Chapter 361 The Goddess Said My Turn

Lucian’s wolves tore through the first wave of Willow’s men. Screams tore across the field, blades and dark magic clashing against claws.

More of Willow’s men arrived from the southern tree line just as Atlas’s soldiers entered the clearing. River realized her father must’ve brought backup, unlike the first time he did this. The fight was actually even.

The field that had been designed for a quick assassination under a false flag had become a battle. She should have been scared. But she felt numb.

Her pink magic snapped around Lucian and her father on its own, spreading to every wolf and fae on their side.

She barely registered it because every ounce of her concentration was locked on the column of dark energy she was holding in place with her magic. Her legs were shaking and arms were trembling. She felt weaker after the severing and was pulling from something she didn’t know she had in her until right this second.

General Willow’s magic pushed towards her. Dark veins formed under her eyes, seeping through the collision point.

“Let go, daughter,” Atlas yelled over the noise. “I have this. Run to cover. Now.”

She couldn’t move. Her body was locked in the stream, her palms fused to the output, the magic holding her in place with the same force that was holding Willow. Breaking contact would mean releasing the column, and releasing the column would let the dark magic through. She had watched her father die on this field once and the once was enough for every lifetime she would ever live.

Her hair began to glow.

White. The color it had been on the temple slab, the color it held when something deeper than her own power surfaced through her body and used her as a conduit. The glow spread from her hair to her skin, and the light that filled her was gold, ancient, borrowed, carrying a frequency that her Fae magic recognized and her body received and her mind identified as something that she was borrowing.

The Moon Goddess.

The gold magic flowed through her the way water flows through a channel that was built to carry it: easily, without friction, with the specific efficiency of a power that had found the vessel it was designed for. River didn’t fight it. She let it move. She let it fill the spaces her pink couldn’t reach and the reserves her body couldn’t produce.

“Let go, Father. I have this.” Her voice came from her mouth and was spoken by something older. The resonance of it carried across the field and silenced the combat for a fraction of a second, because every Fae present felt the frequency shift, felt the air change, felt the particular weight of a deity making itself known through mortal vocal cords.

Atlas felt it. Through his blood-sense, through his Fae magic, through every instinct a thirty-year king possessed, he felt what was speaking through his daughter. The recognition hit him with a force that bypassed his authority and his pride and his protective fury and arrived at a single, absolute conclusion: the Goddess was here, and the Goddess had this, and the king’s job was to let go.

He released his green magic.

River rose.

Her boots left the grass. Ten feet. The gold and pink pouring from her hands intensified tenfold, the column between her and General Willow expanding, brightening, the pink and gold overwhelming the black in a cascade that pushed the dark magic backward inch by inch. The helix that had been a stalemate became a siege, and the siege was one-directional.

General Willow rose with her.

Every wolf and Fae on the field froze. Wolves and soldiers and guards and augmented warriors turned their faces upward towards the woman suspended above the clearing, pouring light from her hands, her white hair blazing, her body glowing gold, while her pink magic still wrapped around every ally on the field.

The gold and pink pushed forward, until it made contact with General Willow’s palms.

His body went white. Then gray. Then formless. General Aldren Willow, Commander of the Eastern Fae Alliance, the man who had murdered a king under a false flag in a timeline that only one woman remembered, turned to ash in midair.

The wind took him. The ash scattered across the clearing and over the tree line and into the forest where it would settle on roots and soil and be forgotten by everything except the woman who had watched him kill everyone she loved and had decided, in every version of this moment, that this time would be different.

River’s light expanded.

The gold and pink surged outward from her body in a final, sweeping wave that crossed the field in every direction. It found every Fae wielding dark magic. Every warrior whose hands carried the black-veined glow of power purchased through forbidden means. The light reached them, wrapped around them, and they turned to ash where they stood.

One by one. Silent. The ash rose in soft columns that drifted upward and dissolved, leaving empty armor and scattered weapons and the sudden, absolute quiet of a battlefield where one side had ceased to exist.

She fell, landing on her knees. The glow faded from her hair, from her skin, from her hands. Her chest was heaving. She wiped blood from the corner of her mouth.

Atlas was at her side. His hand extended. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet with the steady grip of a king who had just watched his daughter channel a goddess and turn an army to dust and was choosing to process that information later.

She stood. Unsteady. Her legs were shaking. The dark veins under her eyes were still there, faint and lingering.

Then every wolf and Fae on the field knelt.

River blinked at the kneeling field. Then blinked again, as if the second blink might produce a different result.

Gavriel Sterling, standing invisible at the edge of the clearing watching this, laughed.

The laugh was quiet, helpless, the laugh of a man watching a woman he had loved across lifetimes react to reverence with the same bewildered, slightly uncomfortable expression she wore in every life. She could channel a goddess and turn a general to ash and protect an army with her heartbeat, and the part that surprised her was the kneeling.

It was the most Serena thing he had ever seen, in any life, in any body, in any name.

Some things, it turned out, even rebirth couldn’t change.