The next thing I see—blue sky. I’m flying through the air, backward and away from the Bone Tree, pushed by some unbelievable force, the claws and vertebrae of the branches spiraling in my vision as I roll countless times in the snow like a thrown doll.

“No!” Fione’s scream pierces the insulation of the moment, and time resumes.

“Varia!” Lucien calls, his tone cracking with worry. “Varia! Varia!!”

She has chosen.

I stagger to my feet, squinting with six eyes as a searing light at the base of the Bone Tree, where Varia once was, grows ever bigger. Her outline is faintly visible—a humanoid shape engulfed by white light, her hand resting on the trunk. She tilts her head up, her mouth opening and light pouring out of it in a concentrated beam. I rush to stand before Lucien, Fione, and Malachite as Old Vetrisian power blurs the snow, the sky, draining all color from the world, from our faces and clothes. It’s sucking in, as if in preparation to expel, the Bone Tree’s branches now twitching wildly, nonsensically—a mirror image of the way Evlorasin twitched in pain all those days below the city.

“Something is going to burst!” Fione shrieks. I can feel it, too—the heaviness in the air is compressing to that single point of Varia beneath the Tree. Something has to give, and soon.

“Varia!” Lucien’s voice goes ragged, sloughing through the snow to reach his sister. “Varia!”

“Luc, no!” Malachite staggers after him.

The moment slows again. Me, standing with a bejeweled white mercury dagger in my chest, my six white eyes narrowed and crying blood. Malachite, reaching his long pale hand for Lucien, his injured face etched with worry. Fione, tears streaming down her cheeks, five points of blood stained into the skin over her heart, her heart that must be utterly broken. Varia, brimming with light, spilling it, almost consumed by it now. And Lucien.

Lucien, reaching for his sister, his hand outstretched, his legs frozen in a long stride and his expression—so stolid until now—teetering on the edge of crumbling.

To lose someone once—devastating.

To lose them again—the end of the world.

Lucien’s closer to the light than anyone; he’s not going to survive the blast. But neither are Fione and Malachite. This power—it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt—not magic, not machine, but something greater than either could ever be alone.

Silence. In the silence. All that matters is the next moment. Not what Lucien has used me for, not what Varia has betrayed her love for. Not what I have become, with my six eyes. Just the next moment.

In the perfect quiet of my concentration, I can see everything, all the heat on and in this mountain, all the coldness in it—how far the mountains go, how close the abyss yawns all around the peak.