Chapter 64
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
LEINA
Inside the Veil, the world is nothing but cool, beautiful darkness.
Blood—too much blood—pours down my arm. Too much blood. I adjust my grip on my scythe, but it’s getting slippery, heavy. I holster it and pull my daggers free.
Vaeloria surges upward, her wings slicing higher and higher, muscles bunching and stretching, building speed in a rising spiral.
“Higher ,” she whispers across my mind, but the thought is so fierce and determined, I can’t tell if she's speaking to me or to herself. The Veil hums around us, a living current of memory and purpose.
“Hold tight, Strider.”
I grip her with my knees, lowering myself against her neck. “There!” I tell her, seeing that wrongness of the Kher’zenn in the Veil.
At the apex of our climb, Vaeloria tucks her wings tight against her body, and we fall.
We plummet through the Veil as if it grabbed us and hurled us out.
The pressure slams into me, pinning me against Vaeloria.
It crushes my ribs into my chainmail, my bones into her back.
The wind shrieks past us in a high, thin keen that drills into my ears, and my vision narrows, going black at the edges.
At the last possible moment, Vaeloria snaps her wings wide—those curved, honed blades masquerading as feathers.
She became a weapon. Though we’d been falling vertically in the Veil, we emerge flying horizontally, slicing straight through the Kher’zenn’s rearguard like a blade through silk. They never see us coming.
She slices through eight draegoths—through hide and muscle and bone—with horrifying ease. I throw my daggers in swift, practiced motions and flick them out and back one by one—slicing a throat, splitting a back, lodging in a forehead.
“Veilstrider!” A Kher’zenn howls, as Vaeloria’s momentum starts to dip, the deadly edge of her wings losing speed.
I let my eyes find our front line. It’s holding, barely. Ryot is holding, barely. The Elder smiles when he sees me, as if this is all some grand game, even as he swings his staff into the chest of an oncoming Kher’zenn. He gestures sharply, a clear command. Come to me .
Dozens of Kher’zenn turn to us, forming an organized unit for a counterattack. I swing open the Veil, and we sail back through, Vaeloria surging us into the darkness between worlds.
There’s a deep cut down Vaeloria’s snout, and another jagged gash on her right wing, but she’s not slowed.
“We need to reach the Elder,” I tell her.
“Yes . ” She banks hard to the right, and there’s a flash of lighting, even here. This time, we burst into the gap between Ryot and the Elder. The Elder looks unsurprised to see us—maybe even pleased, the corner of his mouth twitching upward, as if he’s proud.
In all these months of training this winter, I never managed anything like this.
But Ryot … he is absolutely livid.