Chapter 14
VARIDIAN
Is that us? I demanded of the lightning soul, staring at the wash of darkness spilling through the vivid blue skies over the Torn Isle.
No, she replied in an ice voice. It is them. Our eternal enemy. Shield!
I repeated her command with a barked, “Shields up!”
“Varidian,” Nabil hissed, grabbing my arm. “There’s someone inside it. There’s someone in the darkness.”
It wasn’t a storm cloud like I first thought, wasn’t merely darkness.
There were things within it. Wings. I saw what Nabil had spotted—a slim woman with long hair streaming like a black ribbon behind her, and wings like a bat, like a wyvern, beating the air.
But there were other winged things in the darkness, quick glimpses of mottled skin and the thin membrane of dark wings.
Far too small to be wyvern. A shudder went down my spine.
“Nabil,” I breathed. “Were the araethawn winged?”
“No,” he replied, and relief had only a moment to hit before he added, “But the Zalaam warriors were.”
And now a whole swarm of those lethal, legendary creatures flew overhead.
Fae so powerful that no one’s magic had ever been able to rival them.
So wicked that they’d killed anyone in their path, and mass-slaughtered people for the power in their veins.
One would have been terrifying. A swarm of them turned my blood to ice, turned my breath to broken shards, cutting up my chest as I tried to pull in air.
“They’re not landing,” Emmahin noticed, on her feet with a curved blade in her hand.
“What direction are they flying in?” Mohammed asked tightly, edging closer to Kanuri as the woman wreathed her hand in blue flame.
“East,” Amuq’ran answered, watching the sky with hard eyes. “And you’re right, Emmahin, they’re not stopping.”
“Wyfell is east,” Nabil said to me.
“So is the wall,” I pointed out.
“And Kalder,” Mohammed breathed, watching the dark swarm move closer to the fortress.
The black cloud blotted out the sunlight, turned the garden cold and dark, and I was a heartbeat away from reaching for my magic, when they passed overhead. And continued east.
“Where’s the access point for that tower?” Nabil demanded of Kanuri, pointing at the highest point of the kasbah.
“Inside,” Emmahin replied, striding briskly towards the row of arches that led back inside. “I’ll show you.”
Nabil and I followed urgently, and I tunnelled down into my magic with every step, grasping hold of both control and lightning.
You can’t use it, the lightning soul warned. They’ll know I’m here.
If we can bring that swarm down—
More will come. Use control magic only.
I seethed but bit my tongue and raced through the south end of the fortress after Emmahin, following the warrior up a staircase made of sharp angles and chiselled stone to a chamber many stories high, surrounded by arched openings on all sides.
The island spread out below us, visible all the way to the ocean.
Nabil wasted no time, thrusting his hands out, air magic sending a powerful ripple through the blue sky, spearing for the black cloud of wings and leathery skin.
And that winged woman. Logic insisted she was one of us, fae but corrupted by dark magic.
PYet, paranoia told me it was the dark queen, returned to the continent after biding her time for a thousand years, with her ruthless army of Zalaam warriors at her side.
Nabil’s power struck the swarm at the same time I flung out a net of control. I wasn’t surprised when my power slid off every winged body and there was nothing to grasp. Whatever flew within the darkness, it was already under someone else’s ironclad grip.
Sweat beaded on Nabil’s dark brow as he hit the swarm with wave after wave of elemental magic, and Kanuri finally burst up the staircase and rushed to an arched opening, adding her fire to the mix.
But the dark cloud was moving too fast, and already too far away.
And utterly unaffected by Nabil’s attack.
Unaffected, or merely stronger than him. The thought made me cold.
Someone grasped my forearm, gripping hard enough to make my entire body jolt, to make my magic flare.
I choked down crackling, seething lightning when I saw it was Emmahin who grasped me, her eyes cloudy, distant as Aliah’s had been distant earlier.
The taste of white-hot power and copper coated my tongue as the magic reluctantly receded.
