29. Chapter 29
ERYNDOR
The ground fell away in a blur of motion. Wind screamed past my face, tearing at my armor and biting into the wound still seeping beneath my ribs.
Below us, the void soldiers flooded the spot where we had just been standing, their pulsing forms grasping at empty air. But we were already gone.
We climbed higher and faster, Umbra's massive wings beating a steady, relentless rhythm beneath us.
Amaria's back pressed against my chest, my arms locked around her waist like I could keep us both alive through sheer force.
The armor warmed between us and the Marks stirred, but they were sluggish and weak. We'd both bled too much and burned too much, leaving even the bond exhausted.
It wouldn't last. The heat was already building, slow but inevitable, but I held on anyway. For one perfect moment, we'd made it.
Something slammed into Umbra from below.
The impact shuddered through her body and straight into mine—fresh fire screaming across my ribs where the wound gaped open. I tightened my grip on Amaria as the dragon's wingbeat stuttered, her climb faltering, and I whipped my head over the edge.
A void soldier clung to Umbra's back claw. It had leaped from the caravans—forty feet straight up, a single vertical explosion of motion that slammed its stuttering weight into her leg.
Then the air warped.
Umbra's wings beat out of sync—one stroke happening twice, another not happening at all. The sky fractured. Clouds flickered. The horizon tilted sideways and I saw the same mountain peak in three positions at once.
"Hold on!" I shouted. My arms locked tighter around Amaria's waist. The Marks sang against the armor, humming with the desperate need to protect what was mine.
Umbra roared, a sound of pure, vibrating fury. She threw her weight into a violent roll, trying to snap the creature off.
It didn't work. The void soldier's grip shifted. The cold static bled into her muscles, and her wingbeats lost their rhythm—turning ragged and desperate as she fought the unnatural drag.
We started losing altitude fast. The ground rushed back up to meet us.
"She's going down!"
We plummeted in a violent, dragging descent—Umbra fighting for every foot of altitude, her wings struggling against the distortion, her body twisting against physics that no longer obeyed her.
Trees rushed up to meet us and then we were through the canopy, branches snapping, leaves exploding around us in a green blur.
My grip on Amaria tore loose—the world spun, green and brown and blinding light—
We hit the ground. The impact sent me slamming into dirt and broken branches, pain lancing through my side and skull and the ribs where the wound had barely begun to close. I skidded to a brutal halt, ears ringing, the breath knocked completely from my lungs.
Above me, the sky hung fractured through a shattered canopy. I dragged in a jagged breath, the smell of sap and crushed leaves filling my chest.
A massive trench tore through the earth where Umbra had hit—trees splintered, soil churned, a wound in the forest floor that stretched fifty feet and ended in…
nothing. Empty woods. The reality distortion from the descent had scattered us—the dragon thrown one direction, us another, distance meaningless while the void soldier's influence warped the air.
A roar echoed somewhere through the trees.
Pained but alive. And impossibly far for a crash that should have kept us together.
I was crumpled against a fallen trunk. My side was wet. Fresh blood soaking through the armor, dripping onto the moss beneath me. The wound had torn open again.
But the edges were knitting. Slowly. The fae healing working beneath my skin, stitching what should have killed me. Her Fury on the battlefield—it had burned through me too. Cauterized the bleeding. Bought me time I shouldn't have.
Not enough. But enough to move.
I pushed through the ringing in my skull and wrenched my gaze across the wreckage.
Amaria. Fifteen feet away. Already on her feet. Already moving.
The monster pulled itself from the debris. One leg bent at an angle that should have crippled it. It straightened anyway, form flickering, and turned toward us.
Amaria shifted into a combat stance, Dawnrender low, Voidbringer angled mid-torso, the blades strapped to her body catching stray light through the smoke. She didn’t even glance back at me.
She was bleeding and exhausted, yet she still planted herself between me and the monster because that was what she always did. Everyone else came first and she came last, treating her own survival like a complete afterthought.
The creature lunged.
She rolled. Barely. Its blade sliced through the space where her head had been. The air screamed where it passed.
I wasn't going to let her be my shield. I shoved myself off the forest floor, ignoring the white-hot agony as the half-healed wound in my ribs ripped open again.
I couldn't reach her in time to block the next swing, so I snatched a heavy piece of debris from the dirt and hurled it right at the creature's back. It passed straight through the static, but it was enough.
The void soldier turned toward me. Flickering. Phasing. Its blade already rising for a strike I couldn't track because it existed in three positions at once.
Amaria's Fury detonated.
Golden light exploded from her chest—a wave of heat and clarity that burned through the distortion like fire through cobwebs. The pulsing stopped. The doubling vanished. The world snapped into focus.
The creature solidified.
I drove forward, riding the shockwave of her light straight into the monster's guard.
