Chapter 35 #2
It launched with a terrifying force, its entire body coiling and springing upward like a living weapon. Stone shattered beneath its legs. Snow blasted outward in a violent halo.
Frost slammed down from Draven’s palms in a barrage of jagged spears, layering the pit’s walls in thick sheets of ice. The cold hit the Korythid mid-leap, slowing its ascent just enough to throw off its trajectory.
Around us, the Unseelie moved as one.
Spears whistled through the air, their wicked, serrated blades glinting as they struck the creature’s armored plates. Warriors shouted orders in sharp bursts—Skaldwing commands I didn’t understand but felt in my bones.
Shadows surged at my feet.
Not Draven’s.
Mine.
They crawled up my legs and coiled around my ribs, responding to the rising panic I couldn’t contain. The ground shuddered beneath us, and a burst of ice exploded toward the source—my ice, uncontrolled and jagged, bursting upward in panicked defense.
The world blurred.
Flashes of mana tore through the air. Draven’s frost, Unseelie steel, my own shadows rippling in painful waves. My skull throbbed. My teeth hurt. Every bone felt too small for the magic clawing its way out of me.
Somewhere through the chaos, I saw Kaelen, his body contorting and twisting with effort as he hauled Keira into the sky. They broke free of the pit just as the monster’s stinger sliced through the air beneath them.
Then lightning ripped through me.
Not real lightning—but Batty.
A hard jolt struck the center of my chest, exploding outward in a brilliant, searing pulse. My mana seized, bucked, then snapped back into place like a whip curling into itself.
I gasped.
My knees buckled. Batty screeched into my hair, her wings wrapping around my neck like a desperate anchor.
Draven’s arms closed around me an instant later.
The world fractured into ice and wind as he icewalked us away from the pit’s lethal reach.
Beyond the snapping mandibles and the whip of the Korythid’s barbed and venomous tail.
We reappeared beside Kaelen and Keira taking shelter beneath one of the frozen Lupine corpses left over from the Frostgrave Battle.
“Everly, look at me.” Draven’s hands framed my face, his voice a low, controlled growl.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I managed. My breath came shallow, each inhale scraping like broken glass. “Batty helped… Just… just need a moment.”
My ribs ached. Every muscle trembled from the backlash. But I was still standing.
And Batty hissed triumphantly, as if she took personal credit for the fact.
Draven’s eyes flashed, frost gathering along his shoulders. “Stay with her,” he said, nodding to Keira. “Do not move from this spot.”
“I know,” I whispered. “Go.”
His jaw clenched tight while I watched an internal war raging between his instinct and his duty. But this was why we’d come, to find the monster and take back its venom for Nevara. Without it, without her…
Draven nodded, having heard every unspoken thought through our bond. He turned and launched himself back into the fray, frost exploding beneath his feet as he tore across the clearing.
I stumbled toward the young fae that Kaelen was having a much harder time leaving behind.
He swallowed, glancing up from her small form to meet my eyes.
“My sister,” he said.
Of course she was. Now that we were closer, I could see it. The same warmth in their golden eyes, the same deep gray shade to their wings with flecks of silver in them.
I nodded, kneeling down to wrap my arms around her.
“I’ll take care of her,” I promised. “Help them.”
Kaelen’s jaw tightened, the smallest tremor betraying how badly he didn’t want to leave her. He bent and murmured something against his sister’s hair—too soft for me to hear—before gently prying her fingers from his forearm.
Keira didn’t cry. She didn’t reach for him again. She only straightened her spine and gave one sharp nod, the kind she must have seen the older warriors give before battle. Her wings twitched once, betraying pain she refused to voice.
But when Kaelen launched into the sky, she swayed against me—not collapsing, but bracing, teeth clenched as she forced herself to stay upright.
Dark blood seeped through the torn fabric at her thigh where the broken branch had pierced deep. The sight made her jaw lock even harder, her breath uneven but held tight between her teeth.
I knelt beside her, using my dagger to cut a strip from my cloak before pressing it firmly over the wound. She hissed through her teeth but didn’t pull away, her fingers digging into the snow to keep from trembling.
“It’s fine,” she said through a stiff breath, though she winced. “I can fight if I have to.”
The lie was obvious.
The determination was real.
I tightened the fabric around her leg. “Maybe you can,” I said softly, meeting her eyes. “But knowing when you shouldn’t fight is part of being a warrior too.”
She stared at me, unblinking.
“Someone wise once told me that there is bravery, and there is common sense,” I said pointedly, recalling my sister’s words.
“Bravery isn’t always about charging headfirst into a battle you can’t win. Not every battle is meant for us,” I said, acutely aware of how hypocritical I sounded. “Not every fire needs us to walk through it. Sometimes the real strength lies in choosing not to burn.”
Keira swallowed once, then gave a shallow, resolute dip of her chin. It wasn’t surrender. It was acceptance—the kind that cost her more than she’d ever admit.
Before I could say anything else, the sound of the fight crashed back over us in a brutal wave.
Screams. Shattering ice. The snap and crack of mana rupturing the air. Unseelie steel scraping against chitinous armor. And above it all, the Korythid’s keening hiss as it lunged at the warriors trying to pin it down from the sky.
