I’m here, came her steady voice. And so are you, Lightbringer. Show yourself.
Audric closed his eyes once more, sucked in a breath, and thrust his hands into the air, Illumenor clutched tightly between them.
Immediately, the wind caught the broad blade and sent them spinning until Atheria righted them and pushed forward with a piercing cry.
Audric, his head reeling as if he had been struck, faced the spitting clouds and began to pray. With the dawn I rise.
Memories flooded him: himself as a child, training in the royal gardens with Magister Guillory, every fern and pine of that shadowed green world ornamented with sunbursts he had pulled down from the sky.
With the day I blaze.
His eight-year-old hands, pudgy and sweaty but nevertheless steady in the air, keeping those countless lights suspended and slowly turning. Nearby, watching proudly, his mother and father, arm in arm.
And now, even caught in the thrashing storm, Audric felt the sunlight rising around him, responding to the call of his power. Illumenor blazed in his hands, so bright he could no longer see past it. Its brilliance was his entire world, and it burned its shape into his eyes.
Then a concentrated gust of wind burst to life behind them, pushing them forward into the black wall of clouds.
With the dawn I rise.
He realized, as the Sun Rite raced through his thoughts, that the push of wind had been too precise, too focused, to be natural. And the feeling of it—teeming with hope and gratitude, vibrating with power—confirmed his guess.
The windsingers down below had sent this wind to him. Together, they had mustered up enough power to help him and Atheria make this last desperate push.
With the day I blaze, Audric thought, his hands tingling with power, and when he and Atheria burst through the wall of clouds and into the storm’s eye, his relief was so immense that he cried out, and his power erupted with joy. Energy coursed through him, so violent and vivid that he felt certain it would tear him in two. He imagined the full breadth of the storm, sprawling black and angry over the sea, and the infinite layers of the empirium that wove through it like panes of golden glass. They touched the clouds and the lightning, the blade in his hands, the power in his veins. Broad spears of light exploded from Illumenor, and the world blazed white and hot.
In the ringing silence that followed, his vision slowly returned to him, though his head pounded with pain that blacked out half the world. Dimly, he realized that Atheria was flying desperately back to shore. He looked around, blinking darkness from his eyes. The storm had lost cohesion, its clouds scattered and quickly disintegrating. Calm winds rushed past him, cooling his scorched cheeks as Atheria bolted over the water.
He felt a dull ache pounding up his arms and looked down at his hands.
Illumenor’s hilt glistened with blood. His palms screamed with a blistering agony so ferocious it stabbed his teeth.
Ludivine reached for him, the gentle wash of her tenderness muting all sensation. Soon, he could feel no pain.
You can let go, Audric, she told him. They’re safe.
He did, letting his arms drop. Swaying on Atheria’s back, woozy, he watched firewheels of color spin before his eyes. He wondered if he was dying, if he would ever see Rielle again, and what she would think when she learned what he had done. Then he collapsed against Atheria’s neck.
• • •
Gently, at the sound of a familiar voice calling his name, Audric began to stir, and he only let himself rise to wakefulness because the voice was Rielle’s.
He followed it skyward, pushing through the painful weight that pressed against him, this pressure that wanted to bury him. An immensity of exhaustion.
Then he saw her—his love, his Rielle, dressed in white, her hair loose and her face shining with love. She reached for him; she bid him climb.
But when Audric opened his eyes, her name on his lips, the vision vanished. It was only Ludivine looking down at him. She sat beside him on the bed, her eyes shining with tears.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to wake you. I couldn’t wait any longer to see your eyes again.”
Audric turned away from her. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
Ludivine came around the bed to sit beside him. Gently cradling one of his bandaged hands, she raised his wrist to her lips and kissed it.