The first void-hunter’s blade went straight through Reyna’s fire like it didn’t exist. Like flame itself was just a child’s dream of warmth.
She barely twisted away in time, feeling the edge of nothing slice across her arm. Where it touched, her water-mark went dark, its patterns stuttering like dying stars.
“Jin!” She tried to pull fire through the air currents, but the void-hunters’ presence made magic itself stutter and gasp. “The sphere—”
“Little busy!” Jin’s winds weren’t just failing to push the hunters back – the darkness was eating her air paths, turning aurora-light to empty shadow. Blood ran down her face from where she’d slammed into the crystal walls, her cloud-mark flickering dangerously.
They’d been wrong about the void-hunters. So catastrophically wrong.
The creatures weren’t just trying to stop them from reaching the sphere. They were using the temple’s own power against them, turning remembered light into weapons of unmaking.
Another hunter lunged, its not-quite-there form bending reality around it. Reyna dove aside, but a third hunter was waiting. Pain exploded across her back as darkness carved into flesh and magic alike.
“The patterns,” she gasped, trying to make her fire answer as her birthmark bled both blood and light. “Jin, they’re not just breaking our magic, they’re—”
“Breaking the memory of it,” Jin finished. She’d managed to get higher, closer to the sphere of dawn, but darkness wrapped around her wind-rider like hungry shadows. “Making us forget how to—”
Her words cut off in a scream as void-blades sliced through her air currents. She fell, trailing blood and failing magic, barely catching herself on a crystal outcropping.
The sphere pulsed above them, so close yet impossibly far. Its song had changed from harmony to desperate warning. Around them, the temple’s aurora-light dimmed as the void-hunters’ power spread like spilled ink through water.
“We have to…” Reyna tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t answer. Where the hunters’ blades had touched her, numbness spread. Not just physical – she could feel memories of fire slipping away like water through cupped hands. “Jin, I can’t remember how to…”
“Hold on.” Jin’s voice was weak, but her cloud-mark suddenly blazed brighter. “Just… hold on to…”
The nearest hunter reached for her with hands made of nothing, its masked face reflecting the light it was stealing. Jin’s winds rose to defend her, but the darkness simply ate them, reaching deeper, trying to unmake the very memory of air’s dance.
Reyna watched helplessly as Jin’s cloud-mark began to fade, patterns unwriting themselves from her skin. The younger woman’s eyes went wide with terror as she felt her connection to air slipping away.
The sphere’s song turned desperate above them.
“No,” Reyna tried to pull fire through paths that no longer existed. “No, you don’t get to take this from us. You don’t get to make us forget again!”
But the void-hunters just moved closer, darkness spreading, unmaking everything they’d remembered. Everything they’d learned to be.
Jin’s wind-rider dissolved completely as her magic failed. She fell, really fell this time, toward hunters with blades of nothing and masks that reflected only void.
Reyna caught her, but her own legs gave way. They collapsed together as the hunters circled, darkness rising like a tide.
“I can’t…” Jin’s voice was barely a whisper. “I can’t feel the wind anymore. Can’t remember how to…”
“Stay with me.” Reyna held her with arms that grew number by the second. “Just stay… stay…”
But the darkness kept spreading, kept unmaking, kept forcing them to forget.
Above them, the sphere of dawn pulsed one final warning.
Around them, the temple’s light died by inches.
Within them, magic and memory bled away like water into sand.
The void-hunters moved in for the killing stroke.
And somewhere between star and flame, between memory and unmaking, the last light began to fade.