Page 151 of The Sundered Realms

Even if that meant sacrificing something after all, and a part of herself with it, she was going to make it.

Fundamentally, the crux of the problem was that the realms were too badly weakened by separation. What she needed to do was strengthen the realms, and that meant connecting them.

She still had the magic for that. Right here.

Liris closed her eyes, tears spilling out as the emotional intensity of holding this spell threatened to overwhelm her, trying desperately to breathe.

But she heard Vhannor’s voice, and held on.

For him, and for herself.

She couldn’t connect Serenthuar. She didn’t know where it was.

Serenthuar may have believed in sacrifice, but Liris didn’t. She’d trained her whole life to save Serenthuar, and now that was the one thing she couldn’t do if she was going to make sure there was a world for them to come back to.

Someday, if she could find them. If they could hold.

Liris would have to believe in them, in the people she barely knew who had never known her, the way Serenthuar had never believed in her.

She was never going back to Serenthuar. Only forward, now.

Liris opened her eyes, and focused on the pattern before her. How it existed in its current form, the possibilities in it. The connections she could make to reshape this pattern into a new spell, and a new purpose.

The rest of the world fell away. Her mind blazed.

Liris traced the outline of the spell and made it her own.

Through the rush of more magic than she’d ever felt, Liris was a calm in a storm, the magic honing her into an unerring blade rather than clamoring around her.

She took in the orientation of the dimensions of each realm in how Jadrhun had arranged the spell’s shapes and scrawled an ancient powerful language without hesitation. She determined how that orientation was calculated and affixed, adjusted.

Serenthuar had no other Gates to use as anchors, but these drifting realms did. She didn’t have Serenthuar, but she still had them, and now they would have each other.

Liris changed the spell.

With a new layer of spellcraft, she linked one realm to another it had been severed from. She wove a new shape around them, changing the shape, changing the anchor.

With the fundamental force animating the universe, Liris built ley connections between the realms and spent the magic to tether those realms firmly to the rest of them. She wove them into a new pattern and put the magic back into where it had been taken from.

Fixing what was broken by fashioning a new shape, and new ways. Strengthening what she, and they, had.

In an emotionally deafening rush, all the magic of the spell vanished.

The world remained.

The demons screamed.

With the rush of more magic than she’d ever directed, Liris’ consciousness whited out. When she came back to herself—mostly; it felt like she wasn’t fully settled into her own skin, but she could think and move her body and for now that was what mattered—Vhannor was holding her up. She smiled faintly, got her bearings, and gingerly took over balancing on her own two feet.

Vhannor’s eyes had never left the demons around them, and Liris flipped her spell pad to a new page and joined him.

Shoulder to shoulder, fighting at his side. As she would have it be always.

He’d never stopped, would never stop, and she wouldn’t either.

Vhannor’s magic cracked out in rapid bolts of lightning. Each one pushed advancing demons back farther.

Penning a quick adjustment, Liris unleashed a blaze of magic. No hesitation: anyone close enough to be hurt could protect themself or was her target.

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