Far across the black emptiness, an arch of violet fire faced the smaller portals. I saw a strange and twisting landscape on its far side, a place of chaos and constant change. Hills crumbled into valleys and were washed away by turbulent rivers of lava, which spread into wide, deep lakes before vanishing into whirlpools rimed with frost.
In the distance, an army of crystalline figures swarmed through the nightmare landscape. They glittered like sharpened blades under a shifting sun, drawing closer to the portal every moment.
Closer, but they hadn’t arrived.
There was still a chance to stop them.
“Abi, you have to to tell your commander we need to close a portal,” I called back to my friends. “A big one. I’ll try to hold them off, but I don’t know how long I can last.”
“I’ll tell them,” he said, his eyes searching my face. “How will we find it?”
“How did you know where to open the portal that cut the Lost in half?” I asked.
“Rachel and Clem,” he admitted. “They thought of you, and we used that as an anchor to find you. Once we’d opened the portal to your location, I opened a second portal to deal with the Lost. The offset was tricky, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Thank the Flame that it did.”
“Thank you for taking the chance. I don’t think I’d be here if you hadn’t. If Rachel and Clem can find me, they can find the gate,” I said. “Because I’ll be standing in it.”
“We can’t close it with you inside,” he said. “It will kill you.”
“Just do it,” I said. “It’s the only way. There’s an army of hungry spirits from the Locust Court headed this way. If they get through that portal, they’ll kill us all, anyway.”
“We can close this portal,” he protested. “That will keep them on the other side of the Far Horizon.”
“No,” I said. “There are hundreds of portals already opened. Trust me, Abi. This is the only way. Get your people and seal the gate as fast as you can. You have to do this.”
My friend’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. He reached out, one hand coming through the portal. I clasped it in mine, and he pulled me close to throw an arm around my shoulders.
“I do not want things to end like this,” he whispered. “But I will tell you, Jace, that I finally sense the peace within your grasp. Whatever tormented you before, today is the day you can reconcile with it.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
I wasn’t sure Abi was right. I certainly didn’t feel at peace with the monster still raging in my head and a terrible hunger squeezing my stomach in a black fist. Even if I pulled this off, I was a monster. The sages had seen that, and they would make me pay. Dying a hero seemed far preferable to facing that punishment and disgrace again.
I left my friends behind and sped across the Far Horizon at the speed of thought. Distance there was an illusion, a conceptual space that I found I could discard. One moment I was far from the enemy gate. The next I stood before it.
The world of the hungry spirits was a horrifying place. It broke itself down and built itself up following rules I didn’t understand. How the spirits could survive there was a mystery to me. I wasn’t sure I could do the same.
Let’s find out, I thought. Other Eclipse Warriors had done it.
My fusion blade hummed in my hand, a comforting presence, and my aura throbbed with power. My Eclipse nature was ready to devour everything in sight.
It was time to give it that chance.
I took a deep breath, cycled the strange alien air of the Far Horizon through my core, and stepped through the gate into the world of the Locust Court.
The shift was disorienting and yanked my stomach up into my throat. There was solid ground beneath my feet, but everything else changed faster than I could comprehend. Forests bloomed and then collapsed into ash. Thickets of blackberries burst from the ground in coiled, thorny brambles, only to fade away when I got close to them.
There was something familiar about this place. Not the chaos or instability, but the way it seemed to respect the edges of my presence.
“It’s like the school,” I muttered.
I concentrated on the horde and willed the shifting terrain to take me to them. It wasn’t easy, but the place slowly, painfully, bent to my will. The ground remained solid beneath my soles, and a stretch of ground ten feet ahead of me remained stable and clear of obstructions. That was the most I could do. If my core had still been at the initiate level, I likely wouldn’t have been able to even manage that.
I pushed ahead on a collision course with the invading army. The path ahead of me was straight and true, but what burst from the ground on either side and behind me was another matter entirely. Ravens the size of grown men erupted from patches of moldy ground. Droplets of rain fell from a black sky and cried like children when they splashed into the dirt.
“No,” I said. “None of this is real.”
I was an Eclipse Warrior. I’d been built to defeat this madness, and that is what I was going to do. There was nothing to be gained by chasing after the invaders, when I could make them come to me.
I stopped moving and sculpted my surroundings into a steep-walled ravine that funneled from its wide mouth to a narrow exit behind me. I stood in that gap, blade ready, determined to stop the horde from passing through to reach the portal. It took me what seemed like an hour to complete the task, and I finished not a moment too soon.
The Locust Court poured into the ravine’s mouth in a boiling tide. Unlike the animalistic creatures I’d battled in the courtroom, these
