Chapter 91
Raeve continues to belt commands with the vengeance of a scorched Creator. Her molten champions thrash about, further hollowing the pit that’s starting to resemble a volcanic boil.
Every bit of pain evaporates in the aching wake of my relief as I crush Raeve’s arms against her chest and dig my face into her taut neck. “You got him,” I say, squeezing. Trying to get her to exhale without blasting more words. “There’s nothing left. It’s done.”
She sings louder.
Harder.
The mountain continues to melt around us, slopping down the ravine, refueling the manifestations.
Expanding them.
Although Rygun’s delighting—rubbing against the hot, viscous walls like he’s trying to reach a deep-seated itch—Raeve’s skin grows hotter by the beat. As though she’s lit with a fever.
“Moonbeam, enough!”
The champions melt, losing shape. Plunge back down the chasm they spawned from, even though Raeve’s still singing.
She snarls, busts from my grip, and charges forward, hollering down into the gullet with all the rage of a rabid dragon. “Luvth at uin shiith, Bulder ahn Ignos! NAILEN! NAILEN! NAILEN! LUVTH AT UIN—”
I lunge forward and whip her around, away from the edge. Her chest heaves as I grip either side of her blood-splattered face and look down into pitch-black eyes that bear no specks of light.
Not Slátra. Just a sure sign she’s toeing too close to her bloodlust.
Her brows knit together while she gulps the smoky air and tries to jerk from my hold.
“It’s done,” I repeat, quietly pleading with her to let go. To come back to me. “It’s done, Moonbeam. You did it. We’re safe. We’re alive.”
Her features soften.
She wobbles, and her gaze slips around the melted pit.
No more words come. No seething songs to the Creators. Just the slightest shake of her chin while she pulls short, sharp breaths through her nose, like she’s trying to calm herself.
“We’re alive,” I repeat with more composure than I currently possess. “We’re. Alive.”
Some of the blue returns to her eyes.
She brings her hands up over mine. “You’re okay,” she whispers as moonlight floods the pit and paints her upturned face. “Tell me you’re okay.”
“I—”
A fierce shriek has me looking up, seeing a massive gold-and-red-feathered beast nudge free of a gaping hole in the molten basin. It leaps, tossing out its wings with a spray of melted stone—gusting skyward, tilling a stir of embers.
A beast that looks like an—
“Elding Bird,” Raeve rasps as it powers toward the breach she and Rygun forged. An exit to the cleared sky above.
The beast churns, exposing its back to us.
My blood chills at the sight of a familiar figure perched between its wings, boasting a crown of pinned teeth, tattered cloak snapping about.
Arkyn.
He somehow survived.
Raeve goes stiff in my firm grip, her shock and rage palpable in the tension strung between us, blooming against me like a blow of flame. At the same time, Rygun arches up and postures, baring his teeth as he releases a chesty rumble.
A summoning challenge to meet him on this battlefield he’s claimed dominance over.
Arkyn cuts a glance between us all, then blasts a string of fleeing commands the Elding Bird seems to lash its head against, protesting. Rather than allow her to dive and face us with honor, he spurs the creature skyward, revealing just how spineless he really is.
How cowardly.
A familiar itch flares at the tips of my fingers.
The Elding Bird explodes free of the pit, then cuts north toward The Fade, out of sight. Raeve jolts in my grip, snarling. Like she’s hungry to spawn wings of her own and hunt them down.
To chase her revenge.
I grip her shoulders—
The ground lurches with such force we almost lose our footing, then tremors … like a full-body shudder. Something I’ve felt only three times before.
My heart compacts like a stone in my chest.
“No … not yet!” I growl, looking up at the scatter of Moonplume moons nesting above us.
Watch in cold-blooded horror as a smaller one wobbles …
wobbles … then plummets, drawing out of sight, dragging a flaming gash through the sky.
A similar wound opens through my chest, my heart laboring so hard and fast it feels like my ribs are caging a rabid beast.
We’re not ready …
We still have to find Kyzari. We still have to save our daughter.
“Creators, protect us all,” I rasp, then close my eyes. Squeeze them as the mountain quakes from the force of the nearby fall, coupled with Bulder’s drudging lament. Like he just caught an arrow to the gut.
I swallow, compose myself as best I can, then tilt Raeve’s head so she’s forced to look at me. In her drawn face, gritted teeth, and wide, unblinking eyes, a battle wages.
The same battle that’s waging within myself.
Should Arkyn escape, history will repeat itself. He’ll hibernate, scavenge his way back to power, and rise again. He’ll come for our family—of that, I’m certain. None of us will be safe so long as he lives.
But our daughter needs one of us.
Right now.
I cup Raeve’s cheek, her jaw tensing beneath my bloody palm.
“Rygun will gladly carry you north so you can hunt him down.” The world jolts again, almost sending us to our knees.
Or perhaps it’s the weight of this moment; this impossible decision about to cleave us apart.
