I hit the ground harder than I expected.

The impact rattled through me, the jagged stone scraping my palms as I caught myself, my fingers slipped against the rough surface. Every breath came in shallow gasps, like I was fighting against the air itself.

For a moment, I didn’t register anything else.

Pain travelled through my body like a relentless, all-consuming fire. Mouriana had pushed my body past my limits, used me until I was nothing more than a vessel breaking under the strain. Every nerve burned, every muscle screamed, but I had no choice. I had to move.

I forced myself up, hands trembling, limbs barely mine.

“Mouriana?” I whispered, my throat was so sore, and my voice hoarse as I straightened.

Nothing. No sharp retort from her. No presence curling around my mind like it always had. Just silence.

I stood suspended in the void, neither here nor there, my head pounding from the ache in my body. The emptiness I felt was like an unfathomable cavern bearing down on me.

“Mouriana,” I called again, swallowing back the unease creeping up my spine. “We’re still in” wherever this is.”

A flicker. A whisper in the back of my mind.

“The void exists between worlds, between light and dark,” Mouriana’s voice finally returned, fainter than I’d ever felt it, almost as if she was fading from the creases my mind. “It is where the balance tips.”

A hollow laugh escaped me. “A cosmic waiting room.”

“You’re welcome.” And her voice was unsettlingly distant. “You are alive because of me, Celeste. Do not forget that.”

I let out a slow, shaking breath, my fingers curling into fists. “Are you serious right now?”

The irritation brought on by the crap she said burned hotter than the exhaustion cutting through my bones, and it forced my voice out stronger than I thought possible.

“You hijacked my body, shoved me out like I was nothing, like I wasn’t even there, and you’re telling me what?”

I felt my chest rise and fall, every breath coming faster, sharper, like my own rage was pressing against my ribs.

“You could have easily removed the dark without subjecting me or Ostonia to all of this. But you just had to wait until it was convenient for you to get your domain back.”

“You couldn’t have done what needed to be done on your own. That is why I took over. Nothing more.”

Nothing more. Like that was supposed to make it better and I had to accept it. Everything she had done since our contract was just another step in her plan, and she expected that I just go along with it.

I clenched my teeth so hard it hurt, swallowing down the sharp, bitter words that threatened to tear from my throat.

“So that’s it?”

No apology or explanation, just this.

The void moved, and the drowning silence peeled back slowly. My stomach twisted at the sudden weightlessness gave, and my feet hit solid ground. The change was so abrupt that I stumbled, my knees nearly buckling.

And then the familiar hum of Le Torneau Manor seeped into my bones, wrapping around me in a way I hadn’t realized I needed. The fog that had once swallowed the compound was finally gone. I blinked as my vision adjusted to everything sharpening around me.

The scorched stone. The broken statues. The lingering frost where mine and mother’s magic had clashed and burned. The wreckage was still there, but the darkness had lifted and I could breathe. It didn’t feel like the air was clawing its way into my lungs.

Not through clenched teeth or suffocated gasps. Just” breath.

“Mouriana.” The name left my lips before I could stop it. “Is that it? You’re just going to leave me to figure out the rest on my own?”

For a long moment, nothing. Then a soft, quiet, almost gentle: “I will always be here. But this part of the journey is yours alone, Celeste. You must face what comes next without me. That is what it means to be Gaia’s successor.”

I wanted to argue that I wasn’t ready for any of it, and couldn’t carry the burden of Wridel’s leadership on my own because I’ve had a taste of it and didn’t quite care a lick for it. She had no right to push me into this without so much as a warning.

But before I could say anything, she appeared. The air around me bent, as Mouriana rematerialized before me.

I stilled.

It wasn’t the same presence that I had summoned, had lived in my mind, the force I had grown so used to. This was different.

She had a face now.

She had wings.

Not the soft, delicate kind I had seen on faeries before. These were huge, towering behind her, black as the void itself, shifting like shadows caught in a restless wind. Her body was a kaleidoscope of colours that shimmered like the cosmos. She truly was magnificent.

Her eyes—gods, her eyes.

Deep. Endless. A well of emotions I could hardly fathom behind them that made me want to look away.

Reclaiming her domain had changed her.

I swallowed hard, my chest tight, as the gravity of the moment dawned on me.