“They fly east,” Emmahin said, her voice strong, enraged, where I’d expected weakness. “They fly east. Which means those bastards have come from Daurith.”
There was no other city, no other village on the stretch of land that housed Daurith’s mountains.
“Did we trigger this?” I asked, trying in vain to soften my voice. Emmahin wasn’t the target of my rage; instead, it was aimed inward. Had we left Daurith safe, only to expose it to a new, worse threat mere hours later?
“We were just there,” Nabil snarled, the air throbbing around him. “We checked the hills, the mountains, and the surrounding areas all the way to the damned coast. How the fuck did we miss a host this large?”
“We were meant to,” I replied grimly.
“We checked the hills, the mountains, the surrounding areas,” Emmahin repeated, her eyes focusing on Nabil.
Sharp, canny eyes. “You’re right. There were no traces of a wyvern—any wyvern.
No trace of Zalaam warriors, either. So where did the legion who attacked Daurith come from?
You tracked ground warriors on their march, but did you spot wings in the skies? ”
“No,” I said, forcing a slow breath into my lungs, barely in control of the living power—both kinds that lived within me.
“Then where did they come from?” Kanuri asked, eyes on the skies, the dark swarm now moving beyond the Torn Isle towards the mainland, towards the wall.
“Underground,” Nabil realised. “What if they were beneath the hills?”
I turned and raced down the stairs, my skin too tight over my bones. “We need to get into the skies. Kanuri, Emmahin, can you spare a legion to follow that swarm to their destination?”
“Consider it done,” Emmahin agreed in such a hard tone that I wondered if she’d take her own legion and attempt to knock those winged things from the sky.
“We’re flying to Daurith?” Nabil asked, looking the most alive I’d seen him in a whole day. Anger would burn through his grief, giving him something to hold onto, a target upon which to unleash his rage.
“We fly now.” I glanced over my shoulder at Emmahin, the straight-backed, serious figure of Kanuri still in that tower chamber, watching the sky and quiet in a way that spoke of anger. “We’ll send word of what we find.”
“And we’ll send word of the darkness’s route,” Emmahin replied. “Good luck. Safe skies.”
I repeated the farewell as we exploded out of the fortress, Nabil and I taking off running through the city towards where we’d left the rest of our legion.
They were gathered, already waiting when we arrived, and it took mere minutes to scale Mak’s scales and throw myself into my seat, to launch into the bright blue sky.
No remnant at all of the dark cloud that had passed over it so recently.
“Daurith, Mak,” I shouted over the boom of his wingbeats, glancing down at the noisy, hectic Isle only once as we left the spires, medinas, and harbours behind.
The flight to Daurith passed in a blur of panic, with the lightning soul and I trading theories and paranoia. We sailed over the rolling hills, over dense forestland where trees bent under the weight of winds from the ocean, and finally the sacred city came into view.
Nothing remained of the walls, the external gates, the guard posts.
Only one turmeric tower remained, its yellow stone bridges leading to nothing, the rest snapped clean off by god’s hand—or a wyvern’s spiked tail.
Black smoke curled from the ruins, from the bare skeletons of houses, from the shattered dome of a mosque.
A quarter—a mere quarter of the city had survived, and that was being generous.
“The hatching grounds,” Aliah yelled over the wind, the smoke, the fire still eating away at the remains of a market. Nabil choked out as many flames as he could, riding Mak behind me.
We sped across the city, wingbeats drowning out every other sound in my ears until all I heard was my own blood roaring.
So much had been burned to ashes. The stench shoved itself up my nose until I could taste it, until it sat heavy on my chest. There were so many blasted bits of ground that I lost count.
Buildings and bakeries and butcher’s shops had stood proud here for centuries, and now there were only scorch marks left to show for those years.
The bonding square was cracked in half, its tiles falling into the chasm created by strikes from a deliberate tail.
They’d sacked the city. Left nothing to salvage.
And when we reached the hatching grounds, when we saw that only fire and ash remained, I knew it was a message. For the lightning soul. For me.