Celeste’s hands shook around the wind like they belonged to someone else.

  Up here, the sky had edges. Space pressed down as a black, indifferent curve above her, and the air beneath her feet felt stretched thin and brittle—wind gathered only because she tore it together, strand by strand, forcing it to become a column when it wanted to become nothing.

  The spear under her boots—ice born from cloud vapor and pressure—groaned with weight. Its surface crawled with fractures that healed into new fractures as it flexed under its own mass. Jagged ridges caught the light like broken glass. It was an ugly thing, violent by necessity, shaped more by force than craft.

  She could feel the void sphere inside it.

  A dense wrongness buried near the spear’s thick midline, held in place by ice and intention. Oryx’s gift. Oryx’s weapon. Celeste carried it like a live ember against her conscience, a thing she did not understand and would never pretend she could create.

  Below, the desert rotated.

  A tornado still lived down there—thin, furious, grinding—feeding the spear’s fall like a piston. Celeste had built it as a funnel and a throat, a way to shove air upward where air did not want to be. A column of stolen sky that let her keep pushing when altitude tried to starve her.

  The tornado sputtered.

  It began as a hitch in the rotation, a stutter so small the eye would forgive it. Celeste didn’t. She felt it in her ribs, in the way mana refused to separate cleanly into compartments. She’d been splitting herself into systems since the ascent: cloud-gathering, crystallization, guidance, propulsion. Every second demanded a little more accuracy than her body wanted to give.

  The tornado coughed again.

  Dust spilled outward at its base in a widening ring. The column lost cohesion along its spine, bands of rotation fraying into ragged ribbons. The roar softened into uneven breaths.

  Celeste tasted blood.

  Her jaw clenched. She tried to rebalance—feed the funnel more, tighten the airflow, pull surrounding air into the system. The sky resisted her like a living thing. Up here, wind was not a sea. It was scraps.

  The spear drifted.

  A slow yaw to the east, a betrayal measured in degrees. Celeste’s stomach dropped. That drift meant the strike missed. That drift meant she delivered nothing but frozen water into the desert. That drift meant she returned to the ground with empty hands and no mana and no excuse.

  Her breath came shallow, sharp.

  “Hold,” Celeste whispered, as if the spear could hear her. “Hold—”

  She jumped.

  The world fell away beneath her as she stepped off the descending ice. For a fraction of a second, she floated in a silence so complete it felt like the universe had stopped paying attention. Then gravity grabbed her and she dropped alongside her own weapon, frost and shards whipping past her face.

  Celeste threw both hands out and shoved.

  Wind slammed into the spear’s midsection like a physical strike. Ice screamed, shedding brittle plates and glittering fragments that spiraled away into the void of open air. The spear’s vector bent, slow at first, then committed as the mass accepted the new line.

  Celeste kicked and caught the spear with one boot, using the contact to pivot herself back onto its jagged back. She landed hard, knees buckling, and immediately felt the cost. Her muscles trembled. The cold gnawed deeper. The exertion pulled at her lungs like hooks.

  Below, the ground grew closer faster than it should have.

  Descent did that. Every correction stole time, and the spear was already accelerating. Altitude dropped; air thickened; her wind became easier to gather. That should have helped.

  It also made everything faster.

  The tornado wheezed.

  Celeste felt the imbalance widen. She pushed air behind the spear like a hand shoving a falling boulder. The effort required volume, and the volume required gathering. She pulled wind from miles around, compressing it into a lance behind the ice, turning sky into propellant.

  The tornado began to die.

  Its base scattered into dust. Its midsection broke into two rotating stumps that twisted against each other, then dissolved. The column collapsed into a churning, spreading cloud of grit and debris that rolled outward in a ring.

  Celeste’s throat tightened.

  That tornado had been her anchor. Her reserve. Her safety margin. Its collapse meant the spear had only her now—only her failing lungs and thinning mana and hands that wanted to open and let go.

  She looked down and finally saw the battlefield clearly.

  Zara’Kael’s body moved like a siege engine.

  Massive. Armored. Alive.

