“I am ready.”

Boreas grinned, a fierce glint of stormlight flashing in his eyes. “Good,” he rumbled, his massive form shifting as he crouched, muscles coiling like a predator about to pounce. “Then your final trial… is to face me—Aeon of the North Wind!”

With a roar that shook the very earth, Boreas lunged forward, a maelstrom of frost and lightning surging through the cavern with his awakening. The battle to forge Star’s destiny had begun.

The North Wind rose.

Boreas grinned, and the stormlight gleaming in his eyes sealed the promise of battle. His voice rumbled like distant thunder:

“Good. Then face me—your final trial. I am Boreas, the Aeon of the North Wind.”

The air thickened. Frost gathered like breath held in fear. As he rose, the earth beneath him groaned; his towering form was draped in glacial armor that shimmered with an ancient, unearthly sheen. Wings of translucent ice unfurled from his back, vast and terrible, casting a wintry shadow over the battlefield.

“Prove yourselves,” he declared, “and show me you are worthy to bear Atlantia’s Light.”

Then came the wind.

Not mere air, but a howling force, laden with shards of ancient cold and the scream of forgotten winters. It struck like judgment.

Boreas moved—a blur of claw and snow and fury. His first blow cracked the earth and sent the warriors flying like leaves in a tempest.

Siegfried raised his shield into the storm, bracing his stance. “Klara—we need a plan!” he cried, his voice nearly lost in the gale.

Klara’s catalyst flared, her eyes blazing. “His wings!” she shouted through the storm. “If we ground him, we have a chance!”

Friedrich did not hesitate. With a roar, he hurled himself forward, his greatsword a blazing comet of Incidis flame. He leapt high, aiming for the right wing—

—but Boreas, swift as the avalanche, knocked him from the sky. Friedrich fell hard, the impact splintering the ice beneath him. Steam hissed where his fire met frost.

“Is that all you are?” Boreas sneered, frost wreathing his breath. “Do you believe you can wound an Aeon with such paltry sparks?”

Star’s breath fogged around her as she rose, fury and light gathering in her blade. “We won’t run from you,” she said.

She dashed forward, a streak of radiance in the storm, her sword cutting toward his leg. A distraction, a strike to slow him.

But Boreas anticipated. He danced with unnatural grace, countering with a sweep of his claws. Star twisted, narrowly avoiding the strike as the frozen ground shattered behind her.

Siegfried pulled Friedrich to his feet. “We must move as one,” he said. “Together.”

Friedrich’s voice was pained, but fierce. “I’ll keep his eyes on me. The rest is yours.”

Above, Klara summoned the storm. Her magic answered her call, swirling in defiance of the North Wind. Lightning crackled in the snow, and the battlefield became a vortex of war between wind and ice.

Boreas stumbled, the storm biting at his balance.

“Now!” Klara cried.

With that opening, Star and Siegfried surged forward—two threads of fate drawn toward a singular strike. Star’s sword glowed with purest Light, Siegfried’s blade rippled with the element of Dew. Together, they struck Boreas’s wing. The explosion of light and frost was blinding.

A scream—not of pain alone, but of pride wounded—tore from the Aeon’s throat. One wing crumpled, falling like a dying star.

“You… surprise me,” he said, voice deep as the glacier. “But this is not the end.”

With his remaining wing, Boreas summoned a blizzard vast enough to swallow the sky. The world vanished beneath the snow.

“Stay together!” Star called out, but her voice was stolen by the wind.

Then the ice itself glowed. Boreas emerged, wreathed in a sacred frost, his body healed by the North’s breath.

“Let me show you,” he intoned, “what power truly is.”

He drove his claws into the earth, and the battlefield rose to meet him—vast spears of ice erupted from below, towering like the spires of a dead god’s cathedral.

One of them struck Star, flinging her backward—

Her body crashed against the cavern wall. Silence.

“Star!” Klara screamed, running through the snowdrift toward her.

Siegfried and Friedrich shielded her as she knelt beside Star’s fallen form. “No—stay with me,” Klara whispered, her hands trembling with Light.

But Star was gone.

The world fell to silence.

No wind. No voice. No light.

Only the cold, and the place where she once stood.