Min had no idea anymore what time it was. The night seemed to have gone on for years already. They had fended off wave after wave of lux beasts, each growing stronger. She had wondered if they would be able to hold them off, but so far, none had gotten past her barricade.

  Three of the disciples had been badly wounded and dragged back to safety. She wanted to know how they were but didn't dare leave the barricade.

  Her arrows were becoming more accurate as the night wore on. It was getting easier to form them. She thought, distantly, that there was more lux in the air now, like what she had experienced inside the towers. But she couldn't say for certain. It wasn’t important, compared to the need to protect those who cowered behind their barricade. The arrows came easier now but she was so tired.

  Brother Stone fought at her side, occasionally shouting orders for other acolytes or members of the Brotherhood to heed. Min just wanted the night to end. As her arrow took the last of this wave of monsters through the eye, she sagged against the wall to her right, panting. A sister hurried out of shelter, carrying cups of water for the defenders. Min drank, feeling the exhaustion spreading through her limbs.

  The tower shook. There had been plenty of shaking tonight, but this one went on and on and grew in strength. Min was afraid that the ring was coming apart. What about the lower petals? Had they survived? The people of the lower levels? How bad was the quake down there?

  Now, as the shaking finally died away, Min had time to worry about more than just herself and her people. What about Chang-li? She hadn't seen him since much earlier this evening. Noren had gone to find him, and she'd been hoping ever since that he'd make his way here, despite Noren having said he had more important work to do.

  If Noren had found him and sent him into the tower, then even now he was trying to stop this. But how could anyone hope to put an end to a tower eruption? Despair washed over her. The dawn would never come. She would fail, and Chang-li would be lost.

  Someone shouted, "They're back!" She looked up, high in the sky overhead, where the two bright figures of the prisms, wreathed in white and golden flame, fought in the sky above. They threw techniques at each other, huge colorful patterns against the dark sky.

  One of the two wielded an enormous bow from which techniques shot. The other, a vast, two-handed sword that was taller than the prisms themselves. Min assumed one of the two was Prism Eri, since why would Nai Hong and his daughter fight? But whether it was Nai Hong or Nai Lin, she couldn't tell.

  Why were the Prisms fighting? She heard whispers all around, people worrying this was the start of a new Prism War. Right now, Min was more worried about surviving the night than what it might mean.

  The sword-wielding prism threw their blade, not at the opponent but down toward the earth. It exploded into a wide silvery wash of light that filled the air between the tower and the prisms, then faded out.

  Suddenly, the prisms were fifty times their previous size. Above shone a sky filled with more stars than Min had ever seen, with tendrils of lux undulating across it like multi-colored serpents. There was the faintest shimmer in the air, and she realized she was watching the fight through some sort of barrier.

  The bow-wielding Prism was Eri. Her golden hair streamed out behind her. She raised her bow and nocked two arrows to it, both layered with many lux techniques. Min couldn’t begin to understand what they were doing, the weaves were so tight and dense. She loosed all three. One flew right for the second Prism — Nai Lin, Min could now tell. She conjured an iridescent fan out of thin air, snapping it open. It grew to cover her body. The first arrow flew into it and exploded, the layered techniques unfolding. Darkness seethed across the fan. Cracks of light appeared, and it blew apart, taking the arrow with it and knocking the prisms apart.

  The second arrow — Min saw it now, racing toward the Riceflower, a huge ugly bolt of lux that crackled with potential. The first layered technique peeled away and suddenly there were a hundred copies of the arrow, each strong with lux. Nai Lin recovered from her fall across the sky, racing back as she pulled a sickle from her soulspace and infused it with lux. She swung, sending rippling cuts through the air. The attacks intersected dozens of the arrows, slicing them cleanly. Each arrow she intercepted dissipated back into raw lux — but there were still dozens.

  Then, suddenly, they vanished. Min blinked. Someone next to her cheered — but she realized what happened, focusing her lux senses. “Brace!” she shouted. “They’re not gone, they just passed through that magnifying technique and we can’t see them any more!”

  Nai Lin was racing forward, but Eri fired another arrow at her. She was forced to twist in the air to respond with a technique of her own.

  Min was paralyzed. There was nowhere to go, no way to hide. She wove a shield of red lux and raised it over the defenders at the barricade. The weave frayed and fizzled, and she wasn’t going to be able to sustain it long —

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  The arrows struck. She felt the tower shudder and shake, differently from the shaking that had been going on all night, as the arrows impacted. One hit where Min could see it — in front of their barricade, by the edge of the ring. A blinding burst of light flared. She cried out, her lux shield dropping, ducking away as the blast wave hit and knocked her away from the barricade. Her lux senses were overwhelmed and she shut herself off from them.

  Min forced herself up to her knees and forward, blinking away purple and white spots from her vision. Smoke rose from the hole. As it cleared, her jaw dropped. A circle twenty feet wide had been punched in the Crown Ring, near the edge. She’d lived here all her life and everyone in Vardin City knew the petals and Crown could not be damaged in any normal way.

  But Prisms, it seemed, were something else.

