Salt remained suspended in the air well past the moment the tide had swept over her.
Kael remained motionless on the cliff's edge, the brine and grief weighing on his palate. Wind tousled his hair, wrapped around the collar of his coat as unyielding fingers trying to persuade him to return, but he could not turn. Aere would not permit it.
Aerenya was gone.
But unlike before—not as a victim, not as a shattered soul lost to the Void. She had departed willingly. By choice. With the same fierce light burning in her eyes that she had always had through every night.
And yet, Kael felt hollow. Shattered. As if something essential had been carved out of his chest and thrown into the ocean after her.
With him, Elira knelt by the wreckage of the Weeping Blade. There was no longer anything but rubble now—glinting pieces that whirred faintly with the dying embers of ancient power. One was small enough to hold in the palm of a hand, and it sang when she put her fingertips on it.
