41. Chapter Forty One #2
It hit the lower steps with a crack, stone shattering under its weight. The impact threw a ring of pressure up the stairwell that hit the three of us like a wall. I slammed both hands into the rail to stay upright as another section of the staircase collapsed into the pit.
“Okay,” Felix wheezed, eyes bright, mouth a thin line. “New plan. We don’t die here.”
“Work with what we have,” Fen said, which was as close as she got to a pep talk. She planted herself between me and the Warden, blades high, stance low. “Eva. Sight me.”
I reached. Drake had trained me for this.
The star-glow in me flared, a cool burn under my ribs and behind my eyes.
The world sharpened. The Warden’s movements slowed a hair, like the Rift itself wanted me to trace its path.
Lines lit up—faint trajectories in the air where claw would meet stone, where weight would shift, where an opening would bloom for the width of a breath.
“Left—low,” I said. “Joint after the third plate. There.”
Fen struck without hesitation. The blade hit home. Black ichor hissed; the Warden shrieked, shaking my teeth.
It retaliated with speed a creature that size shouldn’t have had. It whipped its stinger at its rear. Fen ducked; the barb buried in stone. The stair shattered under another slam.
The Warden reared back, lashing blindly, and slammed the stair with enough force to spider-crack the stone. We scattered up the steps. The beast hit again, shaking loose a trough of debris that slid toward us like a small gray landslide.
I was done running.
I stepped into the river of debris and met it with my palm.
Instinct took over. My star-glow pulsed.
The rolling stones instantly slowed—not stopped, but slowed—like the air had thickened around them.
Not just the stones. The Warden’s tail, too.
The hook claw that would have caught Fen’s hip. I didn’t know I could do that.
“Go,” I said through my teeth.
Fen eyes widened with surprise, but she went. She vaulted, drove her blades deeper, tearing the seam wider. The plates parted for a heartbeat—enough for me to see the knot clearly. Every line of glowing runes carved into the beasts shell fed toward that core. It’s power was centralized there.
“Fen! At its center!” I said. “There’s a core. Plate seam down the sternum, four hand-widths long.”
“Copy!” Fen said. She didn’t check if I was right. She believed me. The force of that trust hit my throat like heat.
The Warden came low, fast. Too fast. It slammed the flat of its skull into the steps below us and skated forward on a shatter of stone, raking hooks up at our legs.
I threw my hand down and prayed the beast would stop.
The Rift answered—not with fire, not with wind, not with anything I had a name for. Something like pressure and light; something like a net thrown, not outward, but… between. It webbed the space in front of us in a translucent lattice and the Warden was trapped in it. Hard.
The lattice flexed, popped at its edges—and held.
Not for long. Not enough to stop a mountain. But enough to slow one.
Felix slid in beside me, palms up, breath ragged. “That’s very interesting,” he said, fascinated. “Do me a favor and keep it up while I do something stupid.”
“Define ‘something stupid,’” I snapped, sweat burning my eyes.
He picked up a broken chunk of a step and traced a rune onto it with his thumb. He gingerly tossed it to its underside before it detonated.
“Something explosive,” he said, backing up in a hurry. “Down!”
We dropped as the runed chunk flared and detonated. The blast blew the stair under the Warden’s face into shrapnel and flipped its front half up, exposing the stripe of armor along its chest exactly where I needed. Nice one.
“Fen!” I shouted. “Now!”
She launched.
She wasn’t magic like me. She was momentum and blades honed into something lethal. She ran three steps up the wall, flipped onto the beast’s lifted chest, and drove both daggers into the chest plate protecting the knot with a scream. The plates parted. Under them, the knot pulsed.
The Warden went feral. It bucked and slammed its body into the stairwell wall so hard I tasted copper. Fen held; her foot slipped; she swore with devout sincerity; then the tail whipped around, aiming for her spine and I moved without thinking.
I didn’t throw power at the tail. I threw it through Fen.
The star-glow snagged on every edge of her—It braided through her every muscle.
It filled her lungs with air. It steadied her heartbeat and bolstered her resolve.
Her body obeyed like I’d asked, not commanded, and shifted her to the left.
The stinger missed its mark and drove into stone instead of her back, and a spray of rock dust erupted like applause.
Fen didn’t flinch at the magic in her bones. She welcomed it. She gritted her teeth, set her shoulders, and pulled her daggers outward.