“This is you biding me farewell, I take it.” The bitterness in my voice was impossible to hide.

Mouriana didn’t flinch as she said, “with Gaia’s grace, I shatter this bond.”

The words cut through me as something snapped, and gods, I felt it. My stomach dropped, a cold, hollow emptiness settling in its place. My breath hitched as my body shuddered in reaction to the severing.

“You said you weren’t leaving.” I hated how small my voice sounded.

Mouriana held my gaze, unshaken. Like she had rehearsed this moment a thousand times. “I’m not,” she said.

But it felt like a lie.

“Our bond cannot remain as it is. It was never meant to be permanent. It was simply a means to an end.”

I stood there, staring, my mind grasping at nothing, because what could I even say to that?

“Still, how could you just” shatter it,” I whispered.

“Because I must.”

That simplicity cut deeper than anything else.

“It was a contract allowed for as long as Gaia willed it,” she continued. “And she only allowed it to remove the dark threatening the Sovereignty, Celeste.”

Now, the talisman at my chest pulsed, a wicked, jarring beat that sent me staggering backward. Then pain. Not physical, or I could brace against. It ran deep, like a thread being pulled loose from the fabric of my soul.

“What are you doing?” The words caught in my throat as a light flared between us, a force separating us like a chasm.

“Setting you free,” she said. It wasn’t cold or indifferent. If anything, it was tender. A kindness I wasn’t prepared for.

“You think I’m ready to do this on my own? To lead Wridel?”

“You are ready,” she said. “To lead and to protect, and you must prove yourself worthy of being my equal for when the time comes.”

I laughed bitterly, shaking my head. “That’s rich, coming from you. How am I supposed to be your equal when you already told me I wasn’t strong enough to even scratch that thing back there? Not to mention you deliberately lied to me about so much.”

A ripple of power brushed against me as her wings flared slightly, like a silent warning.

“I have kept things from you not out of malice, but necessity. You would not have accepted the truth then. Perhaps you still won’t.”

“Try me,” I said as I met her gaze. “No more riddles or half-truths. If you want to shatter this bond and make it something “equal,” then tell me everything.”

Another pause, longer this time, as if she was debating how much to say. “I am the dark, Celeste.”

The words settled too quickly, but that was because she already told me that, and I had questions about that.

“I bonded with you because I needed you to take me into the core of this fragment to reclaim it.” She paused as if to let the truth sink in before adding: “And you needed me too. Whether you realized it or not.”

My breath hitched.

“That darkness was born of my everlasting essence, a fragment of the power I was forced to leave behind when I was displaced.”

My fingers curled. Something about that word felt wrong. “Displaced by whom?”

Mouriana gave a small shrug, an expression so casual, so uncaring, it unnerved me. “Does it matter?”

I hated how easily she dismissed it. “It does to me.”

“What you faced,” she continued, “what was terrorizing Wridel, was not the dark itself. It was a pretender, a thief. It stole my domain, my power, and warped it into the monstrosity you saw today. I brought you here because you were the only one who could channel what I needed to take it back. Gaia allowed our contract because she knew only I could stop it.”

“So I was right?” My voice came quieter now. “This was never about Wridel but about you reclaiming your power.”

She exhaled sharply.

“You’re oversimplifying,” she said, and her tone was verging on impatience. “Wridel’s fate is tied to the darkness. If it had consumed everything, neither you nor I would have had anything left to fight for. Saving this place served us both.”

I pushed myself fully upright, my legs trembling slightly as if to remind me I was still utterly exhausted. “You could’ve told me the truth.” The words shook as they left me, my anger creeping back in.

Mouriana’s expression remained unreadable. “And what would you have done with it?” she countered.

I opened my mouth, but the answer didn’t come.

“Curse Gaia?” she pressed. “Refuse to fight? You can’t even comprehend what you’ve been up against, Celeste. The dark is an inevitability.”

She took a step forward towards me, and the space warped. “I am what keeps it contained.”

A cold certainty settled in my bones in the way that she said that.

“You speak like the battle is already over.” Mouriana studied me, and for a flicker of a moment, I swore I saw something like pity in her gaze.

