Thunder rolled out over the peak as the Everless Wall collapsed.

Claire’s ragged breath caught in her chest.

The wraiths had broken through. Arden’s last defense was now only a ring of dust.

Not just dust, the unicorn said with a gentle prod. Look.

Claire fumbled once more for her spyglass and brought it to her eye. Something moved within the clouds. Giants.

Statues.

Claire let out a joyful shout as row after row of red-stone warriors shrugged out of the dust and surrounded the Citadel in a protective circle, forming a barrier between the wraiths and the people.

The Memorial of the Missing had awakened.

Or, as Claire had realized, the memorial of all those Gemmers who’d gone on a unicorn hunt and whose choices had twisted them beyond any human recognition, corrupting them into shadow. The only thing left of their humanity was the memorial sculpted by the loving hands of those Gemmers who were left behind, with no knowledge of what had happened to their friends and family members. The sculptors from three hundred years ago who, at the direction of Prince Martin, who’d been a friend to unicorns, had preserved the best aspects of those hunters so that they, too, might have a chance to feel sunlight again.

The wraiths, confused, shifted back, away from the strange marching statues, but the unicorns charged forward. Their horns brimmed with light, illuminating the wraiths’ former selves carved into the stone.

But one unicorn did not go forward. She stayed behind with Claire, and they watched together from the higher peak as the white ring of unicorns rushed toward a red-stone band to squeeze out the dark shadows between, a circle of darkness that grew thinner and thinner as the unicorns’ light grew stronger.

For a moment, Claire thought she could hear a bubble of laughter—of joyful recognition, of reunion with a long-lost friend—as the wraiths saw and remembered who they had been and could be again.

A changing of hearts.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t laughter at all but only the chime of diamond hooves on rock.

Still, Claire was sure of one thing: the dark was lifting. Slowly at first, but then like a thunderstorm giving way to rain and then a gentle patter, it lessened until it was nothing at all. The shadows were gone, replaced by misty rainbows that hung over the mountaintop.

Estelle’s promise, at last, had been fulfilled.

The wraiths had been reunited with the sun.

The stone statues, their mission done, settled back into their stationary state, though they remained circling Starscrape Citadel, replacing the Everless Wall that had separated the Gemmers from the rest of Arden for three hundred years. A new kind of memorial, one not of loss but of being found again.

“Where are the unicorns going?” Claire cried out. They had not stopped running. Instead, they were streaming down the mountains, flowing like rivers into the rest of Arden.