Chapter 41 Access Denied
Access Denied
Sascia immediately clutches Nugau’s waist, buries her face in the princess’s neck, and screams. Air whooshes past at a million miles per hour.
The flaps of the Darkwyvern’s wings are thunderous, vibrating through Sascia’s chest. Beneath her, its spine moves and shifts with every beat of its wings in powerful, teeth-trembling thrusts.
“Easy,” Nugau calls over the wind, patting Sascia’s death grip around her rib cage. “I’ve got you.”
Slowly and rather unwillingly, Sascia eases her grip.
The battlefield stretches beneath them. The billowing cloud of the aesin formation is staying close to the rippling surface, the riders protecting their comrades as they pour out of the Maw.
The human forces are lining the perimeter, blasting a steady stream of nova-light at the aesin.
Most blasts bounce off their onyx shields and armor, but the few that hit the aesin’s soft flesh or the Darkwyverns’ paper-thin wings leave ghastly burns behind.
On the parapets, soldiers are putting together machine guns, with bullets made of metal and gunpowder that will tear through porcelain flesh as though it is gossamer.
Tae’s nova-cannon is rotating on its axis, coming to life.
“Hold on,” Nugau warns over her shoulder.
The wind snaps at Sascia’s ears. The princess drives the Darkwyvern harder around the Maw, where it swoops low and caws the shrill call of its brethren.
In mere seconds, dozens of riders break formation to join Nugau: Orran and Thalla and others, too, hundreds of them. The princess is gathering her allies.
Nugau’s wyvern plunges into the fray, a vertical drop straight into the heart of the Maw.
A scream tears through Sascia’s mouth. A current of cold air whips at her face, her arms squeeze Nugau’s midriff, her legs clench around the poor creature’s back, then thankfully, blessedly, they pull up again, inches above the rippling black.
Nugau leans down and swoops a fistful of Dark from the surface of the Maw.
Knuckles wrapped with black, she crashes her hand against her breastplate.
Thump, thump, thump; the drum is a deep, resonant sound, a bell ringing right into the cavities of Sascia’s chest.
“Aesin!” Nugau calls.
Sascia can’t understand the rest of the princess’s speech, but the content is obvious: Nugau is finally making her Royal Claim.
The princess turns her wyvern in a circle, taking in every aesin warrior in the Maw.
Overhead, a CNN news helicopter hovers a few dozen feet away, the light and camera lens mounted on its tip focused on Nugau.
“Hold your fire!” Nugau shouts in English. “Lower your weapons! No more death!”
The drumming beat of the Thistha Ren is echoed through every part of the formation.
More and more riders are flying up to join Nugau’s allies and stand between the human soldiers and the Queen’s army.
The sound rises to a melodious cacophony—Thump!
Thump! Thump!—a trial of the heart in earnest, pumping through their veins.
In her spot at the front of the Jagged Blade, the Queen rises slowly on her wyvern.
She doesn’t scowl or glare, or even clench her jaw.
She only watches her daughter with eyes that shine a little too bright, too wide, too focused.
Shadows coil around her wrist, calling forth the immense power of her royal status.
Sascia has seen those shadows before. She knows what happens when they reach for Nugau: punishment and pain.
“Watch out!” Sascia warns.
But Nugau has already seen the blast of Dark headed their way. She steers her wyvern aside, barely avoiding the black beam that zaps past it. It lands on one of the skyscrapers surrounding the Maw, raining glass and debris down on the battlefield.
“Mother’s anger is showing.” Nugau says, quiet and calculating. “I think I can push it right into wrath.”
With a tap at the wyvern’s stirrups, they are flying again.
Nugau takes them on a wide arc around the Maw, keeping close to the concrete barrier.
Rivulets of Dark sprout from the princess’s fingers.
She whips them away and back again, like a cowboy on a rampage.
Objects come flying about in their wake, blades and long bows, quivers full of arrows and shields of onyx.
But the princess doesn’t stop there. She pushes the wyvern higher around the Maw and focuses on the human army next. Her black whips snatch guns and blasters straight from the soldiers’ hands and warp the barrels of mortars and machine guns.
She’s disarming them, Sascia realizes. She’s disarming all of them.
When met with a blade, with a blade you’ll meet—but what if there are no blades to speak of? What if the only thing you have left is your voice and your mind? A courage that sheds no blood, just as they promised each other.
“Sascia!” Nugau cries. “Duck!”
No explanation required; Sascia flattens herself against the wyvern’s back, right by the stirrups, as Nugau does the same on the opposite side. A blazing fireball of black flames whooshes past where they just were. The Queen is hot on their tail, swinging blast after blast at them.
“Ah, there it is,” the princess says. “Mother’s wrath.”
But she is far less composed than her voice pretends.
She keeps glancing behind them, at the onslaught of Darkblasts the Queen is hurling at them.
