For a moment, we all held our breath.

  The violet light seeping through the cracks in the ice began to darken, glowing a deep blood-red. The air around it shivered, humming with power.

  Just as the energy within condensed, preparing to burst, something inside of me twisted. A pulse—not Lunae, not Tenebrae, and not the Witch’s magic either. It was... different. Distant, yet familiar. My chest tightened.

  Without thinking, I turned away from the frozen spire, my gaze searching across the graveyard. Nothing but smoke, mist, and shadow—but something was wrong. I could feel it.

  Tenebrae’s fury began to build—slowly at first, then rising like a storm—but I couldn’t tell why. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. Selene, Kaela, and Ron’s shouts sounded distant, warped. The world was moving, but I wasn’t. I felt trapped in the space between moments.

  And then, just as suddenly as it came, the fury was gone. The ache in my gut vanished.

  The silence broke.

  Reality came rushing back in a storm of red light and sound.

  The spire exploded outward in a wave of scarlet shards, each fragment burning as they fell. The shockwave hit us hard—Ron’s holy barrier flared to life just in time, though the blast still knocked us to our knees.

  Through the storm of shattering ice, I saw movement.

  The Witch emerged from the collapsing spire, her body fractured like glass, purple energy leaking from the seams in her flesh. Her bone staff hung at her side, pulsing as if alive. Her once-human face had become a mask of red veins and violet light, eyes gleaming with something far beyond hate.

  Kaela cursed under her breath, steadying her spear. “You’ve got to be kidding me—!”

  Ron stumbled forward beside her, voice hoarse as he began chanting another warding prayer. The golden sigils flickered weakly in his shaking hands.

  Selene’s rapier burned with white-blue energy as she stepped in front of me, teeth gritted. “She’s losing control—Yukon, what do we do!?”

  My hands clenched. The cold ache in my chest still hadn’t faded completely. Lunae’s presence was faint—Tenebrae’s, restless. Whatever I’d felt before the spire broke still haunted the edge of my mind, whispering that something vital had just slipped away.

  But there wasn’t time to think.

  “She’s feeding off Grahamut’s corruption,” I said, forcing the words out. “If we don’t end this now, she could tear through the whole town.”

  The Witch raised her staff skyward, and a ring of glowing runes flared open above us—red, black, and violet intertwining in a spiraling sigil that made the air hum like a furnace. The ground trembled beneath our feet.

  “Move!” I shouted.

  We scattered as a lance of light crashed down where we’d been standing, vaporizing the earth in a column of molten energy. Kaela dove through the falling debris, her spear spinning in her grip. Selene followed, darting through the Witch’s shadow like lightning.

  I drew my bow again—Lunae’s mark pulsing weakly on my chest. The light flickered, uneven, reflecting my uncertainty. I didn’t care.

  My aim searched for her heart.

  For an instant, our eyes met through the chaos—hers, wild and burning; mine, frozen over with desperate resolve.

  Then I loosed the arrow.

  Deflected. A barrier of dark light.

  Again.

  Deflected.

  Nothing we did was breaking through. We needed magic to fight magic.

  We needed Lyria.

  “Lyria…” My voice was barely a whisper. “Where are you…?”

  …Somewhere very far away…

  “I don’t want to stay here forever!” a young Lyria complained.

  “I want to see the world! I want to see what’s beyond Moonvale!”

  Her father smiled softly, but her mother’s voice came sharp as a blade.

  “No, Lyria. The world of men and monsters is cruel. You belong here, among your own.”

  “But, Mother!” She hopped onto a tree stump, arms spread wide like wings. “I want to be an adventurer! I want to help people—and I want to make friends!”

  Her parents exchanged a look — that silent, tired one children always notice but never understand.

  Lyria’s shoulders slumped. “No one here plays with me anyway… They think I’m strange. They call me half-girl.”

  “Lyria…” they said together, gentle but firm.

  “One day, you’ll take my place as a Moon-Elven noble,” her mother said, her tone final. “Half or not.”

  Her father turned away. He couldn’t argue.

  But Lyria kept dreaming. She found her way out of Moonvale. She became an adventurer.

  And, for a while… she even found friends.

  Memories burned across her mind as the blade closed in—hundreds of them, flashing all at once. Not full scenes, just fragments. Feelings. Faces.

  She’d made a misstep.

  She’d allowed Sylico to distract her. Let her pity for the fallen dull her edge.

  And now, as the blade sang down, she didn’t even have time to regret the words she never spoke.

  Yukon…

  The name echoed one last time through her skull—just before the sickening sound of metal shearing through flesh split the night.

  Then—silence.

  For a terrible moment, she was sure it was her own.

  She blinked, dazed. The world swam in and out of focus—mud, mist, the faint reek of iron. Shock and adrenaline blurred the edges of reality.

  And then a voice: low, rough, unmistakably real.

  “Mage—ye’ okay?”

