The Unmaking

It didn't start with a sound. It started with a color.

Green.

Violent, neon, impossible green.

It exploded from the point where their lips touched. A shockwave of pure vernal energy.

The snow didn't melt; it vaporized. The Winter Knights didn't die; they burst into flocks of white moths and scattered.

The Winter King roared, shielding his face, as the blizzard was replaced instantly by a humid, tropical storm.

Arthur felt his body dissolving.

It wasn't painful. It felt like waking up from a long nap. He felt his skin stretching, his bones lengthening. He felt the dust in his lungs replaced by pollen and stardust.

The ground beneath them shuddered.

Number 44 exploded—not into rubble, but into a massive, ancient oak tree that shot hundreds of feet into the air in seconds.

Number 42—Arthur’s safe, gray house—groaned as vines thicker than cars crushed it, pulling it down into the earth to become fertilizer.

The asphalt of Blackwood Lane split open. A river of crystal blue water rushed through the neighborhood.

The sky cracked. The grey clouds of the Pacific Northwest tore apart, revealing a sky that was purple, with two suns and a ring of diamond dust.

Arthur broke the kiss, gasping.

He looked at his hands. They were translucent, shimmering like opal. He could see the veins, but they didn't carry blood anymore. They carried light.

He looked at Elara.

She wasn't just a girl in a sundress. She was a queen. Her skin was bark and gold. Her hair was a canopy of autumn leaves. She was ten feet tall and terrible and beautiful.

The Winter King was gone. Stasis was broken.