Chapter 25: The Salvage of Souls

The morning after the battle, the bay was littered with the skeletal remains of the Jade flagship. The bone-white wood didn't rot; it drifted like bleached ribs in the tide, humming with a residual heat that made the water around it steam. But it wasn't the bone I was interested in—it was the Eclipse-Glass.

Where my power had collided with the flagship’s Sol-Core, the matter had fused into a new substance. It was a crystalline material, as dark as the void but shot through with veins of liquid gold that moved like lightning trapped in amber.

"It’s beautiful," Lyra whispered, standing beside me on the shore. She reached out to touch a shard that had washed up, and instead of burning her, the glass sang. It emitted a low, harmonic chord that resonated in my very marrow.

"It’s dangerous," Kaelen corrected, approaching us with a containment field generator. He looked as if he hadn't slept in a week. "Elora, I’ve been analyzing the fragments. This isn't just mineral or magic. The Sol-Cores… they aren't machines. They’re prisons."

I turned to him, my obsidian hand—still faintly stained by the night's power—clenching. "Explain."

Kaelen held up a magnifying lens to a small shard of the glass. "Inside the lattice of the light, I found echoes. Not just energy signatures, but neural patterns. The Jade Isles aren't 'distilling' the sun, Elora. They are siphoning the collective consciousness of a race of beings made of light—the Aetherials. They trap them, compress them into cores, and burn their essence for fuel."

A cold rage, sharper than any frost I had ever summoned, settled in my chest. "They are burning souls to stay warm."

"And the Aether-Born children like Lyra?" Thane asked, his voice a low thunder as he joined us. "Are they connected to these beings?"

"They are the descendants," Kaelen said, looking at Lyra with a mixture of awe and fear. "When the Jade Emperor began the 'Great Harvest' centuries ago, a few Aetherials escaped by binding themselves to the bloodlines of the outcasts. Lyra isn't a glitch. She’s a survivor. She’s the last of their royalty."

I looked at the black-and-gold glass in my hand. If this substance was a fusion of my void and their light, it was the key.

"We aren't just rebuilding a fleet," I announced, my voice carrying across the beach to the gathered Legion. "We are going to build a path. If the Jade Emperor wants a war of Light, we will give him a war of Liberation."

"Kaelen, take every shard of this Eclipse-Glass. Use it to reinforce the hulls of our new skiffs. I want ships that can phase through their solar-beams, not just withstand them. Jace, I want you to take a team of Shadow-Walkers and slip into the Jade Isles' colonial outposts. Find out where they keep the 'Unprocessed' cores. We are going to stop the burning."

"And what about the High King's interest?" Thane asked, his hand resting on my waist. "Silas is gone, but the Void he left behind is still hungry."

"The Void is part of the balance now," I said, looking at the horizon where the sun was struggling to break through the mist. "The Jade Isles think they can rule through purity. They think the dark is an infection. We’re going to show them that without the dark, the light has no shape. We’re going to show them the Eclipse."

As the Legion began the massive task of salvaging the flagship, I felt the Tri-Mark bond surge with a new, terrifying purpose. We were no longer defending a ravine. We were preparing to cross the Great Divide to dismantle an empire built on the screams of a sun.

I looked at Lyra, who was standing at the water's edge, her white-blonde hair glowing as she hummed back to the glass. She wasn't just a child anymore. She was the spark that would set the world on fire.

"Ready the fleet," I whispered to the wind. "The Sovereign is coming for the Emperor's throne."