“If you want to be the one to end him, Raeve … he’s yours. ”
Time stretches while she searches my eyes, back and forth like a pendulum, her pupils so blown they’re dark mirrors to the shedding sky. To the breaking world beyond.
Until a bleed of blue vulnerability makes my chest ache, coupled with a slight tremor in her chin. “I don’t want that.” Her voice is cracked through, becoming stiffer. More sturdy. “I just want her.”
The declaration packs me full of compounding relief and deep, primal pride.
This time, she’s not choosing to chase death. But life.
She’s choosing our daughter.
She’s choosing love.
I bind her close, press my lips against her forehead, and squeeze my eyes shut. “Go to her, Moonbeam.”
Unsaid words follow, strung through the tightening of my arms and the devout tremble taking me over. A silent promise tilled from the very fiber of my being, screamed with every shuddered breath I expel against her.
I will end the male who used you. Tortured you. Who tried to melt all the softness from your soul. For you, for our daughter, and for anyone else he’s wronged.
I
will
end this.
“But your wounds—”
“Are a hindrance, not lethal,” I rasp, pulling back just enough so I can see her eyes, lit with the reflection of another moon streaking free of its perch. “I’ve survived similar injuries without prompt intervention.”
She seems to hesitate, her upper lip twitching. Like she wants to say something.
Again, the world jolts, the air no longer clean, but smoggy enough to make me cough if I didn’t keep swallowing the urge.
Raeve strikes a clinical nod. “I love you,” she pledges, and I breathe her words.
Let them fuel me.
Echo them before I plant a final kiss on her lips. “Go. Find her. And tell Kyzari that I—”
“You will tell her yourself,” she commands with a regal fierceness that makes me want to drop a knee, then she steps from my reach in a way I imagine a muscle rips from a bone.
Reluctantly.
“Whatever it is, Kaan Vaegor, you will tell her yourself.” She swallows, blinking back tears that ruin me. “I’ll make this right. I swear.” With that, she whips around and sprints, leaping between molten pools as she makes for a dripping archway and disappears.
Gone in a breath.
The moment I lose sight of her, my lungs convulse, gouging through a series of sodden coughs that shred me.
By the time the attack abates, I’m breathless, head hung, trying to focus on my center of balance while the world continues to shake and scream.
Trying not to fall without Raeve here to keep me sturdy.
Her absence leaves only the pain; every slit, burn, lash, and the stab wound in my lung now raging.
I wobble—
Rygun’s tail hooks me, preventing a deadly tumble down the puffing ravine. I hadn’t even noticed his approach.
He nudges me with his snout, snuffing my bloody binds.
I draw a crackled breath, looking into his too-dark eyes. Embers starved of air. “Ew shathta mal—hein ák,” I drudge out.
You shouldn’t have come.
He blows a huff in boisterous defiance.
Shaking my head, I grip one of his tusks to steady myself while I sink within—no longer cold and numb as I was from the tonic. Not since the last of its effects burnt away as Rygun was clambering through the hole Raeve created.
I move across the shattered remnants of the barrier I built in the hopes of keeping Rygun oblivious to my pain, then tore down the moment I realized he’d come.
That he’d flown into the cold for me.
I press my hand against the wall I found behind the one I busted down. A scaled barricade the likes of which I’ve never seen, the same burnt-blood tone as Rygun.
His wall.
‘Luk uhn mei bárk úin. Ruif.’
Let me back in. Please.
Externally, he pushes me with the smooth part of his jaw, nudging me toward his flank with firm but gentle urgency. Clear command for me to hurry the fuck up and mount.
With a sigh, I make my way around him, pausing to pull a sword and dagger from the rubble. I slide the former into the unused sheath at my back, tucking the small blade into my leathers.
Reaching what’s left of the saddle ropes that haven’t burned away, I sweep my hand over a patch of Rygun’s scales still bearing none of their shine, and freeze—finding them ice cold despite the lava baths.
“Rygun—”
He snaps at my back. So close I feel the atmosphere squirm away from the crunch.
I throw a snarl over my shoulder, grit my teeth, and set to climbing the ropes—each painful push and pull fueled by determination to end this. To take Arkyn’s head, then get Rygun somewhere warm.
To survive so we can make it back to our family. So I can tell Kyzari that not a dae has passed that I haven’t wished she was mine … since the very dae she entered this world.
Not.
One.
Dae.
I clear my throat, toss my leg over Rygun, and settle deep into the tattered saddle blanket, no reins or strap left to grip. Instead, I do it the old-fashioned way, leaning forward to fist two of the many spikes that run parallel down his spine.
Rygun heaves beneath me, lifting his head to cast his gaze toward the smoggy red sky alight with the blasts of a wounded world. He stretches his wings and powers them in deep, billowing thumps, body tensed as he launches into the air.
“Lukith—kai hik atuín—da zun,” I wrestle out between sharp breaths.
Let’s chase him toward the sun.