Chapter 41
VARIDIAN
If I had to die, giving my life to protect my mother, my sister, and the rest of Ithanys from a swarm of enemy wyverns wasn’t a bad reason to go.
I only wished Ameirah was safe in the Red Star, and that my legion and Kamaal were with her.
But Ameirah would never be sent from my side again, never be anything less than my equal, and I couldn’t deny the comfort of her stare locking on mine in those scorching moments before the light devoured us all.
I didn’t look away, not as my vision burned to nothing, not as darkness fell.
No, not darkness. I squinted, my eyes pierced with sharp pain as I tried to focus them.
It was that prickle of hurt that snapped me back to reality.
I couldn’t see, but I felt Mak beneath me, his wings beating to keep us in place.
I could feel the wind against my skin—hot and sticky but no longer blistering.
Mak? I reached for our link, exhaling roughly when I felt his confusion, as cloying and slow as mine. Still with me?
His reply was a grumble, low and sluggish. Alive. He was alive, and so was I.
My next exhale was a groan, and for a moment I revelled in the way my chest expanded. Never again would I take breathing for granted. I’d come near to death before, had almost kissed the other side, but this? This was the closest I’d come yet. I shook, adrenaline rampaging through me.
“Ameirah,” I rasped, staring through a slit in my eyelids, trying to focus my eyes on the last place I saw her, wide eyed and frightened as she clung to Raheema.
“Zaarib? Aliah? Nabil? Shula? Fa—” My teeth clacked together, pain shattering my chest far worse than anything the eruption of light had done. Fahad was gone, and it tore into my heart to realise it all over again. The automatic instinct to call his name was jarring and cruel.
Wyvern began to grumble and call out to each other.
“I’m—I’m okay,” Ameirah said, her tentative voice enough to make my eyes fall shut, to make weakness bow my body for a moment.
Everyone else checked in, one by one. Not a single one of us had been lost. A miracle indeed.
And when the Elani brothers scouted the lake, hiding in the shadow of the mountain that had saved us, another miracle came. The aerial army was gone. The River Eater had blasted them from the sky, each and every one.