Chapter 37 The Binding Stone #2
Venrick jerked himself in an unnatural motion, landing a punch to her cheek. Lark’s head bounced back, a fresh split weeping blood under her eye. She hissed and kicked Venrick in the thigh as hard as she could. His face contorted as he crumpled to one knee, panting.
Lark shifted her focus to Joc.
A Morsythian with thick, widely spaced tusks, bulky muscles, and a heavy sword moved toward Lark.
The amulet around his neck gave her pause.
No spells came from the Morsythian wielder.
While Joc’s attention focused on the binding stone, he could not cast spells through these creatures. The curse alone forced them to attack.
Consequently, the Morsythian came in swinging.
Lark ducked, spinning just in time to see Venrick’s broken hand grabbing for her.
She blocked it, kicked him again in the same spot on his thigh.
She wanted to stop him from moving quickly without injuring him too badly.
Venrick went down and struggled to get up.
The Morsythian’s blade came for her again.
She bowed and it clipped fur from the borrowed cloak as it passed overhead.
Lark jumped, delivering a mighty kick to the back of the Morsythian’s head.
Without added power, though, Lark’s hit did little damage.
He reset his stance and struck again. This time the blade narrowly missed her chest as she backed away.
A set of slender arms wrapped around her, long braids falling beside her head.
“Sasja?” Lark said, feeling the cold blade pressed up against the skin of her neck.
Lark flexed, pushing out against the impossible strength coming from Sasja.
Screaming through the pain in her broken arm, Lark slowly pushed the blade away from her throat, her vision tunneling as a result of the pain and the effort.
The Morsythian was coming at her again, his massive sword held aloft.
Suddenly, Nix sparked, appearing before Lark as she buzzed around the Morsythian, flashing fire in his eyes.
He swung wildly, missing them completely.
Venrick was on his feet, limping toward them on a swollen leg to join the fight.
Lark forced herself to take hold of the dagger with her broken arm.
She controlled Sasja’s arm with the other as she rolled, tossing Sasja from her back and stealing her dagger.
Venrick stumbled past, crashing into the frustrated Morsythian.
Lark switched the dagger to her good hand.
She pressed it against Sasja’s throat, rage pounding through her.
If it wasn’t for her, I would still have this Hyalite, Lark thought, preparing to do away with her one-time friend, enemy… What was Sasja to me before?
Joc shouted something, his voice crackling with red lightning. There was a flash. The light exploded, erupting in a violent outpouring of energy in all directions. Lark was sent flying. When she landed and the blast cleared, she saw the Hyalite.
Its blue light trickled out from the binding stone, where it had cracked along the surface.
The light pulsed like lightning and joined tandem streams of red from the brismil.
They twisted, coiling into tendrils of purple.
One stream stretched out toward Joc’s outstretched palm, the other two fed into the brismil from the Hyalite.
Joc burst into a maniacal laugh. He pointed a bony finger toward the dragon. “Your part comes next. The sacrifice of an unbonded life is all I need to become the ultimate dragonrider. I will become a god incarnate!”
Lark glanced down at the necklace around Sasja’s neck. “The necklace,” she wondered if this was a source of power she could draw from. She took hold of it and drew the chain tight.
“Lark, not that necklace,” Nix cried out.
The dragon’s eyes went golden again as Barrik emerged from his warging. He blinked and then turned to focus on Nix and Lark. His hand shot up. A hazy extension of his arm shot out across the room. He used this power to snatch Nix, his dusty haze catching her and snuffing out her fire.
“Lark, use the la—”
He squeezed the hazy cloud of debris around Nix. Her fire extinguished entirely; her body crumbled to charcoal as the ashes of her physical form fell to the ground. Barrik’s extension vanished like dust drifting harmlessly on the wind.
The unbonded dragon, suddenly aware of his supposed fate, flapped his wings to escape.
Joc pointed to the dragon while whispering his strange language.
A stream of power arced from his arm to wrap around the dragon and hold him in place.
