The world had healed its surface and left everything underneath broken.
The crowd didn't know that. They couldn't know that — from where they sat, the Imperial Arena finals were exactly what they appeared to be: two extraordinary students burning through the limits of what should be possible, Sovereign Soulfire and Endless Eclipse meeting again and again in collisions that shook the stone beneath thousands of feet. The elders had given up their careful expressions somewhere around the fiftieth exchange. The empire watched and believed it understood what it was seeing.
Aether threw another wave of silver-gold flames across the scorched ground and thought about the woman made of galaxies who had looked at him like she was keeping a promise she hadn't made yet.
*Focus.*
