The thing about racing void-hunters to a temple made of frozen starlight? You had to get creative with your solutions.
“You know,” Reyna called, sending fire spiraling through Jin’s wind-paths, “when I stole my first flame, I really didn’t expect it would lead to this.”
‘This’ being their current predicament: halfway up a tower of solid light, with darkness eating the air behind them, trying to figure out how to open a door that wasn’t exactly a door.
The aurora wrote patterns around them in impossible colors, matching the marks that now covered both their arms. The temple’s surface rippled like water caught in glass, refusing to let either fire or air pass through.
“It’s not about getting in,” Jin said, reading scripts that rewrote themselves with each pulse of northern light. “It’s about… becoming worthy to enter.”
“Wonderful.” Reyna pressed her hand against the tower’s surface, watching fire reflect and refract through it. “Any hints about how to do that?”
The void-hunters were getting closer, their not-quite-there forms distorting the very air around them. Where they touched the aurora’s light, colors died.
Jin’s cloud-mark blazed as new patterns wrote themselves across the sky. “Look at how the light moves through the temple’s walls. It’s not random. It’s…”
“Dancing,” Reyna finished, feeling fire respond to something older than flame. “Like at the convergence point, but different. More… specific.”
The aurora’s colors shifted again, forming shapes that pulled at something deep in their shared memory:
When stars first learned to burn
Air carried their dance
Fire wrote their names
Light learned to sing
“Oh,” Jin breathed, understanding dawning like the first sunrise. “We don’t open it. We join it.”
She reached out with air magic, not trying to force the wind through the temple’s surface, but letting it flow with the patterns already there. Beside her, Reyna’s fire followed, not burning but illuminating, teaching the frozen starlight how to dance again.
The temple’s surface began to hum.
“Getting warmer,” Reyna said with a trader’s smile. Then frowned. “Or… colder actually. But better.”
Their magics moved together, fire flowing through air like paint through water, writing shapes that felt older than memory. The aurora responded, its colors harmonizing with their combined power.
Behind them, a void-hunter screeched – a sound that tried to unmake sound itself.
“They don’t want us to remember this dance,” Jin said, watching their magical patterns align with the temple’s pulse. “Because when stars first learned to burn…”
“The elements weren’t separate,” Reyna finished. Her fire curved through Jin’s air, drawing shapes they somehow knew without learning. “Light was light, whether it came from flame or star.”
The void-hunters pressed closer, their darkness trying to break the aurora’s dance. But now the temple’s song grew stronger, harmonizing with patterns that wrote themselves across Jin and Reyna’s skin.
Fire spiraled up.
Air spiraled down.
Light caught between them, remembering its first dance.
The temple’s surface rippled like disturbed water, then…
Opened.
Not with a door or a passage, but with light itself reaching out to draw them in. Their combined magic had taught it to remember what it truly was.
“After you,” Reyna said, flame dancing between her fingers.
Jin smiled as the wind rose to meet fire. “Together, actually.”
They stepped into light that burned colder than flame and flew heavier than air. Behind them, void-hunters screamed denial.
But ahead?
Ahead the temple’s heart beat with remembered power.
And somewhere above, a sphere of pure dawn waited to be awakened.
Time to teach the stars new steps to ancient dances.