Chapter 35
Everly
Athousand questions ran through my mind, melding with those I could hear from Draven’s thoughts.
Was Vaerin successful in rallying the clans?
Had they learned anything from their experiments?
Was he planning to launch an assault, or was it only theoretical?
A scream rent the air in two, and for a ridiculous moment, I thought it was only in my head, a visceral reaction to the idea of the war I had wanted so badly to avoid.
But this one echoed through the pass, guttural and terrified, and young.
Too young.
My heart lurched into my throat, too many questions crashing through my mind all at once.
Kaelen blanched, horror carving his features open.
“Keira,” he breathed, and then he shot upward, his wings snapping out with a loud crack of wind.
I barely had time to suck in a breath before Draven’s hand closed around my waist and the world folded into ice and motion.
We reappeared at the crumbling edge of what looked, at first, like a sinkhole. But the longer I examined it, the more the truth snapped into focus. The snow was heaped too neatly over loosely packed soil and broken branches, the pit below too perfectly shaped—too intentional.
And at the bottom, half-buried beneath cascading snow, lay a young Skaldwing.
She wasn’t much older than a child, thirteen at most. Her dark, membranous wings thrashed wildly, sending glittering arcs of snow into the air as she fought to lift herself free.
But every frantic beat dragged her deeper into the nearly invisible strands stretched across the trench.
Threads so fine the light barely caught them unless she struggled.
Webbing.
Korythid webbing.
My stomach twisted. We’d been searching for signs of the frostbeast, and this young Skaldwing had just stumbled head-first into one of its traps.
“Stop moving!” I called down to her. “You’re making it worse. Just stay still, please!”
She froze, her chest heaving. A thin, choked sound escaped her before she bit it back hard, pressing her lips together until they whitened. Her hands curled into the snow web, knuckles sharp against the ice and fallen debris.
She forced the trembling in her wings to still, though they twitched in uneven spasms. Her chin lifted a fraction, as if bracing for whatever would come next.
“Draven—” I gestured carefully to the delicate strands.
“I see them,” he said, a muscle tightening in his jaw.
“Are you injured?” I asked, my mind already racing through ways we could free her before the monster came back.
The female swallowed, her jaw tightening as if trying to decide how much she should reveal. Then her lip quivered once.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “My leg might be broken…”
I glanced from the fine lines of her face down to where her left leg was twisted deepest in the webbing, a branch protruding from her calf.
Shards-blasted hells.
“Where is my brother?” she asked, her voice hardening with all the false bravado of a young, would-be warrior. One that refused to show another sign of weakness when she was already trapped.
Kaelen dropped beside me before I could answer, hitting the snow hard enough that it scattered in a halo around him. His wings swept outward instinctively, silver marbling catching the light as he leaned over the edge.
His expression sharpened into something both furious and scared all at once, and he shot us a look that said he somehow blamed us for the trap.
“I told you not to follow me,” he snapped down at her, wings already spreading, posture shifting to launch himself into the pit.
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm to stop him from diving. “We have to do this carefully.”
Carefully… because one wrong move meant both of them would end up tangled in the web, or worse, that they’d summon the Korythid from wherever it was lurking.
Kaelen’s gaze flicked between Draven and me. Slowly, his frustration melted into fear.
Before I could explain, or we could form a semblance of a plan, another Skaldwing warrior flew overhead. His gray eyes darted between the three of us, down to the trapped female.
“Darik, wait—!” Kaelen shouted, but it was too late.
The soldier landed in the webbing feet-first. He bounced once before sinking several inches into the invisible lattice. He let out a slew of vicious curses as he kneeled beside the female and began hacking at the web with his dagger.
Kaelen didn’t follow him. Not yet, at least.
His wings folded tight against his back as he turned toward Draven. “What am I missing?”
The rest of Kaelen’s soldiers arrived in a flurry of wings. They looked ready to dive in after their kin until their Thane snapped a sharp command that held them back.
I barely registered their replies, or Draven’s low explanation about the frostbeast. Instead, my attention was fixed on the figures below us. The soldier continued to hack at the shimmering threads, swearing between frantic promises to free the female.
