I couldn't look at it directly.

  The radiance pressed against my eyes like thumbs, tried to force its way into my skull, wanted to fill me up and burn me out the way it was burning everyone else. Every instinct I had screamed to look away, to run, to find somewhere dark and small and hide there until this was over. But there was nowhere to hide. The light was everywhere.

  The Tear pulsed against my chest, and for a moment I thought it was afraid.

  Then I realized it was excited.

  The gem was pulling toward the Portal, straining against my grip, desperate to return to the place it had been torn from three centuries ago. It wanted to go home. It didn't care what that home was becoming. It didn't care what waited on the other side.

  "Yozi."

  Nyssara's voice, somewhere to my left. I couldn't see her through the glare, could only feel her hand finding mine, her fingers lacing through my fingers, holding on.

  "Is this the end?"

  I didn't have an answer. I didn't have a plan. I had a demon in my head and a hungry gem against my chest and a woman's hand in mine, and none of it was enough. None of it had ever been enough. I was an arena slave who'd gotten lucky, who'd made deals he didn't understand with powers he couldn't control, and now the world was ending and everyone was looking to me for salvation.

  The colossus turned.

  Its head swiveled toward us, those sun-bright eyes finding us across the ruins of the palace, pinning us in place like insects on a board. The smile stretched wider.

  "THE SHADOW-TOUCHED," it said. "AND THE SISTER-SLAYER. YOU'VE BROUGHT ME THE TEAR."

  "We've brought you nothing," Nyssara said. Her sword was in her hand, glowing pale and pathetic against the colossus's radiance. "You'll have to take it."

  "CHILD."

  The word rolled over us like a wave, knocked the breath from my lungs, almost drove me to my knees. The colossus raised one hand, and light gathered in its palm, concentrated, focused into something that looked almost solid.

  "I HAVE TAKEN EVERYTHING."

  Then Damian attacked.

  He came from somewhere in the ruins, his body wreathed in shadow so dense it seemed to drink the colossus's light. Azrathel had stopped pretending to be a passenger. The second prince of the demon realm had taken full control, and he was terrified, and his terror made him powerful.

  Shadows erupted across the ruins like a black tide, tendrils and blades and shapes that had no names reaching for the colossus from every direction at once. They climbed its legs, wrapped around its arms, tried to find purchase on a body made of pure light.

  "You think I'll let you end this world?" Azrathel's voice poured from Damian's throat, layered with harmonics that made the rubble tremble. "I've spent millennia building my influence here. Cultivating my servants. This realm is mine!"

  The colossus looked down at him the way a human might look at an insect climbing its boot.

  "AZRATHEL. THE SECOND PRINCE." The smile didn't waver. "YOU STOPPED HIDING INSIDE THAT BROKEN PUPPET."

  "This broken puppet is going to tear you apart."

  Azrathel threw everything he had at the colossus. Shadows that had consumed a hundred mages, darkness that had swallowed kingdoms, power that had made the demon realm tremble for a few thousand years. It crashed against the colossus like a wave against a cliff.

  The colossus raised one hand.

  Light erupted from its palm.

  I'd seen Azrathel's shadows before. Seen them against Vekros, seen them spread across the throne room like a living thing. They were vast and hungry and older than human civilization.

  The light touched them and they ceased to exist.

  One moment they were there, dark and writhing and full of malice. The next moment there was nothing, not even ash, not even memory, just absence where something had been.

  Azrathel screamed. The sound came from Damian's throat but belonged to something far older, a howl of pain and rage that echoed off ruins that couldn't absorb it. He tried to pull back, tried to retreat, tried to reconstitute his shadows somewhere beyond the light's reach.

  The colossus didn't let him.

  It walked toward him, slow and unhurried, light pouring from every inch of its form. Step by step the radiance advanced, and step by step Azrathel's shadows retreated. The prince who had terrorized this realm for millennia, who had consumed mages and kings and anyone else who stood in his way, was being pushed back like a child facing a bonfire.

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  "DID YOU THINK YOU WERE POWERFUL?" the colossus asked. "DID YOU THINK YOUR SHADOWS MEANT ANYTHING TO BEINGS WHO EXISTED BEFORE DARKNESS WAS INVENTED?"

  It reached Damian.

  Reached through the remnants of Azrathel's defenses like they weren't there.

  Pressed one glowing palm against his forehead.

  Damian convulsed. Black smoke poured from his eyes, his mouth, his ears, his pores. Azrathel was being burned out of him, expelled from the body he'd claimed, driven back by a power that made demon princes look like candle flames before the sun.

  The prince's screams echoed across the ruins, growing fainter with each second, until finally they stopped altogether.

  Damian's body collapsed to the rubble.

  The colossus stepped over him and turned back toward us.

  I watched Azrathel fall, and I understood.

  I understood that we were going to die here. All of us. Nyssara with her sword that couldn't cut light. Damian with his demon burned out of him. Me with my shadow-blades and my borrowed power and my desperate, impossible hope that somehow we could win.

