Twenty-Seven
Zidra
No. No, they couldn’t have found us—not yet. Not before I’d had a chance to tell Kyrundar I’d been wrong. Over the last few days, the heartbond and Kyrundar had become a part of me in a way I never would have imagined. A part of me I didn’t want to lose.
I wanted to keep the heartbond, to keep Kyrundar.
But now wasn’t the moment to tell him.
Sajen had already left, the door swinging shut behind him. Kyrundar and Rouven jumped to their feet, but Kyrundar turned to me, his eyes worried.
“Are you—”
“I can fight.” I stood and squared my shoulders. For the first time in over a week, I stoked my dragon fire. Claws erupted in place of my fingernails, scales formed on my neck and jaw and horns grew from my scalp. My fangs became more pronounced, and my eyes shifted to slitted red dragon eyes, sharpening my vision.
Kyrundar’s eyebrows raised. “You are terrifying and beautiful, and is it bizarre that I am so attracted to you right now?”
My last fear, that maybe he wouldn’t want me now that I didn’t need him, was banished.
“A little,” I said, even though I couldn’t help a teasing grin.
Rouven made a gagging noise. “Enemies approaching, rengiri. Save it for when you’re in your own room.”
I shared a smirk with Kyrundar, but then Sajen’s shout of “They’re landing” wiped the mirth from our faces.
“Maybe you should hide those features, though,” Kyrundar said. “Let the fact you can shift again be a surprise.”
With a sigh, I nodded and shifted away the wyvern traits. My ice elf strode toward the front door, and I hurried after him.
“We’ll handle this,” I told Rouven as I passed him. “Just stay—”
“Not on your Order insignia, girl.”
“Do you know how to fight?” I asked tentatively.
Rouven harrumphed. “Of course I do. And I’m tired of hiding. They want to end this, let’s end it.”
“We aren’t responsible for—” Kyrundar started, but the older ice elf waved dismissively.
“Kyrmaris!” Sajen roared. “Get out here!”
I lifted an eyebrow, but the moniker didn’t bother me the way it used to. We raced outside, Rouven on our heels.
Sajen, in his gryphon di’yar, paced along the pebbly beach in front of the cabin. Several paces away, another, larger gryphoni landed, and two figures slid off its back.
One was a human man wearing light-gray robes that made his fair skin look colorless beneath his sandy-blond hair. He carried a staff and looked over our group with haughty indifference.
But the other man captured my attention. Dressed in a close-fitting tunic and loose trousers, fingerless gloves, and tall boots, all in dark blue, and with two long daggers strapped to his hips, he appeared the quintessential picture of an assassin. He was tall and slender, with pale-gray skin, silver eyes, and silvery hair braided back from his face to reveal the long points of his ears.
Night elf.
“Come to try again after your last failure?” I gripped the hilt of my sword.
Truthfully, assassins had no honor, and Sajen and the other gryphoni had already shifted. I had no obligation to meet these men in battle in my di’ora. But it still felt wrong to do otherwise. I would do the honorable thing and face them in my true form before I unleashed my di’yar.
“Thank you for leading us to Rouven,” the human said with a lifeless smile. “I didn’t like having someone who knew my face and name but refused to join our glorious endeavor running loose in the world.”
“Go to the void, Dandrio Kane.” Rouven sniffed, as if even speaking to the man were below him .
“That’s Archon Kane to you.”
“To me?” Rouven sputtered. “I’m no member of your infernal League, and you’re an affront to Iskyr. You’re not an archon any more than I’m a monk.”
“Enough of this.” Kane raised his hands, and globes of fire burst into existence above his palms. “Time for all of you to die.”
Metal scraped against hard leather as the night elf drew his long daggers and Kyrundar drew his twin swords. The shadows cast by the cliff above Rouven’s cottage grew, expanding and darkening as if reaching out to swallow us. I drew my own sword and slid my feet into a ready position.
With an earsplitting cry, the enemy shifter lunged. Sajen released an eagle screech and bounded forward. Standing on their back legs with their massive wings spread wide, the two gryphoni crashed into each other.
Kane threw a fireball at my head. I dodged, and the ball of flame crashed into the pebbled beach. Kyrundar was already moving forward to attack the night elf, who had wrapped himself in shadows that would make him harder to strike. Leaving my companions to their matches, I yelled a battle cry and rushed Kane.
A barrage of sharp icicles flew around me and hurtled toward Kane. I missed my next step as I glanced over my shoulder. But it wasn’t Kyrundar—it was Rouven, who had an expression on his face that made him look like a being of wrath incarnate.
Streams of fire melted the icicles before they reached Kane, but I darted around the flames and swung my sword. Kane cursed and leaped back. The tip of my sword scored a line in his gray robes but didn’t go deep enough to draw blood. I snarled and vowed that my next strike would not miss.
But as Rouven started up a barrage of ice from the right, Kane raised an impenetrable wall of flame around himself. I paced, watching for a weakness. Such use of magic would be exhausting; he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long.
I looked toward the rest of the battle. Both Sajen and the other gryphoni had taken to the air, cartwheeling as they clawed and slashed at each other. I spied blood on both, but it was unclear who was actually wounded in the frantic chaos of feathers and fur. Threads of glowing blue ice magic tangled with vines of darkness in the shadows beneath the cliff next to the cabin, the only indication of where Kyrundar and the night elf fought.
