Page 337 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“Always,” she whispered.

His brow flinched, and Faythe jerked at the sound of clashing power like wind and lightning.

Faythe stood slowly with Reylan’s aid, and she couldn’t believe what she saw.

Tauria and Zaiana were fighting Dakodas with an onslaught of wind and lightning. Nik rushed over to her, assessing her from head to toe.

“Sorry we took so long,” Nik said, breathless and with a crooked smile. His eyes kept darting back to Tauria.

Faythe reached toward him, touching his cheek.

She wasn’t alone. Never alone. Faythe still had friends in this world who looked out for her as much as she did for them, and she couldn’t stop fighting to win.

“Let’s end this,” she said, and Nik’s expression firmed to one of pure determination.

“Together,” he said.

Faythe leaned off Reylan, exchanging a pained, fearful look, but they didn’t need any words.

“I think I know what I need to do,” Faythe said.

Reylan nodded, fierce but terrified.

That was all the time they got before they were pulled apart by the demand of their enemy pushing back against their friends.

Nik attacked with a bow on Tauria’s right, while Reylan transformed into a large white lion on Zaiana’s left. The four of them kept Dakodas’s focus on defending herself.

Faythe held her palms out, giving herself over to the Ruin Dagger, which lay discarded. She didn’t need the blade itself, only the amplifier that turned the touch of sun within her into a blazing core. Her golden tattoos lit up brighter than ever before. Her mind drifted away, retreating to allow the last piece of the Goddess of the Sun to take over…and end her sister once and for all.

Aurialis flooded her mind, and Faythe had to trust the Spirit.

“You figured it out,”Aurialis said to her thoughts, which Faythe was only a bystander to now.

“Will you really sacrifice the last piece of yourself for this?”Faythe asked.

Aurialis had control of her body now. When she’d broken the Death Ruin and watched Aurialis turn to smoke in a vision, Faythe had thought she’d lost the Spirit of Life then too. But while Faythe still lived, Aurialis could never truly die when her power was used to bring Faythe back. Just for this moment.

Aurialis said,“Will you?”

Once they pushed Aurialis’s power into Dakodas, Faythe had long accepted that she would die without the Spirit’s essence sustaining her anymore.

“It was all borrowed time, wasn’t it?”

Faythe Ashfyre braced, ready to make her final stance.

Aurialis said,“I wish it didn’t have to be.”

Faythe looked at Reylan, but he wasn’t there anymore. Not attacking Dakodas’s front like Nik, Tauria, and Zaiana.

“Me too,”she whispered.

Faythe ran. Her Phoenix wings cast out, shooting her into the air as she flipped over her friends. As Faythe reached for Dakodas, the Spirit called on a plume of shadow that engulfed her. Faythe fell into the smoke and would have been under the shadow attack again, but Aurialis’s power formed a sphere around her. The light pushed out, and the shadows hissed, dissipating to reveal Dakodas in all her fury.

“Your band of saviors is nothing to me,” she hissed.

Reylan, in his lion form, growled menacingly beside her. Faythe braced, but more darkness caught her eye—more so at the sight of the flesh stepping through several walls of darkness across the mountain fringe. Dakodas had brought some of herarmy to fight with her. Some hissed––savage dark fae. Others came running with war cries toward her friends.

The masses kept flooding through. Faythe gritted her teeth as the numbers quickly overwhelmed Nik, Tauria, and Zaiana.

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