Chapter 322
Everything inside me stills.
The ballroom is chaos, nobles screaming and scrambling, guards surging forward only to be slammed back by the enhanced militia now flooding in through the shattered windows. A thick shimmer of Darklite residue hangs in the water like ash after a wildfire—fine, glittering, and deeply wrong. I can feel it in my bones. The Ether recoils from it.
Wake doesn’t flinch. His arm shoots up in front of me, defensive and instinctual, his body already tensing into that still, terrible readiness I’ve seen before—when he’s just about to destroy something. But there are too many of them. Dozens of Lily’s soldiers have stormed the room, and they move like they aren’t even breathing—twitch-fast and synchronized, all soulless eyes and braced limbs, each one armed with tech that glows like inverted stars.
And in the center of it all is Shoal.
He looks… wrong.
Not monstrous. Not unrecognizable. Just cold. Inhuman. His black armor hugs his body like a second skin, glimmering with thin threads of Darklite that pulse rhythmically, almost like veins. His eyes gleam black as coal, and there’s something in his presence now that wasn’t there before. Something larger. He moves like he’s no longer part of the room—but above it. Outside of it. As if he already knows how this ends.
Lily glides beside him. And she’s not pretending to be human anymore.
Her new Enkian form is radiant. Sleek silver and pale violet scales cover her hips, morphing into a long, tapering tail that sways as she moves. Her skin has taken on a faint luminescence, her already light hair, now white, curling weightless behind her like strands of moonlight caught in a current. But her eyes—gods, her eyes—are empty. Whatever humanity was left in them has been burned out. Only hunger remains.
“Phoebe,” she says, voice smooth as coral glass. “I do hope you’ve enjoyed your little speech.”
Shoal lifts his arms as if addressing a congregation. “Brothers. Sisters. Children of the sea. What a beautiful illusion this is. All of you, gathered to pretend your world hasn’t already begun to crumble.”
A nearby guard lunges forward with a blade.
Shoal waves a single hand. The guard stops mid-motion, held aloft by invisible pressure. Then Shoal closes his fist—and the guard crumples like a paper shell, unconscious.
A ripple of fear rolls through the room. Nobles freeze. Lovelace finally rises from his dais, voice shaking.
“This is a sacred gathering—”
Shoal interrupts him without looking. “No. This was a pageant. A pageant of dead gods and obsolete power. I simply decided to offer you something better.”
Wake steps forward with me. We place ourselves between Shoal and the crowd.
“We’re not afraid of you,” I say, my voice low and even. “You’ve made your point. You have soldiers. Weapons. But we have something you don’t.”
“Let me guess,” Shoal says. “Hearts? Hope? The power of friendship?”
Wake growls. “Seven armies stand outside these walls, Shoal. You might have overplayed your hand.”
Shoal actually smiles. “On the contrary. I’ve timed this rather perfectly.”
He lifts his hand again—and that’s when I feel the current shift.
It’s a command.
But not from him.
The energy rolls in like a tide. Controlled. Disciplined. Familiar.
No.
A horn sounds somewhere deep within the palace. A second later, armored feet strike marble. Abyssinian armor.
Axel.
I turn just in time to see him enter—fully armored in a jet-black cuirass, eyes hard, expression unreadable. The entire Abyssinian Guard, his personal brigade, follows him like a dark cloud.
He glides straight past me. Straight past Wake.
To Shoal.
And bows.
The room breaks.
“Axel—” Wake’s voice cracks with disbelief.
I step forward. “What are you doing?!”
Axel rises, finally meeting Wake’s gaze. “The army is mine to command. And I’ve commanded them to secure Estellis and defend against the surrounding forces… by any means necessary.”
“No,” Wake growls. “This isn’t you. This is her.”
Lily steps forward, touching Axel’s arm with a casual intimacy that makes my skin crawl. “Don’t blame him. As it turns out, I was right—I was meant to be here. I have every bit the right to this body as you do, princess. As fate would have it, I even have a mate of my own… it’s just not the brother any of us expected.”
I scan Axel’s face, looking for any sign of conflict. I don’t find it. He looks composed. Determined. Controlled.
I should have known, should have seen this coming. I knew it was too much of a coincidence that Wake and Shoal had both found human mates. If only I’d looked into it further… then, what? This is just like Lily—always a step behind, but still always somehow coming out ahead.
Delphi stares at Lily. “She bound him. She used the mate bond.”
Cora curses under her breath. “The bond was just her way in—this is mind control.”
The Abyssinian Guard begins to encircle the ballroom, positioning themselves between the nobles and the outer halls, effectively penning everyone inside. I see Khale stiffen. Nuala’s fingers twitch at her side. Miore looks pale.
“We’re not here to hurt anyone,” Axel says, but the lie doesn’t land. “This is a transfer of power. For the good of our people.”
“You don’t get to decide that alone,” Wake says. “That’s not leadership. That’s betrayal.”
“Better betrayal than stagnation,” Shoal says coolly. “And better a brother who acts than one who waits for permission from ghosts.”
I step forward, pushing past the guards who try to stop me. “Why now, Shoal? Why tonight? The Conclave hasn’t even begun.”
The answer comes not from him—but from the sky.
A thunderous boom echoes through the ocean, so loud it vibrates in my chest.
The water above the palace flashes red and then black.
The solar eclipse.
And the meteors follow.
One by one, streaks of silver fire fall from the heavens—raining light through the sea like the sky itself is breaking.
The celestial event has begun.
Too early.
Shoal turns toward me with a smile that chills me.
“Some things,” he says. “Can only be left up to fate.”
He ascends the central dais, casting a glance at the crowd like a preacher stepping into the pulpit.
“All your lives you’ve been told that power is sacred. That it is gifted. That the gods choose who is worthy.”
He begins to glow—not from Ether, but from Darklite. It pulses from the plates of his armor, threading along his skin like veins of midnight fire.
“But what if I told you power doesn’t need a god’s permission?”
The nobles are transfixed. Frozen.
“What if I told you the gods feared what you could become? That they cut you off from the source because they knew—they knew—you’d no longer need them.”
He raises both arms.
“They called it balance. I call it theft. They kept Leviathan locked away because he saw the truth. Because he shared it with us.”
Gasps ripple through the room.
“You think me a villain because I do not kneel. But I say this: no more bloodlines. No more crowns. No more chosen. Power is not a gift. It is a birthright.”
And then he turns to me.
“And I will give it back to you. Even if I must take it by force.”
Behind me, I hear Cora draw a blade.
Beside me, Wake’s power sparks and hums.
I feel Delphi shift toward Lily.
Everything is about to break.
And in the rising dark, with the sky on fire and Leviathan stirring somewhere far below us, I realize—
Shoal didn’t come to win.
He came to change everything.
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