“We’re burning away,” Jin gasped, her voice echoing with borrowed starlight. Not just her voice – her entire being flickered between flesh and pure radiance. Where once she’d felt the simple currents of air, now she sensed the vast flows between stars, the ancient paths that light took before wind knew it wasn’t flame.
Around them, the void-hunters’ remains flickered like bad memories, their darkness consumed by the dawn burning through Jin and Reyna’s veins. The temple’s aurora-walls pulsed in harmony with their stolen power, but even its ancient crystal was starting to crack under the strain.
“It’s not just burning our magic,” Reyna said, stellar fire writing impossible patterns across her skin. Her water-mark had transformed into something ancient, no longer just lines but living light that moved and shifted like liquid stars. “It’s burning away what makes us… us.”
She wasn’t wrong. Each heartbeat pushed more of dawn’s power through their veins, replacing blood with light, bone with flame, thought with pure radiance. Jin could feel herself forgetting how lungs worked, how skin held flesh together, how gravity kept feet on ground. Those concepts seemed increasingly irrelevant as starlight rewrote her understanding of existence.
“The sphere,” Jin said, fighting to hold onto thoughts that kept trying to dissolve into pure light. Her cloud-mark wasn’t just glowing now – it was a window into spaces between stars, showing truths that human eyes were never meant to see. “We have to… have to…”
“Put it back together.” Reyna’s laugh held traces of flame and vacuum both. “Before we become it.”
They looked up at the cracked sphere of dawn, still hanging in the chamber’s heart. With each pulse of their borrowed power, the cracks spread further. Reality itself was starting to blur around the edges.
Jin tried to take a step and found herself instead moving through spaces between moments. Her fingers left trails of constellation-light in the air. The simple act of breathing now involved exchanging starfire for void. “Reyna, I can’t… can’t remember how to be…”
“Human?” Reyna’s fingers trailed stellar fire through air that wasn’t air. Where her feet touched the ground, the crystal floor remembered it was once light and tried to rise up to join her. “Pretty sure we’re not. Not anymore. Not entirely.”
She wasn’t wrong about that either. Jin could feel it – the dawn in their blood was burning away everything that made them separate from it. The boundaries between self and light grew thinner with each pulse of power. Soon, there would be no difference between them and the pure radiance they’d stolen. They’d become just another form of first light, forgetting they were ever anything else.
Unless…
“Together,” Jin said, reaching for Reyna with hands that flickered between flesh and flame. Where their fingers met, reality stuttered, trying to remember how to handle beings caught between human and star. “Like at the convergence point. But this time…”
“We don’t just dance,” Reyna finished, her grip solid despite the starfire in her veins. “We return what we borrowed.”
They moved as one, not like humans wielding magic, but like light remembering it could dance. The temple’s aurora-walls sang harmony as they wrote new patterns in the burning air.
[Continue with the rest of the chapter as before, from “No. Not new patterns…” until the end]
[Add new section about their lasting changes:]
Days later, they would discover how dawn’s touch had permanently marked them. Jin found she could sometimes see the paths light took between stars, could feel how starfire and wind were once the same song. Her cloud-mark now held traces of stellar fire, burning cold and bright in its deepest patterns.
Reyna’s fire-stealing gift had evolved, letting her not just borrow flame but glimpse the light hidden in all things. Her water-mark now rippled with hints of starlight, remembering how the first ocean was born from celestial fire.
They were human, yes, but touched by something older. Changed by the memory of what came before separation. Only in dreams did they fully recall the patterns of first light, but their magic would never be quite the same.
Some transformations, once begun, could never be completely undone.
Some light, once witnessed, would always burn behind their eyes.
Some dances would echo in their steps forever.
The aurora wrote blessing across their skin as they began the journey home.