Chapter 31 Ignite
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My drakes and I shift down, spent after battling Hedda’s wights, but victorious. Even though we didn’t get Hedda’s soul trapped inside Baldur’s Soulstone, I feel the elation that heaves through us all now as we laugh in a naked, injured tumble on the bed.
Because we fucked some shit up today, raising some impossibly high-level magic to do it. Even if Hedda has some overarching, diabolical plan for my life, I know I won’t give in to it now.
I’m going to give my all to fuck it up.
Or die trying.
“Jesus, what a rush!” Mikkel coughs now, even as he laughs. He cradles three injured ribs as he does some healing magic on them, though his black eyes spark a vivid copper, ferocious and elated.
“You would do something like that every day just to get a high, wouldn’t you?” Baldur chuckles at him, as he does a similar healing on a ripped-up leg, though everything imperative is hale. As Mikkel finishes healing himself, he moves over to Baldur, helping.
“Not every day.” Mikkel chuckles as he helps Baldur heal, though I’m not entirely sure the black drake inside him wouldn’t.
As Laerke rushes to the bed now, helping heal Strom, who has a deep gash lancing through his shoulder, it’s only then that I notice the black ooze from the rift in the floor is gone.
Somehow, we banished it, along with Hedda’s evil soul. I also notice the cavern seems to sparkle now beneath the high midnight stars, as if we cleared out the shimmering black taint that had been here for ages, though the crack in the floor is not gone.
The glowing sigils fade from the walls now, however, as our auric fire blisters out, spent. The protector dragons are no more either, as we watch a sigil deep inside them suddenly combust, lighting them up.
Then burning them to ashes from the inside out.
“Well, I guess their help was a onetime deal.” Bjorn snorts as he helps me heal a deep bite-wound on my thigh from one wight.
“Couldn’t have picked a better time to aid us, though.” Strom grins as he helps heal a bite on Bjorn’s foot, which Bjorn is ignoring to heal me.
As we all come back into fighting shape, despite the crazy battle we had just now, I feel how our celebration elevates us. Because we fucked some shit up, and we mostly got what we came for, capturing the four wights’ souls inside Baldur’s stone.
And we’ve never been in a better position to best the Black Dragon, whenever we face it next.
As I feel the Black Dragon roar through my mind again, however, I sober, understanding that time may come far sooner than we know.
But it’s not here now; even though the Dragon of All Souls has rediscovered its birthplace, Aesa’s protection around the city gone, I feel how the Usurper is still far down upon Sweden’s southern coast.
It will not accost us right now; I know it will soon, though, incensed as Hedda is over the loss of her drakes. I push back a sudden fear that this is exactly what she wants, somehow; then refocus on our agenda, because I can only take this all step by step as I spit in the face of fate.
Even as we celebrate, however, elated with our victory, something other than the Black Dragon suddenly rushes in from the skies. A drakaina, she crash-lands upon the cavern’s floor beside the bed, as she shudders, spent from a fast, long flight.
As that drakaina shifts down into a tall woman with long russet hair, I’m amazed to see Mikka Halsbrand, Head Watcher of the False Black Dragon Knights, before us. As she pants hard, Mikka strides right to me.
Clamping a hand on my arm and penetrating me with her sober violet eyes.
“Rikyava! They’re coming!” She heaves now as she grips me. “The Knights’ Council! They’ve found your whereabouts. They know you’re here. They—”
But before she can even finish speaking, the night sky above us suddenly fills with dragons. They blaze in through a portal, and are all-at-once dominating the skies.
There are hundreds of them—as the False Knights suddenly come to trap us in force. It’s then that I know Hedda’s deceived us. For it was her black, eternal energy that called the False Knights right to us—through her mortal instrument, Litha, who has been masquerading as Ruta this entire time.
Now, the False Knights have caught us, cordoning off the skies above our cavern with massive swathes of multi-colored Bloodwinds, making a towering Bloodnet above and all around us, so we cannot escape.
As they do, a group of four wings down, alighting upon the darkened runes of the cavern floor before us.
The last remaining members of the High Council of the Black Dragon Knights.
Including Ruta—Litha herself.
As all those mighty dragons shift down now into their human forms, I see Lars, Arvid, and Anya standing with Ruta.
A terrible pronouncement is in their eyes as they pin their fury upon me.
I push up off the ruined bed with my drakes, however, to stand in their presence rather than sit on my naked ass.
