Page 47 of Oath-Maker

He did, stopping only for a moment to watch Lucius battle with the tear in the Veil. Sure enough, the sheer number of demons and paladins and humans, I realized with a hopeful leap of my heart, were fighting back against the celestials. We couldn’t keep it up if they kept filtering in through the tear, but the troops already here on the ground and in the skies above Lightport were dwindling in number.

“You are alone,” I continued in the Guardian’s stunned silence. “And you always will be. But you can do it from Soltar.”

I pushed forward, but the Guardian moved at the same time, withdrawing his sword. It surprised me, but I realized he wasn’t going to kill me—he was still concentrating elsewhere. But that was the same exact moment a blade tip protruded from the center of the Guardian’s chest.

I blinked as blood trickled up the corners of the Guardian’s mouth. His gaze dropped to his belly and then back to me, shock written in his features. But I didn’t know—I hadn’t been the one to stab him.

The Guardian fell forward, completely crushing me beneath his weight, and my chestscreamedwith fire for it.

“Ayla!” I heard over the Guardian’s massive form.Jessa.“Ayla, hang on.” She shoved the Guardian off of me as his eyes rolled back into his head. As his skin grew dark gray very rapidly.

“Get out of here,” I grunted out as if she very likelyhadn’tbeen the one to kill him.

She appeared in my spinning vision, runes on her arms lit up that hadn’t been there before. Runes like mine. Now absent was the pain that’d been written in her eyes.

“I know,” she said, watching my reaction. She looked powerful. Angelic. “I surrendered to Soltar. All the pain, all the suffering—it was too much. But look at me now. I’m not even mentally swayed.”

A rough cough stole my attention, a wet gargling of blood as the Guardian’s mouth turned red.

I rolled over onto my side and studied the Guardian’s form to make sure he was actually as injured as he’d appeared. Jessa had run him straight through. His eyes were now gray as well as his skin—as if all the light had been shorn out of him.

All of the light.

I turned my gaze to the Order’s tower where, to my utter surprise, the sphere of radiant light, the Light’s form on this world, was gone. Put out or otherwise disappeared, it did not show anymore.

“Ay… la…” He groaned through another bubbled cough. Blood stained his lips. For a moment, looking down at him like this, I could only see Merek. His features had softened. Regret did that to a person. But remorse didn’t erase everything that had happened or every death he’d caused. “I just wanted to bring Light to all.”

“I know,” I said. “Our job is toprotectthe innocent. Not force them one way or another.”

We’d both failed this. But at least I would work to make up for it.

“Go,” Jessa said frantically. “Ayla, Lucius doesn’t look so good!”

Jessa was right. The tear had shrunk some under Lucius’s focus, but the light sickness in his system was weakening him. I could feel that weakness even now in our mate bond. As I watched Lucius, he began to fall from the sky. He landed on his knees on a roof, his wings out around him.

“I’ll stay with Merek.Go,” Jessa pleaded. I wanted to correct her—tell her that wasn’t Merek anymore—but it really did not matter. Not now. Not if we didn’t close the tear in the Veil and seal Soltar away from Serenia for good.

I took off, flying fast toward Lucius, and landed beside him. He reached for me like I were a life vest and he were in open water.

“Ayla.” Lucius croaked as pain shook his body. Light sickness was the only real weakness demons had against paladins of the Light, and to be hit with it a second time—I wanted to cleanse it from his body, but I didn’t know how.

I got a shoulder under him and pulled him to standing. “Come on. We’ve got this. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.”

“I nearly died.”

I grabbed his chin. “But you didn’t, and you willnotdie on me now, Lucius.” I drew him in and kissed him hard, using the opportunity to force the power of our mate bond into his body, to strengthen him the way Soltar was empowering the celestials and demons. “Believe,” I said as I pulled away. I wanted to keep kissing him—my bodycravedhis touch. But a battlefield was neither the time nor the place for him to take me.

Lucius stood straighter—it was the only indication that my plan had worked. “We need to close the tear.”

I held both of his hands in mine. “Then let’s do it.”

Jessa had fulfilled the prophecy to end the evil in this world. Only Lucius and I, our mate bond, had enough power to ensure this future’s safety.

With a push like diving into an ocean, we turned to face the tear in the Veil as we fell to the pull of our power. In my mind’s eye, Lucius and I walked through a space full of mirrors, each populating a possibility, a potential future or outcome, a source of power forhismagic that had become mine. But the reflections were hard to look at—harder yet to ignore—and so I found myself lost so easily. But Lucius was there, sifting with me through the possibilities as our magic built.

“Picture the tear closing,” Lucius said, “and the Veil disappearing, sealed, never to be opened again.”

And I did, but first I imagined a drain around it, pulling all of the celestials back to the Veil to lock them away. I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening outside of this potentiality bubble, but I could feel the waves as aura after aura slipped past me toward the tear in the Veil.

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