Like a small child, the White Queen sobbed and moaned from her first experience of pain in all her long life. Her hold over the diamonds, patiently cultivated over the entirety of Cedric's lifetime, had shattered completely.

Guided by his darkness sense, Cedric stepped away from Ayo's helpless, curled-up form and began to draw upon the diamonds himself. They filled him to the brim at once; he thrummed with the sheer volume of blazing power that nearly burst his veins along their seams. He could only use a portion of it, but that portion was more than anything he'd absorbed before.

Ayo was attempting to roll to her feet. A few white diamonds in the channel began to sputter and flare.

"Don't try anything," Cedric said without turning, and his tongue tasted like concentrated rain. "I'll kill you, if I have to."

She stilled.

Cedric crossed back toward the Aetheria, sensing the first of the diamonds crumbling into dust, and pressed his palm to it. There was one last thing to take care of.

Adrian, Candra, Grace, and Finn were still safe in the protective bubble, though it was rapidly disintegrating around them. Adrian approached him first, proud steel in his eyes.

You did it. It wasn't a question.

Cedric chuckled tiredly. A simple dislocated shoulder, and her focus was broken.

Candra cracked a smile. Not bad, Cedric. Not bad at all.

Perhaps it was the divine power infusing his flesh to bursting, but he now had some idea--sturdier than guesswork, weaker than certainty--of how to send his friends back. The tree brought you all here, not me. Freeing you should simply be a matter of making another… request.

Cedric, Candra said. You should know… you're very brave, to do… what you're about to do.

Two compliments in a row? You're going soft. He ignored Grace and Finn's confused looks; he simply didn't have the energy to explain, not now.

Cedric closed his eyes and projected his mind outwards, just as he'd done at the crowned hill, and felt a vast, inhuman consciousness press up against him. A profoundly familiar one, now that he was no longer blindly swept up in its maelstrom.

Little one, came that ageless voice, neither man nor woman.

Could you release my friends from this place… er, please?

It is done, should they wish it.

Cedric opened his eyes. You're free to go, he told them. But Candra, Grace, Finn--if you're simply returned to the same circumstances you escaped from…

Don't fuss, Cedric, Candra said. I'll handle it. She and the others were now fading away; the Goddess' storm beyond the bubble was visible through them, as if they were made of smoke.

We'll see you soon, Grace said.

Watch yourself, Finn said.

He swallowed against the lump in his throat. Same to you.

Another few seconds, and they were gone entirely. Except for Adrian, whose form remained as solid as ever.

Don't even try it, he said shortly when Cedric opened his mouth to protest. I'll leave when I damn well choose to.

Cedric relented with a wry smile, then looked down at his own hands, whose veins were beginning to glow through the skin in fine lines of branching, interwoven light.

Despite the separation of his mind and physical body, he nonetheless felt the inexorably building pressure in his flesh. He was a delicate waterskin aspiring to swallow up a boiling ocean, and the white-hot furnace in his chest would only swell and blaze ever brighter with each passing moment.

Adrian watched him, his expression unfathomable. How much more is left?

Cedric grimaced. Too much. You shouldn't stay for this. There’s no point.

The globular web of cracks around them was spreading, widening. Soon, this sanctuary would shatter and leave them both to the mercies of the howling storm.

Cedric held out his arms to Adrian. It was time for their final goodbye.

Adrian, I--

Adrian punched him.

It certainly hurt as if it were real. Cedric cupped his jaw, and the instinctual flare of outrage temporarily drove all else from his mind. What the bloody--

Fight it! Adrian screamed, his eyes maddened with fury, and seized Cedric's shoulders. Wipe that stupid cow-eyed look off your face! If you even think about slipping away like some little weakling, I--I swear, I'll piss on your grave! I'll haul your stupid corpse all the way up those stairs just so I can bury you and piss all over it! Every day!

Cedric wrenched from his grip. You can't get your way by throwing a--a tantrum! What use am I if not for this? I may as well have never been freed from the Dead End!

Adrian's features twisted into something worse than anger, worse than sadness. That is the ugliest thing you've ever said. Maybe I could have--could have--made peace with this whole… stupid affair someday, but then you also drag me here and force me to watch you wilt like an old cabbage? Fuck you.

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Cedric's shoulders slumped. I've… done things, Adrian, he muttered. Bad things. Of course I wanted a life with you, more than anything. But this… this is right.

Adrian didn't soften. Hogwash, he spat. Save the blubbering and whinging for when you're dead. But if you don't do everything in your power to survive here and now, while you're still able to try-- Adrian jabbed a vicious finger in Cedric's chest. And this isn't about us, dimwit, it's about you! Whether we grow old and fat together or you discard me within the week, or you do nothing else with your life but raise pigs and chickens, fight for it! You don't get to take the coward's way out--you don't get to take for granted that you deserve to die. No, you scratch and bite and claw for what's yours like the rest of us. Understand, stupid?

Cedric had never seen Adrian so wholly enraged, so completely beside himself. He kissed him deeply, hungrily. Something else was blazing furiously in his chest, and not even the light of a thousand diamonds could compare.

All right, Cedric finally said, grinning widely. I'll think of something.

Don't be long, Adrian said, unable to suppress the bright-eyed fluster on his face. He was fading away, retreating from the realm of the Goddess and back to reality.

Cedric pulled himself from the Aetheria just as the sanctuary splintered into nothingness.