  Cries and shouts rose up all over the city. She could spot more plumes of smoke. She worried what would happen if more than one arrow had hit the same petal. Visions of a whole shelf full of people and buildings falling, crashing into the petal beneath or the Flotsam far below — she banished the fear from her mind and set her face forward. She couldn’t help them, couldn’t do anything about a Prism duel, but she could defend against tower beasts, and as her lux sense recovered she sensed one coming.

  The Prisms moved off. Min caught her breath, looking around and her valiant defenders. She wished she could protect more people. The cultivators she had were hard-pressed to defend just this square against the tower beasts.

  Where were the other cultivators? Varden City was full of them. There were nine different sects here, all of whom had grandmasters and dozens of cultivators at least at the Peak of Mental Refinement. Were they hiding? Or was, in fact, the fighting so terrible that they were fully engaged somewhere else?

  “Another one!” someone shouted. Min summoned her bow and leapt to the barricade as the roaring started. The creature rounded the nearest bend. It wasn't a tower beast; it was three of them, enormous green lizards with manes and fangs like a hyena's and a tail like a scorpion's. They were eight feet tall, towering over the barricade as they rushed it.

  Min forged an arrow out of lux, set it to her bow, and fired. She fired again and again, but her arrows clattered off of scales and dissipated back into their component luxes. She was helpless to stop them, and none of the men with her would be able to either. Min braced herself for the onslaught.

  Then from up the street, someone came charging, whirling a staff and throwing out a hail of techniques. Blue and orange chains shot out from his hand, binding all three of the tower beasts, hauling them back toward him. His staff sprouted a spear point, and the man pulled himself forward with the chains, springing up onto the back of the nearest of the monsters and skewering it.

  From the point of his spear, light shot out as he infused a technique into his weapon and sent it through the beast, which shivered, then exploded. Already the man was leaping to the next.

  Min stared, her mouth hanging open. She'd never seen anything like this before. As he destroyed the second beast and then turned, raising his staff's spear point to thrust up into the throat of the third lizard creature, the light from the sky fell on his face.

  It was Noren. He was glowing with lux, like the prisms had. Min stared in disbelief at the grandmaster. So he really was worthy of that title. A moment later, the third beast collapsed. Noren dismissed the spearhead and brushed back his hair from his face. He turned and strode toward the barricade.

  "You can put that away," he told Min, gesturing toward her bow.

  She looked at him questioningly. Noren just shook his head. “Don’t you feel him coming?”

  The shaking went on and on. A noise split the air like a crack of thunder, but far, far louder.

  At the barricade, her people were looking up at the sky, still clutching their weapons. Min looked up too.

  The sky was on fire. It blazed with every color of the rainbow, like the earlier splitting of lumos into lux, but instead of bands of color, it was the entire sky. Colors swirled, deepening their shades, growing darker, more blue than purple.

  Then the sky split open, and a golden man descended. Light streamed from his figure. Even from hundreds of feet below, she could somehow make out his features. He seemed ageless, not young, not old. His hair gleamed with purple highlights, his robes scintillated even more than the prisms’ had. In one hand, he carried a scepter; in another, a globe.

  Min, and everyone around her, fell to their knees as his will spread out. It wasn't like the prisms' overwhelming blow. It was more like a hand on her shoulder, urging her to kneel. She obeyed, but kept her head craned skyward.

  The two prisms had broken off their duel. One flew toward the emperor, the other raced away. The emperor raised a hand. Light shot out toward the escaping figure, but as it reached them, there was a twist of golden light, and they vanished. Min wasn't sure if the technique had caught up or if it was an escape route of some sort.

  The other prism joined the emperor as they descended. Min got a look. It was Nai Lin, the daughter of Nai Hong. The two reached the top of the tower and disappeared inside.

  She looked around in bewilderment and saw Noren smiling at her. ”Well, your husband and his friends seem to have done as we hoped and summoned the emperor. Now it is up to him." Noren looked up at the top of the tower looming over the crowd with a worried expression on his face.

  "What's wrong?" Min asked. "Is it too late?"

  "What? No. I can already feel the lux levels balancing out, can't you? Just... Well, the Emperor is a very powerful cultivator, and one never knows what he will find to take offense at. I think we should return to your brother's palace. That's probably where they'll emerge, after all. Assuming there's anything left of the palace. With the number of tower beasts that were getting through, I don't know how effective their defense was."

  Chills ran down Min's spine. Her brother and her grandfather were there, to say nothing of countless other innocents like Hiroko and the Dowager Pearl. She hoped they were all right.

  Brother Stone tugged at her. "We should consult the eldest brother," he said.

  She shook him off. "You go to my grandfather and tell him I've gone with the grandmaster of my sect to wait for the emperor's pleasure," she said.

  "And then you can round up the acolytes and start them on a clean-up mission," Noren said to Stone. "There's likely to be overflow from some of the lower levels of the tower. They need to push all the way down to the Flotsam, but anything coming from the lower floors they ought to be able to handle. Set up squads. You know what to do."

  Brother Stone bowed. "As you command, Grandmaster."

  Noren took Min's arm. "Come, Lady Morning Mist. It's time for us to go see our emperor."