Joc lowered his arm, and a trickle of the strange purple light continued to flow from Hyalite into the pinned dragon.
All three streams passing from the Hyalite into the brismil and the dragon ebbed and ended. The Hyalite was now clear and empty.
Joc palmed the scale. An instant later a set of black armor formed around him. Between each link of the scale, the brismil glowed with a purple light. He took up Stormbreaker and stalked toward the dragon.
Lark sliced Sasja, wounding her but leaving her alive so she couldn’t follow. She dodged Venrick, knocking his dazed body to the ground once again. Then she engaged with the Morsythian again.
“You promised this power would be bound to the Morsythian army. You were to create an ultimate soldier to help the rimeshade, not take it for yourself,” Barrik accused Joc, summoning his brismil spear.
“This power can’t be trusted to the Morsythians or the rimeshade.
No, this energy, the power of a god, can only be wielded by someone strong enough to take it for themselves.
With it, I will control all the kingdoms of Sataran, something not even the rimeshade have never been able to do.
I alone will form an empire. Every time a storm of power produces a Hyalite, it will belong to me.
Every time a shard of that power splinters into a Yogo Sapphire, it will belong to me.
The gods will belong to me,” Joc replied without a hint of guilt for having lied.
Barrik channeled his powers. A swirling vortex of dust formed, twisting and shaping into a second version of himself made of stone.
The mirage attacked Joc. He cut through the stone with his brismil, but the blow did nothing to slow the stone figure.
It instantly stitched back together, crashing into Joc.
Joc recovered quickly, sending a pulse of power into Barrik’s chest. Barrik fell off the dais.
The large black dragon flew in over the open room.
Lark danced around the Morsythian, cutting his hand and forcing him to drop his blade. She kicked his knee, forcing him to drop, then punched the hilt of the dagger against his temple. His eyes rolled and he toppled.
Barrik and Joc clashed, light exploding against the rock, sending rubble down into the throne room. The rock reformed into soldiers of stone to attack Joc. From the openings in the walls, Morsythians spilled into the room from all directions, swarming like sharks in bloody water.
Lark’s necklace still tingled with warmth though Nix was gone.
Lark’s rage cleared enough now to remember her line of thinking.
Every time she’d channeled magic through the bond, it had started with the sensation from the necklace.
The necklace sent vibrations through her, driving her toward the firestorms, where the veil between realms thinned the most. Omirre, the eel, had told her to remember where the necklace had come from.
That there were more ways than one to channel magic through the veil into this world.
“Use the lark necklace,” she realized.
Nix hadn’t been talking about the amulets. She was talking about Lark’s necklace.
Suddenly, it came flooding back to her. The memories of how she’d traveled to the fae realm.
How she had made a deal with the Night Court.
How she’d bonded with a fire fae and returned with the ability to draw upon her magic through the veil using that necklace.
The lark pendant was a direct line to a raw and wild magic from another world.
It was the key to the source, and she was the conduit to release it.
Lark focused on the dais where Joc and Barrik continued their fight, fae magic swelling against the barrier she held around her neck.
Joc was at the dragon’s side, holding Barrik off with a cloud of purple light.
He thrust Stormbreaker into the dragon’s side.
The dragon howled in pain, a breath of fire shooting up into the sky.
A white and purple light twisted out from the dragon, wrapping around the sword and onto Joc’s arm. The magic siphoned continuously out of the dragon and into Joc.
Lark lifted her hands, reaching through her bond and opening the veil to the fae realm. Black energy crackled above, coalescing in a midnight fog that surrounded her. She sent the black fog forth, streaking across the gap at Joc.
A purple dome appeared, isolating Joc and the dragon from the rest of the dais.
Lark’s forces battered against the warding shield, but it held strong.
She drew on the power tethering her to another world and funneled more onto the dome of light.
The purple cracked, her forces filling the cracks but still not penetrating.
Come on, she urged them, calling on more power.
Hardin slumped onto the floor. Tears blurred his vision as he thought of the struggle his friends were going through.