  And on her back—small by comparison, stubborn as a splinter—Eric clung near a wound that glowed with wrong heat and half-healing flesh. Celeste couldn’t hear him from here. She didn’t need to. The posture told the truth: he was holding on by force and spite.

  The spear drifted a fraction again.

  Celeste’s vision narrowed.

  She jumped a second time.

  Free-fall tore at her hair. Her stomach rose into her throat. She raced the spear downward, then slammed both hands into the air and pushed with everything she had left. Wind struck the midsection, compressing, roaring, forcing the line true. It felt like shoving a moving building.

  Celeste’s arms went numb.

  She forced herself back onto the spear, landing hard, breath scraping. Her skin felt too tight. Her mana felt shallow. Each pull of wind brought less response, like the sky was running out of patience with her.

  She managed one more correction—smaller, brutal, precise—and felt the last of her reserves tear free.

  Her body went hollow.

  There was no shield. No spare breath. No margin left for elegance.

  The spear kept falling.

  Celeste fell with it.

  She slipped, tried to catch herself, missed, and then the world was air and speed and nothing else. The ground rushed up, a brown blur. At the last instant she saw the liquefied dust bowl—Zara’Kael’s earlier oscillation attack had churned the earth into soft, unstable powder, a pit of broken soil and suspended grit.

  Celeste hit it like a stone.

  The dust swallowed her impact in a choking eruption. Pain flashed white across her body. She slid, rolled once, and came to rest half-buried, lungs fighting for air that tasted like dirt and blood.

  Her eyes fluttered.

  Above her, the spear continued.

  Eric’s fingers had gone numb ten minutes ago.

  The cold wasn’t the problem. The problem was the tremor in his forearms, the way his grip kept slipping, millimeter by millimeter, every time Zara’Kael’s body jolted. He clung to a ridge line on her dorsal plates—an edge where armor overlapped—and it felt like hanging off a moving cliff while someone tried to shake you loose.

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  His regeneration crawled.

  Earlier, it had surged—wounds closing as fast as they were made, pain dulled by power and momentum. Now it moved like a tired animal, slow and stubborn, healing him only because it hadn’t been given permission to stop.

  Eric’s shoulder burned from repeated impact. His ribs ached. His breath scraped shallow, each inhale tasting like copper and dust.

  He kept striking.

  Constructs formed in his hands—hammers, wedges, heavy blades meant for percussion rather than slicing—and each one shattered after impact, reforming a heartbeat later with slightly adjusted frequency. He was tuning like a musician with shaking hands, searching for a resonance that would let him crack what brute strength couldn’t.

  His humming had become a rasp.

  A low sound in his throat to keep time and keep his mind anchored away from pain. It matched the rhythm of his strikes: hit—adjust—hit—adjust—listen for the change in feedback through the carapace.

  Zara’Kael’s wound tried to heal beneath him.

  He could feel it. The heat and twitching tissue under armor plates. Every strike made it flinch. Every strike made it stall. Even without a breach, pain traveled. Armor carried it. The creature beneath it hated him for it.

  His left hand slipped.

  Eric caught himself with his right, fingers screaming as he re-grabbed the ridge. His shoulder protested, half-healed and angry. His breath stalled. Spots danced at the edge of his vision.

  He forced another construct into being.

  It formed slower this time. Less clean. The edges wavered as his void answered with reluctance—still present, still lethal, but strained.

  Eric slammed the hammer down.

  The impact vibrated up his arms. A deep, metallic thud. Feedback through armor. A flinch from Zara’Kael’s body.

  A surge of irritation, like a living mountain deciding it had endured enough.

  Zara’Kael moved.

  Her limbs adjusted, lowering her profile. Plates shifted. The world around Eric tilted as she began to roll—an animal maneuver, practical and violent, designed to crush and scrape and remove the thing clinging to her.

  Eric’s grip failed.

  He tried to re-anchor—fingers reaching for a new seam, a new ridge. His hand found only slick armor and vibration. His body swung outward as gravity changed orientation. His shoulder screamed.

  The roll slammed him toward the ground.

  Eric twisted, bones protesting, and felt the earth surge up beneath the carapace. For half a second he lived inside a closing vice—armor above, ground below, space disappearing.

