The shock wave had knocked the vines off the ribs of the ark, and the evening light poured in like fire. Whatever was left of the interior had crumbled, and the last of the creature’s skin, hanging on to the bones, fluttered down like pebble-size metallic snowflakes. One landed on his shoulder, but he brushed the scale off. The rings of the astrolabe had come off their rotation and sat on their sides on the floor, encircling the crystal, which was now clear all the way through—like glass.

“Jax?” he called, coughing against the ancient dust, as he climbed over the rings and onto the center dais. Dirt and dust stuck to the tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if he was sobbing or calling his name. “Jax?—”

As the dust settled, he saw him.

The Solani prince was standing, staring down at the palm of his hand, surprise and confusion lacing across his silver eyebrows. His hair cascaded down his shoulders to his lower back, glimmering like spun steel in the sunlight. There was a new color in his cheeks, and the bruises across his arms and under his eyes seemed to dull by the moment.

He was alive, and Koren Vey was gone.

His hands went to the life support on his chest. Robb tried to stop him—but Jax shut it off before he could say a word. The disk went dark, needles coming undone from his chest, and it clattered onto the ground.

Jax took a deep breath.

Then another.

There was an odd light in the ancient ark that didn’t come from the sunlight streaming in overhead, and it seemed to get brighter with each breath Jax took. At first, Robb thought it was a trick of his eyes, but as he came closer, the light didn’t fade. It was the same soft shimmer from the crystal, but now—now it was coming from . . .

“You’re . . . glowing,” Robb whispered, quite unable to say anything else. And he was. Robb blinked the tears out of his eyes just to make sure, because it looked like a million stars shimmered, dim, just underneath Jax’s skin.

Startled, the C’zar turned to face him, his violet eyes impossibly wide. “Ma’alor?”

“Y-yes?” He came up to him, pressing his metal hand against Jax’s cheek. He was alive. He was okay, and Robb had yet to stop crying.

“I think you should catch me.”

“What—why? Goddess—Jax!”

The Solani’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he dropped like a sack of lead, but Robb caught him before he hit the floor.

Emperor

He scoured the rare book selection in the palace’s library, combing through the contents of numerous dissertations and nonfiction accounts of the Goddess’s reign. He even flipped through one of the first translations of The Cantos of Light from the Old Language, but there was nothing he didn’t already know.

He licked his thumb, his tongue dry, and it surprised him for a moment before he remembered that of course it was. He did not have saliva. His tongue was merely . . . there. Which, if he thought too hard on that, was a little odd—and he flipped through an older tome, the leather dry and brittle in his hand. It was a novel detailing accounts of the Great Dark’s descent into the Iron Kingdom. It came in the form of a Solani, because it adapted to whatever galaxy it absorbed, like how it looked human now. The Great Dark—Mellifare—came to absorb the light in the kingdom, but the wording was strange.