The winds at the summit of Caelum’s Reach screamed like dying gods.
Seraphina ascended through the boiling cloud bank, touching down silently upon the circular, marble-tiled pinnacle of the spire. Two thousand paces above the raging siege below, the air was bitterly thin and reeked of scorched iron and dark necromancy.
In the center of the terrace sat the Sun-Mirror—a colossal disk of polished amber crystal eighty feet across, held within a towering gimbal of ancient bronze. Corrupted soul-iron spikes had been driven into the delicate solar runes along its rim, bleeding dark, oily veins across the glass. The mirror was angled downward toward the western horizon, humming with an unstable, inverted frequency aimed straight at the heart of Mount Dread.
Standing before the primary alignment console was the Oracle of Cinders, her tattered silk shrouds whipping in the gale, her weeping bronze mask reflecting the sickly green lightning. Flanking her were four elite Void-Weavers, chanting low, guttering incantations as they siphoned necrotic ether into the mirror’s core.
"Step away from the glass, witch," Seraphina’s voice cut through the tempest, clear, cold, and lethal.
The Oracle turned slowly, her head tilting with grotesque curiosity. Beneath the bronze mask, two pinpricks of burning emerald fire flared.
"The little Sun-Brat arrives in time to witness the cremation of her realm," the Oracle hissed, her voice a cacophony of scraping bones. "Your lover bleeds in the mud below, half-blood. When this beam fires, his mountain will crack into the molten abyss, and your precious mate-bond will drown in ash."
"My blood built this spire," Seraphina replied, drawing her twin sunstone daggers as her twenty-foot wings of starlight arched aggressively behind her. "And my blood will cleanse it."
"Kill her!" the Oracle shrieked. "Feed her heart to the lens!"
The four Void-Weavers lunged forward in unison, hurling lances of condensed void-rot that hissed through the air like striking serpents.
Seraphina moved with breathtaking speed. She ducked beneath the first two bolts, her solar wings beating forward in a blinding shockwave that deflected the third. She closed the distance to the nearest sorcerer in a heartbeat, spinning low and driving her sunstone dagger upward into his ribcage.
Pure thermonuclear plasma erupted from the blade, flash-vaporizing the weaver from the inside out in a burst of white smoke.
Without breaking momentum, she vaulted over his collapsing ashes, sweeping her left wing in an incandescent arc that cleaved the heads from the second and third weavers before their blades could clear their scabbards.
The fourth weaver backed away in terror, but Seraphina didn't look at him; she raised her sunstone bow and fired a single, blind plasma arrow over her shoulder, pinning him through the throat to the bronze gimbal.
"Impressive parlor tricks," the Oracle sneered.
Suddenly, the Oracle blurred.
She reappeared directly in Seraphina’s guard, moving with supernatural, liquid speed. A curved ritual blade of blackened bone slashed across Seraphina’s dragon-scale breastplate, showering sparks and carving a shallow, burning cut along her collarbone.
A wave of numbing, necrotic venom instantly seeped toward Seraphina’s heart, stealing the breath from her lungs.
"You are only flesh, little queen," the Oracle purred, raising her blade for the killing thrust to Seraphina’s throat. "And flesh withers before the void."
Seraphina stumbled back, her vision blurring at the edges with creeping frost.
Then, through the mate-bond, she felt it: Kaelen’s presence surging into her soul like an ocean of molten steel and unyielding pride. His voice echoed in her mind, dark, fierce, and absolute: Burn, my sun. You are the dawn itself.
The venom didn't freeze her heart; it hit the bottomless furnace of her Sunblood and ignited into raw fuel.
Seraphina caught the Oracle’s descending wrist with her bare hand.
The Oracle shrieked as Seraphina’s skin flared with five thousand degrees of white-hot solar fire, melting the witch’s flesh and bone to slag in an instant. With a savage twist, Seraphina shattered the bone blade, spun, and drove her right sunstone dagger straight through the eye slit of the weeping bronze mask.
The Oracle convulsed, green fire pouring from her mouth and ears as the holy plasma consumed her corrupted essence, collapsing into a heap of smoldering ash upon the marble.
Breathing heavily, her collarbone smoking as her Sunblood rapidly sealed the wound, Seraphina turned toward the corrupted Sun-Mirror. The device was at critical mass, seconds away from firing its lethal inverted beam at Mount Dread.
She rushed to the pedestal, laying both bare hands upon the corrupted amber glass.
"Awaken, ancient light," she whispered fiercely. "Remember your true master."
Her golden fire flooded the crystalline disk. The corrupted soul-iron spikes shattered into harmless dust as the mirror’s true amber brilliance returned, swiveling skyward and discharging a blinding, beautiful beam of purified starlight into the heavens, tearing the storm clouds to pieces and heralding the true dawn over the Seven Spheres.
A heavy thud shook the terrace behind her.
Kaelen landed, his eighty-foot shadow-wings battered and spattered with corsair blood, his broadsword dripping black ichor. His silver eyes locked onto Seraphina standing bathed in the golden column of light, and the tension drained from his broad shoulders.
He sheathed his blade and crossed the terrace in three massive strides, pulling her against his chest in a bruising, desperate embrace. His mouth found hers in a breathless, savage kiss of shared triumph that silenced the howling wind.
"I told you," Seraphina murmured against his lips, smiling as she cupped his blood-streaked cheek. "I take my own heads."