The void-hunter’s blade stopped an inch from Jin’s throat. Not because of their failing magic. Because of the laugh.
Reyna was laughing.
Blood ran down her face, her water-mark almost completely dark, but she laughed like someone who’d just heard the world’s best joke.
“I finally figured it out,” she said, voice raw with pain and revelation. “Why they’re so afraid of us remembering. Why they want us to forget so badly.” She looked up at the sphere of dawn, still pulsing its desperate warning. “Because they forgot first.”
The nearest hunter tilted its mask-face, reflection rippling like disturbed water.
“They forgot,” Reyna continued, holding Jin tighter as numbness crept through both their bodies, “that I’m really good at stealing things that don’t belong to me.”
Understanding hit Jin like first light. “You can’t,” she gasped. “Reyna, stealing fire is one thing, but that’s… that’s pure dawn up there. First light. It’ll burn you from the inside out.”
“Probably.” Reyna’s smile was fierce despite her fading marks. “But I won’t be holding it alone.”
The void-hunters must have sensed their intention. Darkness surged forward, trying to unmake the very possibility of what they planned.
But Reyna was already reaching, not with magic – they had almost none left – but with the thing that had let her steal fire in the first place. That spark of defiance that said: this doesn’t belong to you anymore.
Jin felt it through their joined hands. Felt Reyna’s gift trying to pull down dawn itself.
It wasn’t enough. The sphere was too powerful, too primal. It would destroy them both.
Unless…
“Together,” Jin whispered. She couldn’t feel the wind anymore, couldn’t remember its dance. But she remembered this: “The temple showed us. Star and flame were the same once.”
She reached with Reyna, adding her own defiance to the pull. Above them, the sphere’s pulse changed. Not warning now. Recognition.
The void-hunters screamed, a sound that tried to unmake sound itself. Their darkness pressed in, eating light, eating memory, eating magic.
But dawn listened to their call.
The sphere cracked.
Light older than memory, older than magic, older than the separation of elements itself, poured into them like molten stars.
It hurt.
By all that was holy, it hurt.
Jin felt her cloud-mark blazing back to life, but wrong. Not air-patterns anymore. Something older. Something that existed before wind knew it wasn’t fire, before flame knew it wasn’t starlight.
Beside her, Reyna screamed as dawn rewrote her water-mark with symbols that shouldn’t exist. That couldn’t exist. That existed anyway.
The void-hunters recoiled as pure light blazed from the two women’s skin. Their darkness tried to eat it, to unmake it, to force it to forget.
But you couldn’t make first dawn forget what it was.
You couldn’t unmake the memory of original light.
You couldn’t break what was already broken and chose to shine anyway.
Jin felt wind answer her call again, but different. Heavy with light, dense with power that burned cold as stars.
Reyna’s flames returned too, but they wrote stellar patterns in the air, casting shadows that pointed in impossible directions.
Together, they stood. Power that was never meant to be contained in flesh burned through their veins like liquid dawn.
The void-hunters attacked with blades of nothing.
Jin and Reyna answered with the light that had taught stars how to burn.
The temple blazed.
The hunters screamed.
And dawn itself remembered how to dance.
But in that moment of victory, Jin felt it:
The price of wielding first light.
The cost of remembering what came before separation.
Their borrowed dawn was burning them from the inside out.
They had minutes, at most, before the power that saved them would destroy them completely.
Time enough for one last dance.