I began to sweat from the heat of Kane’s cyclone of fire. Even Rouven’s astonishing barrage of ice and snow wasn’t making it through.
I had done the honorable thing and engaged a non-shifter foe in my di’ora. I owed them nothing more. I moved to a position where I had sufficient room.
The time for holding back was past.
“Rouven!” I shouted over the screeches of the gryphoni and the low roar of Kane’s magecraft fire. “Hold a moment!”
The old ice elf curled his upper lip, but he lowered his hands, and his relentless stream of ice magic ceased .
A moment later, Kane dropped his wall of fire. He sneered. “Ready to give up already, rengir?”
“Ready to end this.”
Kane laughed. “And if you wouldn’t die the moment you shifted, I might believe you.”
I smiled darkly. “Why do you think we needed Rouven?”
The false archon’s cocky expression faltered. “No one has ever survived being struck by an ice curse. Even Rouven couldn’t remove it.”
“Not by himself, no. But once again, you’ve underestimated Kyrmaris. You won’t again.”
My neck grew, my horns and tail sprouted, my thumbs elongated into thick, sharp claws, and my body expanded as my arms and fingers transformed to massive claw-tipped wings. Within moments, the transformation was complete. I rested the bend of my wings on the ground and looked down on Kane’s slack face from my fifteen-foot height. Then I stretched my head forward until my mouth full of long, razor-sharp teeth was scarcely more than a foot from his face and released a bellowing, screeching roar that reverberated in my throat and made the ground vibrate beneath my feet.
Above us, Sajen and the enemy gryphoni disengaged and turned toward me. The shadows and ice thinned, and I caught a glimpse of Kyrundar and the night elf gaping at me.
Kane scrambled backward. Between his hands, he conjured a fireball the size of his torso. With a yell, he threw the white-hot ball of flame. I closed my maw and turned my head. The fireball exploded against the side of my scaly face, and I didn’t feel a thing.
My laugh sounded like a low, hiccuping growl.
After over a week of being caged, my dragon fire burned with vengeful, animalistic intensity. My wyvern nature prodded me to eat Kane, but I would regret such an inhuman action later.
“Phasta!” Kane shrieked.
The gryphoni dove toward Kane. Sajen started to follow, but as I raised my head and opened my mouth, he wheeled aside and out of my way.
I breathed out a jet of fire that made Kane’s human magecraft fire look like a child’s firecracker. Flames enveloped the gryphon. The rumble of my dragon fire mostly drowned out the gryphoni’s screams. I tracked the shifter’s fall until my fire breath gave out. The charred remains of the gryphoni crashed to the ground, lifeless.
While Kane stared in horror at the remains of his soldier, an icicle a handsbreadth in diameter speared through his chest. Rouven lowered his outstretched hand and watched as Kane dropped to his knees and then fell flat on his face. The icicle turned to a whirl of tiny snowflakes and vanished, leaving Kane’s still form bleeding out on the stones.
“Zidra!” Kyrundar’s shout sent my heart racing.
When I looked over, he was standing beside the cabin alone, bleeding from a few shallow cuts, including one on his cheek, but he appeared to be all right. He pointed up toward the oddly dark shadows covering the entirety of the cliff face .
“I can’t see the night elf, and he’s fleeing!”
Even with my wyvern eyes, I couldn’t penetrate the unnaturally dark and solid shadows churning on the rocky cliff. I spread my wings and took to the air, stirring up little clouds of dust along the beach. Rouven raised his arm to shield his eyes and hunched against the wind.
I unleashed a wyvern screech and moved closer to the cliff. As expected, the loud, high-pitched sound made the night elf flinch. His shadows wavered, and I focused on a darker spot near where the walls of the inlet met and where bits of loose pebbles rained down from the elf’s ascent. A deep breath through my nostrils confirmed the night elf’s location.
I beat my wings to rise higher, then swung my legs forward and reached with claws as long as a human’s forearm into the darkness. The wind generated by my wings dispelled some of the shadows like mist. Solid shadows tried to fight my feet, but between the strength of my muscular, scale-covered legs and the elf’s split focus as he tried to cling to the rock wall and fend off my attack, I pushed through. The pungent scent of terror filled my nostrils, and then my right foot found his body. My talons wrapped around the night elf, and I pulled him, screaming, from the cliff.
The corner of the inlet was too tight for me to turn around in, so I flew upward and circled around before I dropped the struggling elf onto the beach. Cushioned by his magic, he landed on the white stones without injury and stumbled to his feet—but too late .
Kyrundar threw a barrage of icicles that tore through the night elf. The writhing shadows vanished, and he sprawled across the ground, never to rise or assassinate another person again.
With a triumphant bellow, I flew a little ways down the beach, safely away from Rouven, Kyrundar, and Sajen, who had shifted back to his di’ora. It felt so good to be back in my wyvern di’yar, I was tempted to do a few laps around the inlet to properly stretch my wings, but there would be plenty of time for that later.
I landed in a spray of white gravel. The moment I finished shifting, I ran to meet Kyrundar.