On an exhale, she plunged the weapons into the slits in the eight-pointed star.
The small one for the knife. The larger one for the sword.
And like a key turning in a lock, they released what lay beneath.
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Light blasted up through the blades into her hands, her arms, her heart.
Bryce could hear it through her feet, through the stone. The song of the land beneath her. Quiet and old and forgotten, but there.
She heard how Avallen had yielded its joy, its bright green lands and skies and flowers, so it might hold the power as it was bid, waiting all this time for someone to unleash it. To free it.
“Bryce!” Hunt shouted, and she met her mate’s eyes.
None of what the Princes of Hel had said about him scared her. They hadn’t made Hunt’s soul. That was all hers, just as her own soul was his.
Helena had bound the soul of this land in magical chains. No more. No more would Bryce allow the Fae to lay claim over anything.
“You’re free,” Bryce whispered to Avallen, to the land and the pure, inherent magic beneath it. “Be free.”
And it was.
Light burst from the star, and the caves shook again. They rolled and rattled and trembled—
The walls were buckling, and she had the sense that Hunt lunged for her, but fell to his knees as the ground moved upward. Stone crumbled away around them, burying Pelias’s sarcophagus, the corpses of the two newly dead kings, and all their other hateful ancestors below. It churned them into dust.
Sunlight broke through, the very earth parting as Bryce and the others were thrust upward.
Sunlight—not gray skies.
They emerged in the hills less than a mile from the castle and royal city.
As if the caves had been backtracking all this way.
And from the rocky ground beneath them, spreading from the star at Bryce’s feet, grass and flowers bloomed. The river from the caverns burst forth, dancing down the newly formed hill.
Sathia and Flynn laughed, and both siblings knelt, putting their fingers in the grass. The earth magic in their veins surged forth as an oak burst from Flynn’s hands, shooting high over them, and from Sathia’s hands tumbled runners of strawberry and brambles of blackberry, tangles of raspberries and thickets of blueberries—
“Holy gods,” Tharion said, and pointed out to the sea.
It was no longer gray and thrashing, but a vibrant, clear turquoise. And rising from the water, just as they had seen on the map Declan had found, were islands, large and small. Lush and green with life.
Forests erupted on the island they stood on, soon joined by mountains and rivers.