Total pages in book: 362
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
The ground cracked under my feet, golden wisps of essence rising from the fissures. Eather as brilliant as the summer sun streaked out, searing the ground. The eather stretched between us, closing the distance between Embris and me. Essence rose, wrapping itself around his legs.
The tear in the realm flickered and then sealed, silencing the draken calls.
Embris’s head jerked around, his eyes widening. “You can’t do this!” he roared, flesh thinning. Tendrils of eather snapped around his wrists, stretching his arms out until his back bowed. “You can’t—”
I lifted my hand, silencing him with a twist of my wrist, shattering his jaw. “You will die in this realm.”
My words set fire to the corn, and the hills lit with an orange glow. The sky above me cracked open just as my heart had done when I saw Ezra’s face. Eather rushed down my arm, crackling and spitting.
All around me, the realm screamed, and I thought I heard my name in the loudest of them.
The valley shuddered when I rose from the ground, gripping Embris’s boyish curls. I twisted his head back and then struck, sinking my fangs into his throat.
The Primal shouted, and his energy lashed out at me, stinging me through my shirt and breeches. But I didn’t care. I drank deeply, taking in his blood—the very essence of the realms. I didn’t care that I had never really spoken to this Primal. I drank until I felt him weakening, felt his breaths becoming labored, and his heart falter. Only then did I tear my fangs free.
Silvery eather lit Embris’s veins, but it quickly turned golden. Blood leaked from the Primal’s ears, nostrils, and mouth, then seeped from his pores.
“You will not pass into Arcadia.” My lips brushed his cheek, peeling layers of his skin back. I dragged him into the air and away from the trembling walls surrounding Masadonia, the capital of Terra. I took him as far from the city as possible—from the bells I now heard ringing within the city’s walls. “There will be no long rest for you. No peace. You deserve nothing. You will cease to exist.”
The flesh of Embris’s throat had begun to flake off, golden eather flooding the rest of his body. I forced him to his knees.
“I am the One who is born of Blood and Ash, the Light and the Fire, and the Brightest Moon, the true Primal of Life and the Queen of the Gods and Common Man. I will give you what you deserve,” I whispered, but all in the realm, from the west to the east, heard my words. My skin tightened as I lifted my right arm. “I condemn you to the final death.”
Lightning erupted from the sky, striking my right palm. A jagged bolt formed, as hot as the Pits of Endless Flames of the Abyss. Guided by instinct, I jerked his head back and slammed the lightning bolt through the underside of his jaw.
The end of the Primal of Wisdom, Loyalty, and Duty wasn’t instantaneous.
Embris’s flesh tore away, and what was left of his blood fell to the ground, boiling until it eventually evaporated and his muscles and tendons dried out. He experienced the disintegration of every fucking inch of his body, starting with his lower half. I left his head—his eyes—for last, making sure his very last second of existence was just as terrifying as Ezra’s and Marisol’s had likely been—as my mother’s, the servants’, the guards’, and all those who were now gone were.
I let go, and his head shattered into a cloud of shimmery dust that spread across the cornfield.
Embris was gone.
And it did nothing to assuage my rage or sorrow. It only grew.
I stepped back as particles of eather began pulsing and expanding where Embris once knelt, coming together to form a ball of softly glowing energy.
Something was happening.
Tiny hairs rose all over my body, and energy pressed down, forcing me to move back even farther.
The ball of energy drifted into the sky and climbed until it was among the stars, throbbing all the while.
Everything stopped.
My breath.
My heart.
The realms.
Eather seeped from the top and bottom of the orb, then from its left and right. What remained of Embris’s essence shuddered—
Then erupted in a blinding light, streaking to the north and south, then the west and east of the realms.
In the distance, half the Masadonia Rise came down. I could hear windows shattering as a scorching wind blew through Terra. For a brief second, I saw pink trees similar to those lining the Golden Bridge, as well as the moonlight-kissed thatched roofs of farmsteads and villages. I saw people running in the hazy glow across the fields. Women. Men. Children. They all ran in a desperate attempt to escape, but then it all went up like they were nothing but dried-out tinder. The trees. The farms. Villages. The people. The orange-lit hills—the lower mountains of the Undying Hills—that stretched all the way to the city of Masadonia crumbled into the sea, sending out a thunderous shockwave. A great wave rose, one as high as any mountain and as wide as the entire coast of the mortal realm. It blocked out the stars and moon—