  Lyria’s gaze snapped upward. A stocky silhouette stood over her, battle axe dripping green ichor. Runes etched along her forearms.

  Margo.

  The corpse of the husk lay split in two before them, twitching in the dirt. Lyria blinked again, still tangled in the bolas, her breath uneven. Margo waited a moment, then reached down, her hand steady despite the chaos around them.

  Lyria grasped it, pulling herself upright. “Mhm… thank you—”

  A violent flash from the hilltop cut her off—volatile magic spiraling upward in a storm of light.

  Margo grunted, hefting her axe. “Then come on. Ron’s gotten himself in way over his head with yer’ friends up there. I’m goin’ after him. You comin’ or not?”

  Lyria drew a shaky breath, eyes still wide but steadying. “I’m coming.”

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  “PULL BACK—PULL BACK!” I shouted into the wind, but it was useless. The Witch’s rampage only grew worse.

  Ron fell back beside me, diving behind an overturned gravestone, panting. “What are we going to do!?” he cried over the roaring magic.

  Selene appeared in a flash, her braids floating as arcs of lightning danced across her body. I’d never seen her channel this much power before—there was more to her than I’d realized.

  Kaela couldn’t reach us, sprinting through a hail of flying stakes that cratered the earth where they struck. She moved like a serpent through smoke, her spear flickering in and out of sight.

  “Can’t you just transform!?” Selene shouted.

  “And then what—?” I barked back. “She’s blocking everything we throw at her!”

  “Maybe you and I can distract her! Ron, do you have a big finishing move or something!?”

  Ron shook his head, panic in his eyes. “I—I’m nearly out of mana! I don’t have anything that big! I’m still—”

  “New, yeah, I noticed!” Selene cursed and glanced toward Kaela. “I’m going to help her—!” And then she was gone, vanishing into the haze.

  My mind raced.

  The sword at my hip began to hum—a low, resonant sound that made my heart stutter. I hadn’t even considered it. Fighting a mage with a sword was reckless. But desperate times…

  I drew it.

  The twin metals sang as Lun and Ten’s energies flared to life, light and dark coiling through the silver and dark-iron blade. The strain on my body lessened as the energy flowed outward, gathering in the twisted steel.

  I could distract her with this…

  But then what?

  “Yukon—!” a familiar voice called.

  My head snapped around. For a moment I thought I was imagining it.

  But there she was—mud-streaked, breathless, alive.

  “Lyria!” I nearly tripped over myself rushing toward her, my grin breaking through the chaos. “Where have you been!? What happened to Sylico, where’s Bront?”

  “Long story—” she panted, skidding to a stop beside me, Margo right behind her. “Do you have a plan?”

  We both turned toward the Witch. Margo was already busy shouting at Ron and smacking him on the shoulder, telling him not to join fights he couldn’t win.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe I can use this.” I lifted the blade.

  Lyria’s lavender eyes flickered, tracing the surge of power in the Witch’s aura—seeing the flow of mana I could only feel.

  “Her magic’s unstable,” she murmured. “It’s feeding on that thing—” she pointed downhill, where Murasa fought Grahamut in a brutal clash that shook the ground. “Also, what is that?”

  “Long story,” I said, mirroring her tone, but she was right. The Witch and Grahamut seemed connected somehow.

  Despite everything falling apart around us, she smirked. The fear that had haunted her earlier slipping away, replaced by calm determination.

  “...I have an idea,” she said.

  And for the first time all night—I believed we might actually survive this.

  “We can’t overpower her, not directly,” she began, her voice quick but steady. “She’s feeding off Grahamut’s energy. The longer she channels it, the more unstable she becomes. We just need to force her to overextend—and hit her all at once when her defenses drop.”

  “How?”

  “You, Selene, and Kaela—keep her busy. Drive her attacks in a single direction. Make her focus on you, not me. I’ll hide my mana signature and prepare a big spell. It’ll take time—so don’t die before I’m done.”

  As she spoke I saw the light of resolve ignite in her eyes. Whatever she had just been through, she meant to shut up any whispers of doubt it may have brought.

  “No pressure,” I muttered with a smile.

  She smiled faintly. “You’ll know when to pull back.”

  I gave her a final nod and took off through the broken headstones, shouting to Selene and Kaela as I went.

  “We’ve got a plan—on me!”

  Selene landed beside me in a crack of lightning, her rapier glowing white-blue. Kaela twirled her spear, grinning despite the chaos.

  “About time,” Kaela said. “Thought we were just gonna die dramatically.”

  “Not today,” I said. “We push her right—keep her facing us. Don’t give her a second to breathe.”

  The Witch shrieked, her voice cracking through the night like shattered glass. The air thickened with raw power as sigils formed beneath her feet.

  “Move!” I shouted.

  Selene darted in first, faster than I could track—her blade slicing through the Witch’s shields in sparks of white fire. Kaela followed, a blur of motion as her spear danced through the air, deflecting large stakes of pure crimson magic as they sailed in.

