Celeste's POV
The lightning vanishes the moment I crash into the ash.
The impact should kill me. I'm falling from a floating city thousands of feet in the sky. But the gray ash is so deep, so impossibly thick, that it swallows me like water—cushioning my fall while simultaneously trying to suffocate me.
I sink down, down, down into darkness.
My lungs scream for air. Ash fills my mouth, my nose, choking me. I claw upward frantically, but I can't tell which way is up. Everything is gray and suffocating and—
My hand breaks through the surface.
I drag myself out, gasping and coughing. Ash coats every inch of my skin, fills my hair, sticks to my blood-soaked dress. I collapse on the surface, vomiting ash and bile.
When I finally stop heaving, I look around.
The Cinderfalls stretches endlessly in every direction—a wasteland of deep gray ash and broken stone spires jutting up like bones. The sky above is dark and cloudy, blocking out the sun. Everything is gray. Dead. Lifeless.
This is where they throw away people they don't want anymore.
This is where I'll die.
Pain hits me all at once. My ribs are definitely broken—at least three of them. My left ankle is twisted wrong. Blood seeps from dozens of cuts where the binding runes were carved into my skin.
But the worst pain is the emptiness inside me.
My magic is gone. Really, truly gone.
I curl into a ball and start to cry. Not dignified tears, but ugly, choking sobs that tear from my throat. Everything I was is destroyed. My power, my family, my future—all of it ripped away in one night.
Maybe the ash will bury me. Maybe I'll just lie here until I disappear into the gray.
That would be easier than trying to survive.
I don't remember much of the next three days. Just gray ash. Gray sky. Gray hopelessness.
I find a broken wall that provides some shelter. I curl up behind it and wait to die. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I'm awake but wish I wasn't. The pain in my body is constant, but it's nothing compared to the phantom pain of my missing magic.
I can still feel where it should be. Like a missing limb that aches even though it's gone.
On the second day, it rains. The water is dirty and tastes like metal, but I drink it anyway. It keeps me alive when I don't want to be.
On the third day, I start seeing things that aren't there. Maris standing in the ash, crying and apologizing. Aldric laughing. My mother turning her back again and again and again.
The hallucinations are so real that I scream at them. Curse them. Beg them to leave me alone.
They never do.
On the fourth day, the ash storm comes.
I hear it before I see it—a roaring sound like a thousand voices screaming. Then the wind hits, whipping the ash into a blinding wall of gray. It tears at my skin, fills my lungs, buries everything in its path.
I'm too weak to move. Too broken to care.
Let it take me. Let it end this.
But then someone grabs my arm.
"Get up!" a man's voice shouts over the storm. "Move or die!"
I try to fight him off—I want to die—but he's too strong. He hauls me up and half-carries, half-drags me through the blinding ash storm. I can't see anything. Can't breathe. The world is just pain and gray and noise.
Finally, we duck into some kind of shelter. The roar of the storm becomes muffled. I collapse immediately, coughing up ash.
"Breathe slowly," the man orders. "Small breaths or you'll choke."
I force myself to obey. Gradually, my breathing steadies. My vision clears.
The man sitting across from me is probably in his thirties, with dark hair and a face covered in scars. His clothes are rough and patched together. But his eyes are sharp and intelligent.
"You're the disgraced Storm-Caller," he says. It's not a question.
I nod weakly.
"Impressive." He hands me a waterskin. "You lasted longer than most rich people. The nobles we get down here usually die within hours. Too soft. Too used to comfort."
"I wanted to die," I whisper hoarsely.
"Clearly. But you didn't." He studies me with those sharp eyes. "I'm Riven. Former Captain of the Royal Guard until I refused an order to murder a child. They stripped my rank and threw me down here five years ago."
Something stirs in my chest. Not hope—hope is dead. But maybe... curiosity. "You refused to kill a child?"
"Lightning-Blessed child," Riven clarifies. "Prince Aldric's orders. The kid was eight years old and could barely spark a light. But Aldric was hunting down every last Lightning-Blessed descendant he could find."
My blood runs cold. "He's still hunting them? After a thousand years?"
