Some magics should come with warnings, Reyna decided. Like: “Caution: Dancing with all four elements might wake up things better left sleeping.”
The convergence point blazed with remembered power as their elements reached for each other like old friends. Fire wove through water, air sang to stone, and their birthmarks blazed with patterns that wrote themselves across reality itself.
Then the void-ships hit their first ward, and everything got complicated.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” Kira said, watching darkness eat through her water-shields like acid through paper. “The spheres’ magic should—”
“Wrong kind of magic,” Talon’s voice carried on suddenly fierce winds. “They don’t break power. They unmake it.”
The void-ships moved like ink through water, wrong angles drinking light from the dawn. On their decks, figures moved with jerking grace, wearing masks that reflected nothing.
“The Sundering’s hunters,” Gard said, his earth-mark pulsing as the mountain shuddered beneath them. “The ones who—”
“Talk later,” Reyna cut in, feeling fire answer her call with unexpected strength. “Fight now.”
She reached for flame, but instead of stealing it, she felt it flow willingly into her grasp. More than that – the very air around her seemed to guide it, carrying fire in curves and spirals that shouldn’t be possible.
Jin stood beside her, cloud-mark blazing. “The wind remembers carrying fire,” she said, wonder in her voice. “It wants to help.”
Above them, the void-ships’ darkness pressed against the dawn like spilled ink. But where it touched their combined magic, light answered.
Kira’s coral spheres sang higher, harmonizing with some deeper tone from the mountain itself. Beside her, Lira pressed her hands to stone, and suddenly water flowed through crystal veins like blood through living rock.
“The elements remember this,” Gard’s voice was distant, reading patterns in the stone. “Remember fighting together against—”
Something launched from the nearest void-ship – shadows given weight, heading straight for the convergence point.
Three magics moved as one:
Talon’s winds caught them.
Reyna’s fire illuminated them.
Kira’s water froze them.
The shadow-weapons shattered like dark glass.
“Well,” Jin said, starlight bending around her hands. “That’s new.”
But the void-ships were already launching more, and the darkness around them grew deeper. The hunters cared nothing for element or alliance. They existed for one purpose: to break what was trying to remember how to be whole.
“We need more.” Lira’s voice carried earth’s certainty. “More memory. More magic. More—”
“Dance,” Kira finished, raising her spheres higher. “Not just elements touching, but truly moving together.”
The void-ships pressed closer, their wrongness making reality itself shiver.
“One problem,” Reyna said, directing fire through Jin’s wind-paths. “None of us exactly remember the steps to—”
The mountain sang.
The wind chimed.
The water hummed.
The fire harmonized.
And in their birthmarks, patterns shifted into something older than memory:
The first dance.
The true names.
The steps of becoming.
Written in stone and starlight.
In flame and flood.
In all elements joined.
“Oh,” Jin breathed, watching the patterns write themselves in light around them. “We don’t need to remember the steps.”
Talon nodded, storm-marks blazing across his skin. “The elements remember for us.”
The void-ships’ darkness reached for them like hungry shadows.
But here, at the convergence point, with four elements finally touching…
“Together then?” Reyna asked, feeling fire and water, air and earth all reaching for each other through their combined magic.
Five other voices answered as one: “Together.”
The dance began.
And this time?
This time even the void would learn to fear the light.