  I let Tenebrae’s power rise—black flame licking along my limbs, my muscles tightening as the world slowed. Every heartbeat stretched into clarity. Every magical spear and orb of pure energy that came crashing toward me met the same fate, split effortlessly on my blade of twin metals.

  We became motion.

  Lightning, shadow, and finesse.

  Selene’s eyes widened as I caught up to her, passing her in a black flash.

  “Show off—” She muttered with a grin, pushing herself to move faster.

  Each of us circling, striking, drawing the Witch’s fury outward—until her attacks became wild, desperate, unbalanced. The storm turned on itself.

  And far beyond the chaos, unseen by all of us, a blue glow began to bloom in the mist—Lyria’s spell building, slow and unstoppable.

  The Witch, infuriated, began channeling a spell too large for her own good… Tendrils of red energy seeped out of the ground, pooling before her as she formed a dense sphere of magic, crackling, shifting, distorting the sparse light of the surrounding night.

  The Witch screamed as the orb of red energy swelled to an impossible size, her staff trembling in her hands. The air itself warped—heat and gravity twisting around her as she drew in everything like a dying star.

  And then—

  through the smoke and dust and ruin—a calm voice rose above it all.

  A whispered incantation, steady and sure.

  “Astral Art—Wings of Lunaris.”

  The world seemed to pause.

  A brilliant sapphire light tore through the fog, washing the graveyard in moonlit blue. The Witch turned, too slow to comprehend what she was seeing.

  Lyria stood at the edge of the broken hill, hair whipping in the wind. A massive azure rune circle glowed beneath her. The single blue ribbon that had survived her previous fight danced wildly at her side, her silver bangs glowing in the light of her own magic.

  Her staff pulsed once—and from the sigil beneath her feet, wings unfurled.

  The spell took form—majestic and vast—a spectral bird of pure arcane fire. Its body shimmered like glass, veins of starlight running through translucent wings that spanned the breadth of the battlefield. Each feather trailed light, scattering motes of azure across the broken stones.

  Everyone froze.

  Even the Witch hesitated.

  Kaela lowered her spear. Selene’s lightning dimmed to a quiet hum. Ron, stepping out from behind Margo, blinking up in wonder.

  The spectral bird reared back, its cry shaking the heavens—a sound like song and thunder entwined.

  Lyria raised her staff, and the bird swelled, rising with her, every muscle trembling with power. Her lavender eyes burned like twin stars, reflecting the living storm of energy swirling around her.

  “Go,” she breathed.

  The bird dove.

  It cut through the air with a comet’s grace, trailing ribbons of moonfire that turned the debris to glass. The Witch spun to retaliate, her unstable orb of red energy cracking with panic.

  Too late. She couldn’t conjure a barrier spell.

  The blue phoenix struck her with a deafening roar. The impact twisted the night itself—blue and crimson colliding in a spiral of light that tore through the clouds above. The Witch’s scream echoed across the graveyard, the red sphere imploding as the spectral bird wrapped its wings around her, folding inwards—

  —and then exploded in a radiant burst, a beam of silver-blue light lancing skyward like the moon itself had cast the spell.

  For a moment, there was silence.

  Then, a shockwave washed over us, forcing us back a step.

  Finally, as the energy dissipated, only the sound of wind remained.

  Ash drifted like snow. The red glow was gone.

  When the light faded completely, the Witch was on her knees, her body hollow and steaming, the corruption burned from her form. The remaining shards of Lyria’s spell fluttered down like glowing feathers, each one winking out as it touched the ground.

  And there she stood—Lyria, breathing hard, her eyes still shimmering lightly in the aftermath. Her ribbon had come loose, fluttering away into the night breeze.

  No one spoke.

  No one could.

  Even Tenebrae’s restless growl in my chest went quiet for a moment.

  Selene exhaled slowly. “By the gods…” she whispered.

  Kaela gave a low whistle. “Remind me never to piss her off.”

  I couldn’t say anything. My chest ached—not from pain this time, but from the sheer, impossible beauty of her magic. It reminded me of Celeste’s spectral carp, but the light danced differently — freer, fiercer, unmistakably Lyria.

  The faint glow still clung to her, like moonlight refusing to let go.

  The moment held an edge I would never forget. It was as if I knew it was too good to be true. That nothing came without sacrifice. Before I even heard it, before I saw it—the slight fuzz of nausea began building behind my jaw, twisting just beneath my ears.

  And then it came.

  “RON—!” Margo’s cry broke the silence.

  My eyes traced down.

  There, protruding from his chest, was the Witch’s bone staff. Whether propelled by the blast, or hurled by the Witch herself in one final act of cruelty, I couldn’t be sure.

  My feet dragged me forward, my eyes refusing to look away.

  His fragile blue eyes caught mine as a stream of crimson spilled down his chin.

  The world slowed around me, Tenebrae’s fury trembled, Lunae’s control quivered.

  He managed one more smile, just before his eyes closed for the last time.