Chapter 3

Ethan didn't wait long to make me pay for my defiance. The very next day, the skies over Sunstone Valley, my ancestral home, turned black. Unnatural blizzards, driven by Stormriver magic, howled through our sacred groves. Flash floods, violent and sudden, tore through the land.

Our Sun-crystals, the conduits of our life-sustaining solar energy, began to dim. Cracks appeared on their luminous surfaces. My people, the Sunstone Guardians, grew weaker, their light fading with the crystals.

Sylvie was always with Ethan, a dark shadow at his side. Her echo-symbiosis, now amplified by his Storm-Core, seemed to crave the light of my people.

"That one, Ethan," I heard her say one day, pointing to an elderly Guardian whose aura was particularly bright, "her Sun-crystal light would make a beautiful amulet. So protective."

Ethan, eager to please her, unleashed a focused torrent of icy wind at the elder' s crystal. It shattered, and the Guardian collapsed, her light extinguished.

The cruelty was unbearable. My people were suffering, dying, because of a love he claimed was pure.

I confronted him at the edge of the ravaged valley. "Stop this, Ethan! These are innocent people!"

He stood there, arrogant, his power thrumming around him. "I am merely asserting authority over my new domain, Aurora. As your husband, by ancient law, this land is now under my protection. Or rather, my control."

The words were a deliberate twist of the knife. We were still technically bound, even if he had repudiated me.

"You are weakened," he taunted. "The Solar Renewal approaches. You are no match for me now."

"Centuries of Sunstone support," I said, my voice shaking with rage, "generations of care for you, and this is how you repay it? With cruelty and destruction?"

Our powers clashed. His reckless storm energy lashed out, striking me. It wasn't a physical blow, but something tore. I felt a fragment of my Solar Aura, the ethereal, feather-like wisps of light that surrounded me, rip away.

It drifted in the air for a moment, a shining, wounded thing, before dissipating.

Sylvie watched from behind Ethan, her eyes wide, fixed on where my aura had been torn. Her expression was one of intense, greedy covetousness. She wanted my light, all of it.