“The sun is a reminder,” Valen said now, sitting down on a small stone ledge carved into the tower. His body still ached, but Nor had assigned her personal physician to look after him, a cyborg woman who had come to his new suite of rooms and spread oils and tonics across his back until the lash wounds stitched themselves back together.

Nor had given him more food than he’d eaten in months—the best she could offer from Xen Ptera’s limited supply, to help him grow strong.

And now she’d done what she could to give him a ray of sunlight to cast away the shadows of his past.

“A reminder of what?” Nor asked.

Through the glass, Valen surveyed the streets of Nivia, Xen Ptera’s capital city. “That there will always be a new day.”

“And if you can’t see the sun?” she wondered. Her expression was full of grief as she gazed down at her people below—as if all she could see was death.

“Then we will make our own,” Valen swore. “Together. And then the world will be ours, and bow beneath our will.”

Nor looked slightly heartened at his declaration. “The message our mother sent to me before she died... It wasn’t only about you. She told me that Exonia was dying, too. Imagine it, Valen. Our true home is an entire galaxy like Xen Ptera. Desperate for escape. We can be that escape for them, when we tear open the Void.”

They would do it. He knew, just from the look in her eyes each time she spoke of the future, that she would help him hone his power to its greatest potential. And someday, they would change the fate of not just one galaxy, but two.

“That’s why I come up here,” Nor said quietly. “I force myself to stare down at this hideous place, because it reminds me of what’s at stake. And now I hope it reminds you, too.” She glared at the skies, with that icy gaze he had come to know as strength.

It made Valen itch with the need for revenge.

Not for himself. But for these people. For his sister.

For all the lies his father had ever told him.

For Exonia.

One moment, Valen was lying on a soft pillow of moss in Kalee’s garden, feeling Nor’s presence fade away from their mental doorway. The next...a deep breath, a press against that thread of power within his soul...

Valen stepped into the confines of his mind.

Here was the threshold of his power.

The sky was dark overhead, clouds rumbling as the wind howled like a wounded beast. A battlefield lay before him, heavy with the corpses of dead demons from his past. Fear, and insecurity, and the certainty that he would never amount to anything. Valen himself had slain them all on his journey to unlocking his compulsion.