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Kelaros watches the spreading veins with fascination. “Do you think a powerless wildling has a choice?”
The prison around Elionn flares without warning, light erupting from its core in a blinding surge. I throw an arm up, yet even through closed eyelids, the light burns white-hot, searing pulsing patterns onto my retinas.
“What did you do?” Kelaros screams.
“Nothing!” The light bleeds through my fingers, painting my skin translucent.
My blood tattoo ignites, not the gentle warming from before but an inferno. The pain drops me to one knee, a scream locked behind my gritted teeth.
The light intensifies, bleeding from silver to opal, colors shifting too fast to name.
The chamber’s pulse quickens, its luminous veins brightening until they rival the sun. The air grows thick with static electricity, raising the hair on my arms, the taste of metal flooding my mouth. Each breath burns in my lungs.
A high, clear note rings out, vibrating through crystal and bone alike. Then another joins it, higher still, until a chorus of tones fills the chamber, harmonizing in a song too perfect to be natural.
“It’s waking.” Kelaros scrambles backward, his boots skidding over the slick floor and adding to the cacophony.“This isn’t supposed to happen yet!”
I squint through the glare. A crack splits Elionn’s prison, starting at his heart and spreading outward in a network of fractures that catch and splinter the light. With each new break, the note changes pitch, the song growing more complex.
“Elionn!” I push to my feet, fighting the invisible weight pressing down on me.
Another crack splits the air, and a larger fissure appears across Elionn’s cocoon. Crystal dust billows around us, suspended in the strange light, swirling in patterns that form and dissolve too quickly to track.
I reach toward him, palm extended, the sigils on my skin now burning cold rather than hot. “Princeling, can you hear me?”
No response, but the crystal shudders, more cracks branching outward. Small pieces break free, floating in the air rather than falling, defying gravity as they orbit his suspended form.
The song rises as Kelaros reaches for my arm, but the floor between us splits open, forcing him back.
Through my connection to Elionn comes a surge of ancient power that doesn’t destroy but reshapes, recreating what was lost.
The air grows thick with the scent of crushed crystal and ozone, morning dew and night-blooming flowers, all mixing together into a perfume, filling my head with visions of the court as it once was and might become again.
“What do you want?” I ask, not of Elionn, but of the court itself.
The crystal fragments suspended in the air spin faster, catching the light and scattering it in dizzying patterns.
Elionn’s silver skin now glows from within, his veins lit with opalescent light that keeps time with the pulse of the chamber. His features remain still, peaceful, yet power radiates from him in waves.
“Answer me!” The demand tears from my throat.
A pulse stronger than the others rolls outward, bending the very air. My ears pop with the pressure change, and for a moment, sound itself ceases to exist, leaving me in a bubble of perfect silence.
Then, Elionn’s eyelids flutter.
“No!” Kelaros shouts as he desperately searches for a way to cross the fissure.
Another pulse, stronger still, and the crystal around Elionn’s head recedes. I drink in his features as they emerge, the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips, and the slight furrow between his brows.
His eyelids flutter again, then open.
My breath catches in my throat. The silver I remember is gone. His irises flicker with fractured light, shifting through every color in the spectrum before settling into a prismatic sheen reflecting the chamber’s glow.
The crystal continues to melt away from his head and shoulders, leaving his upper body free while his torso and legs remain encased. With uncanny focus, he tracks my every movement as if seeing me for the first time.
“Elionn?”
His lips part, and I lean closer, straining to hear. “Amalia Wolf.”
