other for a long time. And then, slowly, the Shadow God reached to touch her, taking her face in his hands.