  He slipped free by a fraction.

  Zara’Kael continued the roll, grinding armor against desert and shattered asphalt, using her own mass like a weapon. Eric scrambled, desperate to regain purchase, but the motion was too violent. His constructs flickered and shattered before they could stabilize.

  Then Zara’Kael righted herself.

  The motion snapped through her frame like a whip.

  Eric was slung free.

  He flew through open air and hit the ground hard, tumbling end over end. Dust filled his mouth. His shoulder ground wetly, half out of place, and pain flared hot enough to steal his breath. He rolled twice more and finally skidded to a stop in broken asphalt and grit.

  For a moment, he couldn’t move.

  He lay there and listened to his own heartbeat.

  Regeneration stirred—slow, stubborn—and he felt the joint begin to pull itself back together. He clutched his shoulder and ground his teeth, forcing air into lungs that refused to cooperate.

  “Come on,” Eric rasped, voice raw. “Come on.”

  He pushed himself upright.

  His legs shook. His vision wavered. The night-one feeling pressed in: power spent, body heavy, pain honest again.

  Zara’Kael rose.

  Her attention never left him.

  Her voice came layered and resonant, irritation bleeding through her clicks. “Persistent. Painful little creature.”

  Eric stood as straight as he could, one arm held tight against his chest, eyes locked on the towering armored mass.

  The air changed.

  A heavy pressure washed over him, raising the hair along his arms and neck. His instincts flared—too late to identify, too sharp to ignore. Eric’s head tilted upward.

  The sky screamed.

  Zara’Kael’s wound burned.

  Regeneration tried to gather itself into a clean rhythm, and the rhythm kept getting interrupted—hammered by the small creature that clung to her back like a shard beneath armor. Each strike carried through the plates as dull aggravation, enough to keep her healing from settling into certainty.

  The creature’s persistence offended her.

  She rolled to remove it.

  The maneuver satisfied something primal. Armor scraped ground. Mass crushed. The irritation should have ended with silence and broken bones.

  Instead, the creature lived.

  Zara’Kael rose, plates shifting as she reasserted dominance over the earth. The smaller thing stood again, damaged, trembling, still watching her with the stare of something that refused to accept its place.

  Satisfaction spread through her.

  “This world breeds pests,” Zara’Kael clicked, voice deep with contempt. “It breeds noise. It breeds stubborn crawling life that mistakes persistence for worth.”

  She tasted the air, felt her wound still twitching beneath armor, and felt anger sharpen into pleasure.

  “These lands will learn obedience,” Zara’Kael continued, mandibles parting as her voice amplified across the ruined strip. “Your kind will—”

  The sky ruptured.

  The icicle struck.

  [END OF CHAPTER 34 — PART 1]

  The impact arrived as a sudden internal shock.

  Her dorsal plates failed locally with a brutal, focused breach—armor giving way in a tight, catastrophic point rather than peeling apart. The jagged tip punched down through layered carapace and into living mass. Ice screamed as the spear’s momentum drove forward for a heartbeat that felt infinite.

  Then the spear shattered.

  The rest of the falling mass sacrificed itself against her body and the ground beneath, collapsing into a violent eruption of fragments. Ice exploded outward in sheets and chunks, grinding across armor, skidding into the desert, hammering the earth hard enough to send ripples through dust and broken asphalt. The energy bled into fragmentation and soil, into debris and fractures, into a thunder that rolled across Primm like an arriving storm.

  Something cold remained inside her.

  Zara’Kael’s instincts reached for heat, for pressure, for the familiar language of injury.

  The sensation changed into something else.

  Agony detonated inside her core.

  Zara’Kael screamed, a layered rupture of clicks and resonance that tore from her body without permission. Pain traveled through her nervous system faster than her mind could interpret. Living mass disappeared in widening paths, tissue erased as though reality had been scraped away.

  Her nerves flooded with signal.

  Within her, the void unfolded.

  It struck outward in every direction at once—thin tendrils lashing through flesh like frantic construction, a foreign neural network building itself inside her body. Each contact spawned more. Branching. Multiplying. Seeking.

  Wherever those tendrils touched, substance vanished.

