The falling golem hit the Pyre with a titanic BOOOOM, rocking the world and throwing El to the roof.

  A pillar of swirling blue-and-red fire, easily a thousand feet wide, shot upward with a roar like standing under a waterfall. The flames seemed to hit an invisible ceiling in the sky, their upward momentum shifting and spreading wide, until everything was coated in a dome of writhing flames.

  The fire went on and on, more and more rushing skyward, while frost rimmed the buildings and heat scalded El’s skin.

  From the rushing pillar of flame, two forms suddenly pulled apart.

  One, the same shape as the golem, but this time as tall as a mountain. The Pyre, the true Pyre, not just an avatar, made of condensed red flames, spread its terrible wings and drew a sword long enough to cut a continent in two.

  The second, of blue flames, spun and spread outward, a central core with eight long, crystalline legs extending from the lower body. A woman’s torso, draped in falling snow, fluttered her feathered wings of ice and leveled a long, frozen spear at the Pyre’s chest in one of her hands. In the other, she held a balance, with red-and-blue flames each on a scale.

  She couldn’t be more than a tenth of the size of the Pyre.

  “MY TIME HAS…” the Pyre roared and swung his sword that stretched from horizon to horizon. “COME!” he finished as the blade cleaved through his icy foe.

  The afterimage of his icy foe.

  She appeared in front of him in a blink, for all appearances moving casually, and thrust her spear straight into the center of the Pyre’s chest.

  “No,” she said softly, and lines of blue extended outward from the point of impact to every end of the Pyre.

  El blinked, and suddenly the Pyre was frozen solid, a hanging statue.

  She blinked again, and He was gone, a gentle rain of miniscule crystals falling from the flaming sky in his place.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The blue flame on the Goddess’s scale erupted in size, and she discarded her spear to take the flame in hand. “You’ve made the right choice,” she said.

  With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the blue ball of flame into the writhing pillar. It vanished beneath the wave of flames and then exploded outward soundlessly.

  Everything stopped.

  The fiery pillar froze. The flames dancing across the sky halted. Even the people held their breath.

  El stood and stepped to the edge of roof, the raging battle above paused as the Firestorm eyed the frost-rimed monsters they’d been battling. The twisted creatures spawned by the golem hovered in the air, ice crawling along their limbs and covering their wings. How were they even staying in the air?

  “My…lord…?” a voice said below El, and she looked to see a Cardinal staggering out of a nearby building, ice likewise crawling along his body, even out of his mouth and over his face. He barely made it three more steps before he was cocooned in it.

  El’s head snapped to Laze and Nexin, but they were untouched by the ice, and her eyes turned to the Goddess above. The… Creator?

  A smile spread on the Goddess’s lips as She met El’s eyes, and She snapped her fingers.

  All at once the frozen flames shattered into a million tiny pieces, as did the remaining Ignitio monsters, the frozen Cardinal, and even the Goddess herself.

  Tiny, sparkling crystals filled the air, like a million diamonds hanging suspended.

  “Is it over?” Laze asked from where she lay on the roof beside El.

  “Maybe?” El said, her eyes going to the where the Pyre burned blue. The Firestorm circled above, looking for leftover threats, but the battle seemed… over.

  Was that it? Did they actually win?

  “Was that a dream?” Nexin asked, his voice uncharacteristically weak.

  “Nexin!” El said and scrambled to her brother’s side. His arm was bent at an odd angle, and his uniform was… irritatingly wrinkled, but he was alive! “Your… Spark?” she asked cautiously. Had she been too late?

  “Still got it,” he said, his good hand reaching over to his bad arm, a grimace of pain on his face. “Not sure what you did, exactly, but thank you. Where’s the other guy?”

  “Sol?” El asked.

  “Alive,” Sol’s voice answered for her, and he landed on the roof nearby, the ice covering his body falling away to leave his tattered clothes. “Barely,” he added, leaning up against a chimney and sliding down to sit beside it.

  El gave Sol a small smile and a nod, which he returned, then turned her attention back to Nexin. “We should get you to a doctor.”

  “I think the doctors are going to be busy enough. Let’s just… rest here… for a bit,” he said. “We deserve a bit of a breather.”

  “Ahem,” Laze said with a small cough and stepped up beside El.

  “Laze,” Nexin said. “Thank you. You really saved me.”

  The smile on Laze’s face couldn’t have been any bigger. “You hear that, El?” she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “I really saved him.”

  “You did,” El said, then threw her arm over Laze’s shoulders.

  “And you really saved all of us,” Laze added. “Rather dramatically, I might add.”

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