I opened myself wider, drawing in noorestone fire. Faster. Hotter. It choked me, clogging in my throat, in my pores, in my fingernails. It was too much, and still it wasn’t nearly enough.

And then—

The noorestone hit.

It crashed into a building. A temple to Suna, the Judge, with delicate spires and decorative arches carved from rose marble, some pieces shaved so thin that sunlight shone through the smoky stone. It was a masterpiece of architecture, awe-inspiring and imposing, and now it shattered apart.

“No!” The roar spilled from my wide-open jaws, but it was too late.

The noorestone exploded as it slammed into marble and limestone and metal framework, and drove into the earth below. Shards of glittering fire shot out in a thousand directions. Into the sky. Into surrounding buildings. Into carriages. Into orderly rows of trees. Into people.

The ground quaked with the impact, and the unconscious dragons groaned fitfully. The humans with me stumbled—some toward me, but most toward the uncertain safety of the carriage.

I couldn’t blame them; I was terrible to behold: wreathed in blue-white fire, skin shining with dark, unearthly light, and those wings. Not the wings from before, when I’d gripped noorestones in the theater or Pit, but wings that buzzed and flickered and hurt. They weren’t right. They weren’t natural. And they were going to kill me if I couldn’t do something with all this power.

But that was secondary. There was no space to worry about what was happening to me, because in the city, a firestorm rained on buildings and parks and people, incinerating everything in an instant. I saw their faces, terrified and blackening as they died and disappeared; the intensity of the noorestone fire took even their bones.

That was just the first few moments: twenty-three buildings demolished, three hundred and eleven people dead and evaporated, four—no, five—thousand running as though they had any hope of survival.

The numbers grew worse from there.

Ash mixed with falling fire—all the shards that had flown up and out after the first strike were now dropping back to the tender earth—and terrible dry heat rushed through streets and windows, heralding the flames hot enough to melt stone, which ran liquid and black over the charred earth. It was a Sundering of a different sort.

“Stop!” I screamed for the noorestone shards, drawing their fires deeper into me. Thousands upon thousands of threads spun off the fragments, reaching toward me, but I was too late. Too slow. Too unprepared.

Over the palace, silence bloomed.

It spread like a bubble, rising and stretching toward the shattered noorestone, enveloping gardens and courtyards and temples in pure silence as it rolled outward. But even that wouldn’t be enough. It would quiet the noorestone fragments, but it could not quell the fires that blazed through the streets of Sunder, or ease the heat that sucked moisture from everything, even stone, or prevent the stampede of people fleeing in every direction.

I let out a furious cry. My wings flexed wide, scorching crescent moons into the ground around me. I pulled more and more of the noorestone’s shattering power into me, making every piece of my body buzz with dissonance, with unstable harmony, with burning. I wanted to fly into that plume of silence and let it cool the agony of this inferno, but the noorestone shards still rained on Sunder, exploding anew and killing more and more.