  Muscle segments. Support lattice. Wet organ mass that had never seen open air. Gone.

  Regeneration surged.

  It met nothing to grasp.

  Mana poured inward, drawn with irresistible hunger toward the consuming wrongness lodged in her core. Zara’Kael felt her reserves being stripped. She felt the void focusing, abandoning random exploration as soon as it found dense living matter, collapsing its behavior into directed consumption.

  The agony intensified until it filled her.

  Zara’Kael tried to move.

  Her legs answered late, stuttering through a body that had begun to fail internally. Commands reached muscle that no longer existed. Signals raced through pathways that ended in absence. Her stance faltered, ice fragments sliding from her armor in clattering sheets as her weight shifted unpredictably.

  She chittered again, the sound breaking apart as coherence dissolved.

  Understanding arrived in pieces.

  Something inside her was consuming her while she remained alive to feel it.

  Threads of darkness tore outward from the wound.

  They carved from the inside, slicing armor apart in clean, impossible lines. Each time ice struck those threads, it vanished—erased mid-fragment, leaving gaps in the debris field where physics should have insisted on impact.

  The void swelled.

  Its boundaries expanded as it devoured everything dense enough to sustain it. It drank mana like breath. It stripped her inner strength, turning her power into fuel for her own erasure.

  Zara’Kael’s body sagged.

  Her limbs buckled. The towering form that had dominated the battlefield slumped forward, massive weight settling into fractured ground with a dull, final impact that felt small compared to the agony still ripping through her.

  Her final sounds came out broken.

  Clicks. Chittering. The last remnants of language collapsing into animal noise as the structures that formed those sounds disappeared.

  The void erupted through her carapace.

  Dark filaments writhed briefly in open air, then contracted, withdrawing as their source exhausted itself and the available living mass dwindled into absence.

  Zara’Kael’s body went still.

  Silence followed.

  Eric stood motionless, one arm held tight against his chest, breath shallow as Zara’Kael finished falling.

  Ice littered the ground around her in shattered ruins—chunks the size of cars, splintered sheets, glittering shards half-buried in dust. Some fragments steamed faintly where cold met heat and friction sparked small fires. Others lay untouched, scattered in a rough ring where the spear had surrendered its momentum.

  The corpse looked wrong.

  Not exploded. Not torn open like prey.

  Hollowed.

  Carved.

  Places where armor should have been continuous showed clean lines cut from the inside, as though something had traced the shape of absence through plates that had resisted blades and constructs.

  Eric’s shoulder throbbed. Healing crawled along in slow, deliberate pulls, each heartbeat forcing the joint a little closer to where it belonged. He felt every millimeter of it. Power had covered pain earlier; now pain demanded to be acknowledged.

  Around him, the battlefield held its breath.

  Debris settled. Dust drifted. Small fires crackled in pockets. The wider noise—engines, screams, distant alarms—felt muted under the weight of what had just happened.

  Eric exhaled shakily.

  His eyes tracked the places where the void had erupted and receded. The air there still looked wrong, a faint distortion that refused to behave like heat shimmer.

  He swallowed hard.

  The plan had worked.

  The cost sat heavy in his bones.

  Celeste lay half-buried in the liquefied dust bowl, chest rising and falling in shallow pulls.

  Her body felt scraped empty. Every muscle trembled, overworked and bruised. Her mouth tasted like grit and blood. She tried to lift a hand and managed only a twitch.

  Sound arrived in fragments.

  The settling of debris. A faint crackle of fire. The distant echo of something metal collapsing far away. The rest of the world seemed to pause, as if it needed a moment to decide what came after a sky-born spear.

  Celeste turned her head slightly.

  Through the haze, she saw Zara’Kael’s fallen body—broken and still—ice clinging to it like a shroud. She saw the carved lines where something had pushed outward from within. She saw Eric standing, shaking, alive.

  Relief tried to rise.

  Exhaustion smothered it.

  Celeste let her eyes close.

  The sky above was empty now, stripped clean of cloud and storm.

  The ground remained quiet.

  is real. Whatever goals you’re carrying into this year, take them one step at a time. Momentum builds faster than you think once you commit to it.