The chaos was everywhere. Wild and overwhelming.
And then, slowly… painfully… it began to take shape.
Not calm, not control, but something like strategy forming in the storm. Draven’s voice cut through the storm as he shouted orders on where and how to strike best.
They moved like a single organism—wings snapping open as they dodged, twisting midair with impossible agility, their serrated blades slipping into the narrow gaps between the Korythid’s armored plates with terrifying precision.
Every strike was deliberate. Every impact purposeful until black, inky blood arced through the air, spattering over snow and skin alike, hissing wherever it landed.
But the Korythid refused to slow down.
It fought harder.
Faster.
Smarter.
Its tail lashed out like a whip, the stinger impaling one of Kaelen’s warriors through her wing. The female gasped. A choked, broken sound that curdled my blood. By the time another warrior tried to drag her away, her wings had already begun to dissolve under the venom.
Keira sobbed harder, wings curling inward as she wailed.
“Don’t look,” I whispered, my voice raw as I covered her face.
My stomach lurched as I watched the female writhe in agony until she stopped moving altogether. Bile coated my tongue, but I swallowed it down for Keira’s sake.
“It’s almost over,” I told her. “You’re safe.”
The lie scraped my throat on the way out.
Because no one here was safe, not while that thing still breathed. While any of them still breathed…
The dread I’d been putting off for hours came crashing over me in a wave now. Surely Draven had to know, had to see that the monster we were tracking before was not this one.
No beast this size could effectively crawl along the treetops without toppling the forest completely. Maybe it should have been a comfort to know that the other one was smaller… That it might be weaker, put up less of a fight…
My mind flashed back to the aged pages of the compendium. Back to the notes in the margins, and the details I’d been insistent on writing down. Ones that the books my library had given me only corroborated.
Korythids laid eggs. Not just a few at a time. But hundreds all at once…
I took a deep, shaking breath in, trying to stave off the panic threatening to claw its way out of me.
The Korythid screeched again, and I pressed my hands over Keira’s ears to help block the sound. The monster staggered backward under the combined assault of Draven’s ice locking its mandibles shut, and Kaelen’s blade driving deep into the plates near its head—
My breath caught in my throat. The smallest ember of hope flared to life as the Korythid stumbled. It slipped, its massive body crashing to the ground before dragging itself back up.
Draven used his mana like icy manacles, freezing each of the Korythid’s legs in place, and refusing to let it get away.
A warrior with bright pink braids and a matching spear darted low, driving it deep into the exposed joint of a back leg.
Another plunged down from above, his blade striking the vulnerable curve of the monster’s neck.
Then there was Kaelen, bloody, relentless, and furious. He twisted through the air and thrust his blade into the seam near the frostbeast’s head. A loud, ear-splitting crack rent the air.
The Korythid convulsed violently.
Its roar shook snow from the trees in the distance, sending a silver-white avalanche of ice and snow crashing down from the mountain peaks.
Then finally, the monster’s legs buckled as Draven released the hold on his mana.
It collapsed with a ground-shaking thud, its legs curling inward like burning parchment, its tail giving one last spasm before falling still.
Steam hissed from its wounds. Black venom seeped from its tail onto the ice. Snow drifted down in soft flakes as if trying to cover the horror we’d just survived.
Keira’s breath hitched against me, her sob muffled in the wool of my cloak. I got to my feet, smoothing a trembling hand down her back, more for my own steadiness than hers. The air still crackled with the remnants of battle, mana, scorched ice, the metallic reek of frostbeast blood.
My pulse beat a frantic rhythm that refused to slow.
“You’re alright now,” I whispered, even though the words felt like a lie, too thin in the mountain air. “You’re safe.”
Batty shifted beneath my cloak. Her tiny claws dug suddenly, urgently, into my shoulder. A warning tremor buzzed through her body, high-pitched and frantic.
“What is it—” I began as my skathryn flapped her wings furiously, her gaze fixed on the Korythid’s unmoving form.
My blood went cold. And something deep inside of me already knew the answer. She wasn’t looking at the corpse of the monster, but rather just beyond it.
Far too slowly, I lifted my head, my gut already churning with dread.
Draven stood facing me, his head cocked like he could sense the fear flooding through our bond. And still, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t form the words, couldn’t figure out how to shape them to warn him.
Behind him, rising from a fissure in the ice like some fresh, new, hellish nightmare dredged from the deep, a second Korythid silently unfolded its massive limbs. Its cluster of crimson eyes locked onto Draven with predatory precision.
Its tail was already arched high, poised to strike, the deadly black venom already dripping from the tip of its stinger.
Batty shrieked again, her wings flaring against my collarbone.
No.
No, no, no.
“Draven—”
But there was no time. The creature was already moving… and something inside of me broke loose.
Shadows surged outward in an instinctive and violent rush.
Ice flashed like lightning beneath my skin.
The two collided in my chest and roared through my veins.
I felt my mana tear free of me, wild and desperate as it raced toward my husband right before the world went quiet, and much, much too dark.