The knot tore open.
The Warden screamed. Piercing. Like a thousand tortured Riftborn screams on the wind. The blast threw Fen off its chest. She curled, landed in a crouch two steps up with both blades still in her hands.
The Warden lay still for moments. We were frozen. It twitched. I looked closer into the knot where Fen had sunk her blades. It was trying to reweave the knot.
“Godsdamnit!” I cursed, the bond to Drake tugged hard enough to be pain. He was there. He was waiting. I was sick of delays.
Just then, all of the wounds we had created started to slowly close and patch, stitching themselves back together.
Fen snarled, teeth bared, as the force swept her. “It’s fucking healing itself!”
“Of course it is,” Felix said shakily. “It’s feeding on Rift. there!” He pointed at glowing lines in the wall.
“Do it,” I said. “We’ll keep it busy.”
“Love that for us,” Felix said, sprinting. “If you die, I will be so annoyed.”
Fen moved back in. I felt where she meant to go before she went there, my Star-Glow mapping her intent like constellations. We weren’t just fighting near each other anymore. We were fighting together—a braid of steel and sight.
“Left plate,” I said.
“On it,” she said, and her dagger bit.
“Mind the tail.” I reached, hooked the tail’s momentum with a hard yank of power, and pulled it wide. The sting chittered off the wall, skittered, and stuck. For a heartbeat, the Warden was pinned by its own barb.
“Nice,” Fen said. Her mouth was a slash. Her eyes were bright. “Don’t let go.”
I didn’t.
The Warden screamed frustration and answer.
The runes in its skull flared brighter, and three smaller Vyrmin—scaled-down copies of its skull-masked face on eel-thin bodies with too many legs—spilled out like knives from a sheath.
They hit the broken stairs and climbed the walls in a spider-dash, one for each of us.
“Absolutely fucking not,” Felix yelled, “Somebody kill my problems!”
I let one leap for me, at the last instant, I stepped sideways and reached into its mind.: stop hunting, fold. It collapsed into a quivering knot. Fen cut another mid-air.
The third skitterer lunged for Felix, but a silver thread tugged my hand and I flung it into the wall. He flashed me a breathless grin.
The big Warden’s tail ripped free. My net snapped. It swung for me—slow, inexorable.
Left, Drake’s voice surged through the bond, steady as a hand on my back. Now.
I moved. The tail tore the rail where I’d been. Splinters stung my cheek. Good, he whispered, pride and pain bound together.
“Two runes down!” Felix called. “Keep it busy!”
Then the freed Riftborn arrived.
A winged boy dove from above, dropping a firebomb onto the beast’s mask. A green-skinned woman lifted her arms; the Warden shrieked, runes in its skull burning as if blinded. An old man tossed flames across its chest.
The surge staggered it long enough for Felix to blow the last conduit. The knot flickered, starving.
“Hold it!” he shouted.
I wove another net, pinning claws and stinger. “Fen!”
She sprinted, blades flashing. The chest plates cracked open again.
“Now,” I whispered.
She crossed her knives through the knot.
It didn’t burst outward—it collapsed in on itself, imploding like a blister. The Warden sagged, skull-runes guttering. Claws twitched once. Then it fell into the crater, still.
Silence.
We stood panting on what was left of the stairwell, lit by the glow burning faint in our bones.
Felix leaned his head back, laughing breathless. “Updates: one, that was stressful. Two, teamwork is hot. Three, we just killed a house-sized bug.”
Fen knelt at the edge, eyes flicking up to mine. “You’ve got some new tricks,” she said, her eyebrows raised.
I huffed a laugh. The star-glow softened. The bond tugged urgent, not drowning. I’m so proud of you, Drake whispered.
“We move,” Fen said, pushing up. “Before something comes to see what screamed.”
“Small wrinkle,” Felix added, eyeing the wreckage. “Our staircase is now more metaphor than architecture.”
The collapse had peeled the wall, exposing narrow service ledges and swaying chains. I lifted a hand, weaving another net across the gaps. “This will work, hopefully.”
At the far landing, the tower still loomed above—a maze, but no longer a grave.
“I’ll follow the bond,” I said. “He’s close.”
End of the gallery, Drake murmured in my chest. Hurry.
I clenched my daggers. “I’m coming, my love.”