*

Candra emerged from the ground as if spat up by some subterranean beast. She allowed herself one second to rest her cheek on the real, blessed grass and savor the coolness of a passing breeze, then pushed herself to her knees and raised her head.

Gregor, Khana, and the villager witnesses were gathered around her, though at a fair distance. No one dared move or make a sound upon her inexplicable return following an equally inexplicable disappearance. The sheer depth of the stony silence was almost funny.

Candra rose to her feet, and the crowd shuffled back a step. Several paces behind them, unnoticed, stood Finn and Grace. She caught their eyes and lightly cocked her head. Miraculously, they yielded to sense and turned quietly to flee.

"Well, there you have it," she said to the crowd, spreading her arms. "I am a personal friend of Rava, the banished Heir of Darkness, and he's supremely concerned with my continuing survival. What do you say to that, gentlemen?"

*

Cedric could no longer stop the flow of Axis energy. The influx had begun to generate its own momentum, pouring into him ever faster like a searing river. There was no furnace in his chest; he'd become the furnace, an entity of pure, blinding power.

Ayo lay on her side nearby, clutching her mangled shoulder. "What are you doing?" she panted in quiet horror. But that wasn't right; he couldn't possibly have heard her through the piercing, all-consuming howl in his ears.

Cedric's mind was fragmenting into scattered, discordant shards. He'd made a promise to someone important. He was supposed to do something, not simply kneel in the dirt and let this all happen.

Fight. Fight to live.

There was something else, but he'd forgotten. He'd planned to die here, but… she hadn't…

Cedric looked down at his blazing hands, palms flat against the ground, and they seemed a million miles away. Only the unspeakable smell of his own roasting flesh tethered him to some sense of lucidity and selfhood.

My own body, cooking from the inside. What have I forgotten? What was it?

And then, like a miracle, the word finally came to him.

Conduit.

That's right. He wasn't the master of this power--he never had been. He was merely an insignificant vessel through which divinity flowed.

Cedric forced his distant, smoldering limbs to move--one hand forward, followed by a knee, repeat--leaving molten divots in his wake. The Aetheria loomed over him, and through his fractured vision appeared to practically vibrate with divine power. He put his hand on the trunk, and smoke immediately began trailing out from his fingers.

Take it back, he pleaded with his last trickle of clarity. Take it all.

And so, She did.

The vicious force that had been destroying him from the inside was now flowing out of him, through his hand and into the Aetheria, as quickly as it was pouring in. Centuries' worth of jealously-hoarded power, all returning to its rightful place.

Simple, Cedric thought dazedly. Return what was taken. That was all we ever…

His thoughts scattered again. The world still roared in his ears, and his flesh still blazed. It would be all too easy to fade into oblivion and give up the fight, even now.

But he wouldn't. Because he'd promised.

And then he was plunged back into the Goddess' storm, but with his perception entirely shifted. It wasn't incoherent chaos after all; it was living poetry, vibrant, breathtaking in its beauty. Endless repeating patterns that were never truly identical, the perfect symmetry of asymmetry in all things living or dead.

There was one last thing to do, flush as he was with the unfathomable knowledge and understanding that he knew he'd never touch again. It now seemed so simple, what Ayo had done over the years: sowing tiny seeds of light, as delicate as candleflame, where none but she--with the aid of the Aetheria--could ever reach.

It was only a matter of pinching them back out.

Banish the Blight. Restore them all.

It is done, came the serene response, and Cedric knew it to be true.

He felt the stolen power of the Vault flow gladly into all corners of Eris' being. He rejoiced with Her as one, but accompanying that joy was no small amount of sadness. All was not as it once was, and it never would be again. Some wounds ran too deep.

Don't go, he pleaded. Stay with us. Stay with me.

Her lifeblood still pulsed in his veins, though he could finally feel it beginning to recede from his flesh as the last of the Vault's hoard depleted. Foolishly, he was now attempting to gather it back into himself if only to preserve their unity for a few moments longer. She knew--and therefore so did he--that this was goodbye.

We shall speak now, She said gently. They shall listen.

Cedric spoke with a voice and conviction not solely his own, and every living human in the kingdom heard them.

*

My children.

Thomas dropped the axe and clutched at his temples.

These are my last moments with you.

*

No longer shall the Heirs presume to claim authority over their own brothers and sisters. No longer shall they send you to plunder that which sustains my flesh.

Destrius vaguely heard a heavy, wet clatter as a full tureen tumbled to the ground nearby, but his focus was mainly devoted to the fistfuls of silk tablecloth beneath his whitened knuckles.

*

Rejoice in my restoration, in your second chance. Grow and prosper, my dearest ones.

The voice echoed in Grace's head for many moments afterwards, like a lingering trail of smoke. Her flailing hand found a blessedly solid tree, and she crumpled against it.

Finn was breathing hard beside her, equally dazed. They stared at each other in the cold moonlight.

"Was that…?" he whispered, not daring to say it aloud.

Grace wiped her eyes and sniffed hard. "I think so," she said faintly. "But… not just Her. I can't describe it."

"He did it, then," Finn said numbly. "He… won."

Countless memories of home, of everything they'd thought forever lost, were shedding their melancholy tinge like gossamer veils. Grace found herself smiling in the wondrous realization of what Cedric had truly accomplished.

"He did far more than that."

The moonlight faded, and the sky rumbled mightily above their heads. All across the kingdom of Iridesca, bountiful gouts of long-awaited, life-giving rain began to fall.