“Help!” he cried again, his voice gone hoarse from screaming so often. He didn’t know how long he’d been sealed in this room. A room that may have been warded, but that magic wasn’t his downfall. The simple mechanics of a locked door had trapped him inside.
Muffled blasts sounded somewhere in the fortress. Hardin barely heard them. He tried the door again, but the handle wouldn’t budge. He pounded on the door until his hands were numb.
Then, something small, something glowing sparked in the air in the room with him.
Hardin’s eyes instantly looked to it in the consuming darkness.
More sparks appeared, shooting off in a spinning circle as a fire fae emerged.
Her body was glowing with yellow and orange flame, her red dress and hair rippling with the otherworldly fire.
Hardin would not be intimidated by the fiery demon. He straightened himself, ready to fight for his life.
“Hardin,” she said, her voice sweet but urgent.
“You’re her, aren’t you? You’re Nix,” he said. “How did you get in here?”
“We don’t have time. I’m no longer in his control as he thinks he killed me when he destroyed my apparition.”
“Who, the rider?”
“Barrik and Joc are going to get them all killed. You are the only one who can help Lark stop it.”
“Why can’t you help, too?” he asked.
“I need to wake up White Eye.”
“What? Why?”
“No time to explain. You need to go to the throne room. It’s a straight shot, just follow the noise,”
“How, I’m stuck in here.”
Nix vanished.
“Nix!”
A second later the door handle turn from the outside. It twisted slowly, as if the effort to open it was coming at a great cost. Finally, it clicked. Hardin twisted the handle the rest of the way, pulling the door wide open.
Nix was there, panting from the effort. “I told Lark I could open some locks,” she said with a smile and disappeared.
Lark strained under the effort it took to force open the shield of light encapsulating Joc and the juvenile unbonded dragon. She shook, the realization that she couldn’t break through stabbing icy daggers of fear into her heart.
Hardin appeared through a break in the wall and ran toward Joc from behind.
He sprinted across the throne room, approaching Joc fast, completely hidden from the mage’s line of sight.
Hardin had no dagger, no weapon on him, but he kept on as though he were wearing brismil himself.
He passed through the purple shield, slowed to a silence stalk, moving in close to Joc’s back.
Hardin slipped his hand inside Joc’s brismil suit to the place where the scale was held tight to his skin and wrenched the scale free.
Joc blinked, realizing his armor and half the conduit tapping into the dragon’s magic were gone.
Hardin, now wearing the dark blue brismil armor, tossed Joc aside as the mage released a shrill, “No!” Hardin pulled the sword free, pushing his hand against the dragon’s side to keep the light from escaping.
Lark channeled the fae magic down onto the dome of light, shattering it with a bolt of black lightning.
The wards fell apart, and she struck again, this time aiming the force at Joc.
Spikes of black lightning, darker than the night around them, pushed through the veil like spears.
They lanced through Joc, pinning him to the dais floor.
The five staves of darkness pushed through his chest, and then the power-hungry mage twitched, and went limp.
Lark now worked to tame the magic and force the torrent of power back through to the fae realm. She closed the veil. Heat sizzled against her chest from the necklace, a pain she welcomed as the cost of the mage’s death.
All around them, Morsythians slowed, looking around as though they were waking from a dream. Venrick and Sasja also scanned their surroundings as though seeing where they were for the first time.
Lark slowly climbed onto the dais where the unbonded dragon lay on the ground, the light no longer flowing from his body. Hardin knelt at his side, the purple light dripped from within the brismil, then winked out.
“No, the Hyalite’s power?” Barrik said, fear lacing his voice. “It wasn’t meant to pass onto the dragon.” He trained his brismil spear point to Hardin and shouted, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
Hardin dopped Stormbreaker and the scale.
Barrik cocked his arm back, aiming to lance Hardin through the chest. Lark surged forward. She moved between Hardin and Barrik as he thrust the spear. She felt a sharp pain burn through her side. The brismil slid out of her, Barrik hesitating. In that moment Lark reached for her power.