"The genocide never stopped," Riven says grimly. "It just got quieter. More careful. High Priestess Serath leads the hunts personally." He pauses. "I heard you tried to expose the truth. That's why they destroyed you."
"They destroyed me because I was naive enough to trust them." Bitterness fills my voice. "I thought Aldric would help me. I thought my sister loved me. I was wrong about everything."
"Welcome to the Cinderfalls." Riven stands and offers his hand. "Where everyone learns the hard way that the Radiant Court is built on lies and corpses."
I take his hand. He pulls me to my feet, steadying me when my broken ankle nearly gives out.
"Why did you save me?" I ask.
"Because down here, we take care of each other. The kingdom threw us away, but that doesn't mean we're worthless." He gestures toward the entrance of the shelter. "The storm's passing. Come on. There are people you should meet."
We emerge into the gray wasteland. The ash has settled, revealing a landscape of ruins and desperate survival. And in the distance, I see them—dozens of makeshift shelters clustered together. Smoke rising from small fires. People moving between the structures.
A camp. A community.
"They're all exiles," Riven explains as we walk. "Some were stripped of magic like you. Others just learned inconvenient truths. We've built something down here. Not much, but it's ours."
As we approach the camp, people stop to stare at me. A woman with burn scars covering half her face. A man missing his left arm. Children with hollow eyes who look like they've never smiled.
All of them thrown away by the kingdom above.
"That's her," someone whispers. "The Storm-Caller who spat in the prince's face."
The whispers spread through the camp. More people emerge from shelters to look at me.
"Is it true?" a young girl asks, stepping forward. She can't be more than twelve. "Did you really try to tell everyone about the Lightning-Blessed murders?"
"I tried," I say quietly. "But they silenced me before I could."
"The papers you found," an old man says urgently. "Do you remember what they said? Could you testify to it?"
"I remember every word," I tell him. "Every name. Every date. Every murder."
Something shifts in the crowd. Excitement. Anger. Hope—the dangerous kind that gets people killed.
Riven puts a warning hand on my shoulder. "Don't give them false hope, Storm-Caller. You're powerless now. What can you possibly do against the entire Radiant Court?"
He's right. I'm broken. Stripped. Worthless.
But then I remember the lightning that followed me down. The impossible lightning that shouldn't have recognized me at all.
I look past the camp, toward the distant horizon where the Cinderfalls ends. Beyond that is the Stormrift Deadlands—the forbidden wasteland where eternal lightning storms rage. The place where the worst storms were sealed away after the Lightning-Blessed genocide.
According to legend, something terrible sleeps in those storms. Something the Radiant Court feared so much they scorched the earth around it.
"What's out there?" I ask, pointing toward the Deadlands.
The entire camp goes silent. People exchange nervous glances.
"Death," Riven says flatly. "The Stormrift is where the old lightning storms were imprisoned. No one who enters comes back. The lightning there doesn't just kill you—it destroys your soul."
"But if the Lightning-Blessed power came from those storms," I say slowly, working through the logic, "then maybe something still exists there. Something the Radiant Court couldn't completely destroy."
"You're talking about walking into certain death," an old woman warns.
"I'm already dead." I meet Riven's eyes. "They took everything from me. My magic, my family, my name. I have nothing left to lose."
"You have your life," he argues.
"What life?" I laugh bitterly. "Hiding in ash? Waiting for the next storm to bury me? That's not living. That's just dying slowly."
The camp is completely silent now. Everyone watching me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.
"If I'm going to die anyway," I continue, my voice growing stronger, "I'd rather die trying to hurt them back. And if there's even a chance—even the smallest possibility—that something in those storms can help expose the truth..."
"Then you'll go into the Stormrift," Riven finishes. He's looking at me like I've lost my mind. "That's suicide."
"Good." I turn toward the distant storms, where lightning flashes on the horizon. "I've been dead since they threw me off that platform. I just haven't stopped moving yet."
As I stare at the deadly lightning storms in the distance, something impossible happens.
A single bolt of lightning strikes the ground between me and the Deadlands.
Then another.
And another.
Each one closer than the last.
Like something in those storms is responding to me.
Like something is calling me home.