I knew where she was without looking. Knew when she'd give me the opening before she created it. Knew the exact heartbeat when her light would hold and the creature would be mine.
My blade found its shoulder and bit deep.
The void soldier made a shrieking sound that scraped the inside of my skull. The noise of existence protesting its own unmaking.
It phased, reappearing three feet to the left and driving its blade straight for my ribs. But I was already gone.
Amaria's Fury flared again—another pulse, another window of solidity. I pivoted into the space she'd cleared, blade carving an arc through air that finally behaved like air should.
Steel met flesh. The creature staggered.
We didn't speak. Didn't need to. She burned and I cut. She anchored reality and I exploited every second of it. Two bodies moving like one mind—like we'd been fighting together for centuries instead of weeks.
The bond between us wasn't just magic. It was our own private shared language. Every shift of her weight told me where to strike. Every flare of her Fury told me when to move. Her exhaustion bled through the connection and matched my pace to what she could sustain.
The creature staggered from the last hit. Wounded. Flickering faster—destabilized, desperate.
Then it phased.
My blade went with it. Steel ripped from my grip, dragged into whatever space the creature occupied between existing and not. My hands closed on empty air.
The forest went quiet. Amaria's Fury dimmed—she was spent and barely standing, the golden light guttering like a candle in wind.
I had no weapon, and the creature was still out there.
The Fury guttered. Reality warped again.
Amaria spun, searching. The creature phased back into existence behind her—blade already descending.
She twisted, catching it on Dawnrender as Voidbringer flashed up a heartbeat later to brace the bind. The impact shuddered through both arms, her boots sliding in the dirt.
The creature pressed forward. Its face—what passed for a face—rippled inches from hers. Empty. A void shaped like a person.
I was too far. Ten feet. An eternity.
Her arms buckled. The blade inched closer.
I sprinted, throwing everything I had into crossing the distance.
But I wasn't fast enough. The creature dropped its blade and lunged, both of its hands snapping out to close around her throat.
The world stopped.
Her skin flickered where it touched her. The sharp lines of her jaw, her cheekbones, the mouth I'd traced with willow leaves in the dark—all of it blurring, losing definition. Becoming less.
The void was eating her alive.
The face I'd memorized started to dissolve—going transparent at the edges, her body becoming something between real and unreal.
Her eyes found mine.
Still gold with Fury. Still her. But fading.
She wasn't afraid. She just looked at me like an apology. Like her only regret was what this would do to me.
No.
The creature's grip on her throat was solid—fully material. It had to be, to hold her. Contact with a living person anchored it to reality, which meant the hand wrapped around her windpipe was the most real part of it. The most vulnerable part.
My blade was gone. A shard of wood jutted from the wreckage beside me. A broken branch from Umbra's crash, splintered to a wicked point.
I grabbed it.
The void soldier's focus stayed locked on Amaria. On the throat it was crushing. On the life it was draining. It didn't see me move.
I drove the shard through its wrist.
Straight through the part that couldn't phase without releasing her.
The creature shrieked—that terrible un-sound, existence protesting itself. It tried to phase out. Couldn't. Its grip on her throat pinned it to the real world. Trapped by its own hunger.
Solid.
Killable.
My hand found a dagger strapped to her thigh—one of the half-dozen blades she kept hidden across her body. I drew it in one motion.
I used the upward pull of the draw to fuel the strike, swinging the steel in a blind, desperate arc to break its hold on her.
The blade caught it at the neck and went clean through.
Its head separated from its body.
The shrieking stopped.
The creature collapsed, dissolving into particles that scattered on the wind and left nothing behind. Its grip released and Amaria dropped.
I caught her before she hit the ground.
My hands found her throat. The skin was hot, already swelling where the soldier's grip had crushed. I covered the marks with my hands. Let her feel my warmth instead of that cold.
Still here. Still whole.
But the sheer, violent terror of how close it had been cracked something open inside me. I had almost lost her. My hands tightened on her jaw and I pressed my forehead to hers, eyes closed. Her breath ghosted against my mouth. In. Out.
"Amaria." I rasped. "Look at me."
Her eyes fluttered open—gold, burning, alive.
She tried to speak but coughed instead, a raw terrible sound that meant her throat was bruised but working.
"I've got you." My voice cracked. "I'm here."
Her hand came up and covered mine on her throat. I stayed like that, forehead against hers, hands cradling her face.
Because I'd almost watched her disappear. The only person I'd ever loved, dissolving into nothing while the world kept turning around us. The sun would have risen tomorrow. The war would have continued. The Veil would have needed healing.
And I would have had to exist in all of it. Without her.
That was the thing I couldn't survive.
Not the void. Not my father. Not any prophecy or curse or blade through the ribs. I could endure all of it—had endured all of it—because she existed somewhere in the same world. Because there was a version of tomorrow where I might see her face again.