“It isn’t.” She huffed. “One day, Celeste, you will have to decide what you stand for.” Her wings flapped. “And when that day comes” you and I will stand on opposite sides.”

My breath caught. “You’re saying’”

“You are Wridel’s protector.” A pause. “And I am the dark.”

The realization shattered through me. But that wasn’t the part that gutted me. It was the fact that Mouriana had always known. That every step, every decision, every lie, was leading to this.

“Gaia chose you for this. And I did too.” Her voice was way too calm for what she was saying. “I chose you because you are the only one worthy of a true fight against me. I didn’t get to teach you as much as I would have preferred, but I hope you learned enough about your eternal adversary.”

Those words made me gulp. I had felt her power. Witnessed it, and now, she was telling me I was meant to stop her?

“I will still be here. The dark always is.” Her form was beginning to fade, and her presence was drawing back like the tide receding before a storm. “But I will no longer be your guide. We are two sides of a coin, Celeste—one will perish by the other. Whether you shatter me or I destroy you, fate will decide. But until then” this is your path to walk.”

I couldn’t move or breathe.

She stepped forward, her expression softening, wings shifting behind her as if she meant to close the space between us. But the chasm of light widened, pushing her back, holding her apart from me, and a part of me felt like that was Gaia’s doing. Keeping Mouriana apart from me now that our contract was broken.

“You are not alone, Celeste. You never were. And now, you will see that.”

The light exploded upward, splitting the space between us into fragments.

“Mouriana!”

The name ripped from my throat as my vision blurred, my subconscious splintering under the force pulling me inward. It was like being torn from my own mind, thoughts scattering like shattered glass, each one cutting as they slipped through my fingers.

I saw her. Us.

The first time I summoned her. The battles we fought together. The moments I doubted her, and the ones she let me doubt her, because the truth would have been so much worse.

And there was also the steady presence of her voice, guiding me even when I hated her for it. Now, that presence was fading.

“Mouriana!” My hand reached, my fingers trembling.

But she was already gone.

“The bond is broken.” Her form flickered, dissolving into light and shadow, the remnants of her power fracturing into the air. “What remains now is choice. Yours and mine.”

“What choice? You’re not giving me a choice!”

She only smiled, the edges of her form already slipping away. “I gave you the choice to trust me. And now I give you the choice to trust yourself. Farewell, little witch.”

The light exploded outward, and suddenly nothing. A silence so profound it crushed the air from my lungs.

And then, pain. A sharp, brutal severing, like something inside me had been ripped out, leaving behind only raw, bleeding emptiness. The bond was gone, our contract was complete and it felt like I lost a piece of my soul with it.

When the light dimmed, Mouriana was nowhere.

I staggered, my knees buckling as I hit the ground, my hands scraping against the stone. Everything was silent, heavy with the enormity of her absence.

“Mouriana’” The name barely made it past my lips.

A plea. A demand. A curse. But there was no answer, just silence.

And then, the final betrayal. The talisman at my chest pulsed once, a dying heartbeat. Then, it cracked.

A sharp, splintering sound split the air, drawing my gaze downward. Jagged lines spread across the surface, spiderwebbing outward, veins of red light bleeding through. My breath hitched, my fingers twitching toward it—But I didn’t dare touch it.

The cracks deepened. Light seeped through before it shattered. The pieces exploded in a burst of light, shards of the talisman scattering like tiny stars. The force sent me stumbling back, my arms raising instinctively to shield my face as it dissolved into nothing.

When the light faded, I lowered my hands, my chest tightening as I looked down. The fragments of the talisman lay at my feet, tiny slivers of blood-red stone glinting faintly against the fractured courtyard.

I knelt, my hand hovering over one of the larger fragments, the edges jagged, sharp. For a moment, I considered picking it up. Holding onto what little remained.

But I didn’t. What would be the point? The bond was severed and Mouriana had turned out to be a mighty adversary I would have to overcome at some point.

And all that was left was me. I had to be ready.

The pieces of the talisman sparkled faintly, catching the last traces of light before fading into a dull, lifeless red. I stared at them, my hand trembling before I slowly clenched it into a fist.

“Mouriana’”

I said it one last time.

No plea, or demand, or even expectation. Just the magnitude of everything I hadn’t said, and everything I never would.

Until I met her again.

Someday.