On a mountaintop far across the gulf from the gathered Vrekeners, Nïx the Ever-Knowing and Morgana, the Queen of Sorceri, watched the Skye fall.

 

One female had allowed it; one had caused it.

 

Nïx’s lightning crackled all around her—and the bat she carried. Morgana’s usurped powers were so volatile that the color streams of her sorcery had morphed to a permanent black.

 

As the two immortals bore witness, they sparked off each other like negatively charged ions.

 

“I foresaw the Queen of Persuasion desperate to stay with King Thronos,” Nïx said, never looking away. The water was already aflame with soaring plumes of otherworldly fire.

 

Morgana too kept her gaze trained. “As soon as I left her and Sabine in Rothkalina, Melanthe probably created a portal back. To nothing.” Black swirls danced from her lips, as if a contagion was trying to escape her body. “If the Vrekener survives, the memory of his wife will not—”

 

The giant monoliths crashed into the flames, displacing miles of water, generating towering tsunamis.

 

“I suppose the mortals will know of this now,” Morgana said, tone inscrutable. “Of us.”

 

“Not quite yet. . . .”

 

From the gulf, the sea god Nereus rose up like a mountain himself, visible only to the immortal pair. With a monstrous inhalation, he sucked all the flames into his lungs.

 

Then he brandished his divine triton, raising it over his head to subdue the waves. The tsunamis paused, their terrible surge arrested in midswell—

 

Yielding to his command, they gradually subsided, slipping to acquiescence.

 

The surface was still, the fire defeated. Before Nereus sank to the depths once more, his smoldering gaze lingered on Morgana.

 

She frowned, but that was the least extraordinary thing she’d seen this day.

 

A reviled realm—the bane of her entire life—had perished by fire and been entombed in the sea. Her heart was glad.

 

The Valkyrie soothsayer turned to the sorceress queen. “For better or worse, it’s begun. . . .”