“We need to move quickly,” Draven continued over my shoulder. “And without getting ourselves caught in that web—”
I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence beneath the frantic shuffling of Batty’s wings. She let out several small, angry sounds that I might have mistaken for growls if she were any other creature.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my blood ran colder than Draven’s ice.
Something shifted in the air, making it heavier, thicker, until I felt like I was drowning in the depths of the Siren Sea. Like my chest might cave in under all the pressure.
I forced a gasping breath just as a faint tremor rolled beneath my boots. It was so subtle. Delicate almost. A quiver of the earth rather than a quake. But then it just kept going. Growing. Tapping in a very deliberate rhythm.
It wasn’t like the distant roll of thunder or the shifting groan of ice or howl of the wind. It was something else… something alive.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The sound crawled up my spine like half-frozen claws hooking beneath my skin.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Batty pressed herself tight against my neck, her claws trembling as she burrowed against my throat. I swallowed and edged toward the rim of the pit, cognizant of Draven’s steady presence behind me.
The webbing shuddered once.
Click. Click.
Then twice more.
Click.
Both Skaldwings below us froze mid-motion, heads snapping toward the far wall of the trench.
A faint crimson ember flickered in the darkness.
Then another. And another.
One by one, eight ember-bright orbs blinked open beneath them, illuminating jagged stone in a sickly red glow.
Eyes. Eight of them, all staring straight up at us.
And in the span of one heartbeat, I saw the moment it decided to act.
The tension in the webbing. The way the frostbeast’s crimson eyes narrowed. The faint coil of its monstrous body drawing back—
Everything happened at once.
The Korythid surged upward, the earth shuddering as the monster’s massive limbs scraped against the frozen ground. Draven reacted instantly. Frost exploded from his hands in violent waves, slamming downward. Mana stretched outward, freezing the upper layers of webbing into solid ice.
But the Korythid didn’t hesitate.
With a single, precise movement, it extended one long, razor-thin leg and slashed cleanly through the frozen strands anchoring the web to the walls in a clean, deliberate cut.
The entire lattice shuddered, and then it collapsed.
Time slowed to an agonizing crawl as the soldier dropped first. There was no scrambling, no last-minute catch. The ice-stiffened strands snapped beneath him, and he fell straight through, like a stone through fractured glass, vanishing into the pit before I could breathe.
Keira fell right after him.
Her wing snagged on a breaking filament, spinning her sideways as snow and shattered ice drifted around her in a glittering veil. She reached upward. Blindly. Desperately. As if she could claw her way back up through empty air.
Kaelen was already diving after her.
He didn’t hesitate or even look at the monster waiting below. He folded his wings tight to his body, cutting through the shower of falling debris with a single, lethal line of motion. His expression was a mask of frozen terror.
Below them, the Korythid stirred.
Its eyes flared open, too bright, too aware, filled with the unmistakable glint of hunger.
A crown of frost-sheathed sensory spines trembled atop its head—thin, quivering filaments arranged in a jagged ring just behind its cluster of crimson eyes, each one vibrating as it tasted the air for movement.
A cold certainty settled in my gut.
I’d dreaded this moment… fearing we’d have to face a much larger Korythid. And here she was. Massive and terrifying, even from deep below the surface of the ground.
It happened in an instant.
Her mandibles spread wide, the plated joints along its jaw clicking apart like the opening of a nightmare. Venom drizzled from the stinger arched over its back, hissing where it struck the frost-laced stones.
Keira’s scream finally tore free, and Kaelen pushed harder, wings snapping open just enough to slow his descent. Frost glinted along their edges as he stretched himself toward her, his fingers trembling, his chest heaving…
And then, he caught her.
His arm locked around her shoulders in a grip so tight it shook them both. Her wings folded in on themselves, trembling as she buried her face against him.
But the Korythid was already lunging.
It surged upward with horrifying speed, the force of it blasting snow from the pit in a white burst. Its mandibles snapped shut around the falling soldier in a single, brutal crunch.
Kaelen didn’t look back.
He wrenched himself upward, his wings beating so hard the air itself seemed to crack. The young female clung to him, quietly sobbing into his shoulder as they rose—too slowly, far too slowly—
Below them, the Korythid pushed off from the trench wall.