Around them, the battlefield has dissolved into panic: unarmed human soldiers hurry to rearm themselves; aesin dip their hands into the Dark to shape it into another blade.
The barrier around the Maw has become a patchwork of rubble and blast marks.
The sky explodes with white.
Beneath Sascia’s legs, the wyvern rears on its haunches and lets out an earsplitting shriek.
Thousands join it, the sound echoing from every direction.
White spots dance across Sascia’s vision—one of the other disoriented riders must fly into them, because suddenly they’re being thrown off-kilter, bumping into concrete.
Thanks to years of nova-light exposure, Sascia’s sight recovers first. The scene before her is horrific.
A scorch line has been razed into the barrier, a grotesque scar of absence in the tight lines of the Jagged Blade’s formation.
The gnarled remains of charred bodies lie in its wake, stark against the concrete, crimson feathers twirling in midair.
Both the Queen’s mount and Nugau’s have been tossed against the wall of the barrier.
Sascia’s eyes follow the course of the blast, coming to rest at the enormous barrel of the nova-cannon. Wisps of white steam from its mouth.
Holy hell. This thing, Tae’s design—it will obliterate everything.
“Nugau,” she says, shaking the princess. “We need to destroy it before it can reload.”
Trembling, the princess gives a nod. She coaxes the wyvern into the sky again.
With a few swipes of her hand, Nugau sends the human soldiers on the parapet back to the walls, trapping them there in nets of pure Dark.
She strikes with her scythe, with beams of magic, yet the cannon withstands it all.
“I can’t,” Nugau groans between gritted teeth. “I doubt even the Queen has the power to destroy this one.”
“Get me on there,” Sascia says. “I can disarm it.”
Nugau nods. “I’ll keep the Queen busy. Hurry, Sascia. It looks like it’s loading again.”
Deep inside the barrel of the cannon, an inner light has started getting brighter.
As the wyvern hovers over the now empty parapet, Sascia slides from its back—Nugau grips her wrist, her eyes fastened on the moths clinging to Sascia’s hair and shoulders. “Protect her,” she tells them before swooping away.
Sascia climbs up to the control panel of the cannon.
Beneath her, she can feel a low vibration as it prepares for another blast. Its design is classic Tae: minimal and straightforward, with only a tiny screen that shows the panels of a recharging battery and four buttons, all unmarked. Sascia will have to experiment.
The first button she taps, on the far left, seems to rotate the cannon left and right.
The second moves it up and down. The third makes the cylinders around its barrel spin, calibrating something or other.
The fourth she doesn’t immediately push, too scared of what it might do.
She uses the first two to aim the cannon high in the sky, just in case, then she tentatively tries the fourth button.
Words pop onto the tiny screen: Turning Off in 5… 4…3…
“Yes!” Sascia cries. She glances at the Maw, eager to let Nugau know the crisis is averted.
A strangled scream escapes her mouth.
The Queen and Nugau are locked in battle.
Each wields an amorphous throng of Dark.
Their strikes reverberate through the concrete barrier.
Their wyverns ram together and spring apart in quick, ravenous hits.
All around them, the aesin are trying to protect themselves from the barrage of nova-light blasts from the human soldiers.
“Stop!” Sascia cries. Her fingers fumble across the buttons, steering the cannon toward the Queen.
She has no intention of firing it, but perhaps it will scare the Queen enough to make her pause.
The Queen doesn’t hear her, but Nugau does.
The princess’s jaw goes slack at the sight of the cannon loading up; a second later, the Queen looks up too.
“Look around you!” Sascia calls out, voice laced with desperation.
She doesn’t know whether the Queen understands her language, but she makes sure to get her meaning across.
She points at the death strewn about the barrier, the human bodies strung on the parapets, the aesin and wyverns razed to dust on the concrete walls. “It doesn’t have to be this way!”
The Queen is beautiful even in her uncertainty. Her hair wisps like smoke over her shoulders. Her powerful chest rises and falls with deep breaths. Beneath her helmet, her mouth is pressed into a solemn line.
And then, horribly, impossibly, the cannon roars to life. Its cylinders spin so fast that they become a blur. Light gathers in the depth of the barrel, a growing inferno of white.
“Sascia!” Nugau cries, pulling her wyvern up.
Panic jostles Sascia into movement. She hits the off button immediately—
Two words appear, in a tiny font: Access Denied.
Mooch and her other moths intuit her desperation. They lift off her shoulders and land on the mouth of the cannon, one by one, forming a shield of onyx wings.
No, don’t, she thinks—but she has no time to speak it.
She can only watch as the cannon erupts.
The light consumes her moths first, their tiny bodies evaporating into black dust. Then it travels across the expanse of the Maw and blazes through the Queen.
Her onyx-plated armor melts off.
Her flesh singes. Her hair catches fire.
Her mouth parts in a soundless scream.
And where a queen once stood, now ashes scatter.