It’s then that I see how only Ruta, Lars, and Arvid seem to be in their right minds, however. Though she’s sober, Anya looks confused, as if she’s not entirely certain why she’s here.
Mikka gives a terrible growl beside me.
“Beware, Rikyava!” Mikka says before the Council can speak. “They’re all bewitched. Ruta’s done something to them—”
“Silence, traitor. We will deal with you and your insubordination against this Council presently.” Ruta’s gravelly old voice blisters through the cavern like a whip, as her rheumy, all-blind eyes shift from Mikka to me.
“Rikyava Andersen and your renegade Bloodmates. You have defied an Excommunication by the High Council of the Black Dragon Knights; the punishment for this most heinous crime is death, by the Council’s ancient laws.
We are here to carry out this sentencing, posthaste. Resist and we will—”
“Cut the shit,” I interrupt then, as I stare Ruta’s blind, old wizened form down.
Because I know it’s a sham—all of it.
“We all know who you are.” I am vicious now as I stare at her, stone-cold and blistering throughout my entire Bloodwalker power. I’m backed up by my drakes tightening in a protective, snarling knot all around me now. “Reveal yourself. Show us your true face… Litha.”
But something strange moves through Ruta’s lined visage now as she cocks her head, searching me with her blind white eyes. “After all your sleuthing, all your searching… do you really not know who I truly am? Little sister.”
“Little… what?”
Before I can say anything more in my befuddlement at Ruta’s response, her visage shifts. Suddenly, the wizened old Matriarch no longer stands before me, nor some other drakaina I was sure would be a tall, fierce battle-maiden of the ages, as Litha.
But my very own older sister—Lithava Andersen.
Fallen at the battle for the Grand Palace during her coup, Lithava has been dead these past twenty years, thanks to me and Bjorn. But she’s not dead, somehow, as my sister stands before me now, just as she ever was.
With bright blond hair almost Bjorn’s golden color, plus truly vivid lavender eyes that shine even more vibrantly than mine, Lithava is my similar stature but far more slender.
With high cheeks and full red lips, my sister is almost more beautiful than a Blood Dragon has any right to be. I was always the little beast to her beauty; though we were both fighters growing up, I was the brawler, and she was the elegance.
Her vast inner hatred after our parent’s death at Riksfold made her intensely ugly, however. That ugliness consumes her as she stands before me now, statuesque in her nakedness, as shock that she’s even alive devours me.
Because I fought her to the death at the Grand Palace in Stockholm twenty years ago; though Bjorn finished the job, casting her down from the skies when I was mortally injured and could not, she was dead as dead when we had to leave her.
Her comrades in their revolt came for her body, scooping it up and attacking Bjorn and me, so we had to flee, injured as we were. But we checked her pulse as she lay bleeding out upon the ruined promenade, eviscerated from Bjorn’s and my battle with her.
Her heart had ceased to beat; her breath no longer gave life. I’m learning now that there’s death and then there’s death, however, as our magical revival of Baldur evinces.
As I glance to Lithava’s hand now, I see a black ring upon her finger—the same ring I recently remembered in my nightmares of our battle twenty years ago. That ring is a perfect match to mine, though all black, rather than silver.
A horrible, oilslick color that is darker than black, somehow—and eats all light.
A terrible feeling engulfs me as I suddenly understand my sister wears not just any black ring, but Hedda Anderlen’s black ring.
Arvid and Lars wear similar black rings as they stand beside her, the rings of Hedda’s drakes, though Anya does not.
It’s then I know that two of the High Council of the Black Dragon Knights are my sister’s mates.
Our enemy, my sister herself.
“You survived.” I rasp, as I stare my sister down across the gulf that separates us. “Twenty years ago, when Bjorn and I killed you… you survived. Because you wear the black ring of Hedda, don’t you?”
“The silver and black rings hold a resonance, Rikyava.” She holds hers up now, on her left ring finger, just like mine is.
“I didn’t understand it when I first found my ring.
But the Dreamspeaker had been coming to me for years, by then, whenever I secretly did a Bloodwalking to touch the Void, absent of Maryse’s training.
She told me I could survive my coup on King Huttr, if I wore her ring, thanks to the ring Maryse also wore.
So I did—and the Dreamspeaker was right. ”
As Lithava speaks, a gargantuan black energy suddenly comes seething down from the midnight skies. Hedda’s escaped black soul-energy, it makes a screaming sound that rips through my ears and those of my drakes, as it surrounds Lithava in a howling black tornado now.