  The colossus was beyond anything we could fight. Beyond anything we could resist. It was going to open that Portal all the way, and the cleansers were going to pour through, and everyone I'd ever known was going to burn.

  Unless.

  The thought came to me slowly, like a man walking toward a cliff he knew he was going to jump from.

  The Blood Ring.

  Vekros's gift. Malgrin's curse. The ability to seize control of anyone whose blood I could reach, to puppet their body, to rifle through their memories like pages in a book.

  Ysolde had blood. Whatever else she was, whatever divine passenger rode behind those golden eyes, the body she wore was still flesh. I could see it floating at the colossus's heart, small and human and suspended in radiance. If I could reach it. If I could touch it. If I could make her bleed.

  "Don't."

  Malgrin's voice in my head, sharp and urgent and afraid in a way I'd never heard before.

  "Yozi, don't. You don't know what's inside her. Ysolde's body has been a vessel for three hundred years. Whatever memories are in there, whatever she's seen and done and become, it will destroy you. It is way too much. If you open that connection, if you let her into your head, you might not come back again."

  I looked at Nyssara.

  Her face was streaked with ash and blood, her sister's blood still drying on her chest. She was holding her sword in a guard that wouldn't stop anything, facing down a god with nothing but steel and stubbornness. She was going to die here. We were all going to die here.

  But she was still standing.

  Her eyes screamed "I am still here".

  Still refusing to kneel.

  "What are you thinking?" she asked. She could see it in my face, whatever I was planning. She'd learned to read me over these past weeks, learned the way my expression changed when I was about to do something stupid.

  "Something stupid," I said.

  "How stupid?"

  "So stupid I might never..."

  She was quiet for a moment. The colossus was turning toward us again, raising its hand, gathering light for the strike that would end us.

  "Will it stop her?"

  "Maybe."

  "Maybe isn't good enough."

  "It's all I have."

  Nyssara looked at me. Looked at the colossus. Looked at the Portal spreading across the sky, at the shapes moving in the light beyond it, at the death that was coming for everyone and everything.

  Then she looked at me again.

  "Come back," she said.

  "I'll try."

  "Don't try. Do it." Her hand found mine, squeezed hard enough to hurt. "Come back to me, Yozi. Whatever happens in there, whatever you see, whatever she shows you. Come back."

  I didn't promise. Promises were for people who knew they could keep them.

  Instead I pressed the tear against her torso, pulled away from her, turned toward the colossus, and started to run.

  The light saw me coming.

  The colossus raised its hand, gathered radiance into a spear of pure annihilation, prepared to erase me the way it had erased Azrathel's shadows.

  Raubtier Speed. Might as well get one last fix.

  The predator within me sang in my blood, pushed me forward, made me into something that moved between moments. The light spear passed through the space where I'd been and struck the rubble behind me, turned stone to glass to vapor in the span of a heartbeat.

  And in that stretched second, while the world froze into honey around me, Malgrin spoke one last time. His voice wasn't cynical. It wasn't amused. It sounded old. And infinitely tired.

  "Ah," he whispered. "There it is. The flaw in the design. I wanted a show. I wanted drama. I wanted to see what happens when you give a mortal the keys to the cage."

  I kept running, pupils dilated while still accelarating.

  "I never considered that the show might end. I never considered that the cage might break."

  The colossus tried again. And again. Each strike came closer, each burst of light nearly finding me, but I was inside its reach now, inside its defenses, climbing the rubble that had been the palace toward the radiant form at its heart.

  "Run, kid. This was a good show. I am ready for the credits to roll."

  Ysolde's body hung suspended in the light, eyes closed, face serene, a puppet master lost in her own performance. She was so focused on maintaining the colossus, on widening the Portal, on preparing the way for her masters, that she didn't see me coming.

  Not until my teeth sank into her neck and the blood ring tapped at her temple, focusing on her beautifully illuminated brain cells.

  Her blood flooded my mouth.

  And the world went white.

  I drowned.

  There was no oxygen in light particles.In three hundred years of being ridden by something that didn't understand what it meant to be human, that used this body like a glove and discarded its feelings like trash.

  I saw a girl in a root cellar, hiding from things that fell from the sky.

  I saw a village burning, shadows scorched onto stone where people had been standing.

  I saw angels descending, beautiful and terrible, reaching for the girl with hands made of light.

  I saw a name being taken, one letter at a time, stripped away over months until there was nothing left but the vessel.

  I saw three hundred years of service, of patience, of waiting for this moment while the thing inside wore her face and smiled her smile and pretended to be human.

  And beneath it all, beneath the divine passenger and the stolen body and the centuries of careful planning, I found her.

  The girl.

  Still there. Still trapped. Still screaming in a voice that no one could hear.

  She'd been screaming for three hundred years.

  The white swallowed me, and I fell into her memories,

  and somewhere very far away, I heard Nyssara calling my name.