Chapter 48
VARIDIAN
The fall happened so fast, the world streaking past us in a blur of vertical rain and tangled wings.
In seconds, we dropped out of that bloody battle, plummeting towards the bloodstained grass like so many riders before us.
I clung to Mak, buried my face in his neck, and refused to let go even as I speared my soul across land and woods and sky, reaching for Ameirah.
To feel her one last time before impact with the ground broke my body, broke my neck.
Dusk-Breaker slipped from my grasp. I began to slide from Mak’s back despite every effort to cling to him. My leg lost its grip first, rain driving into us, the storm itself bellowing at us to fight. But Mak had nothing left and—
Magic pummelled us, smacking into Mak’s belly like a solid wall, and his wings splayed as our fall jerked to a stop. We hovered in the air, only fifty metres above the ground warriors, and it was so impossible that I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t feel my fingers even as I watched them tremble.
Mak whined an apology that I dismissed before it had fully formed, leaning forward to rest my forehead against his neck. Whoever had halted our fall, be it allies or god or the Zalaam queen herself, I didn’t give a shit. We’d been spared.
Wyvern roars cut through the drumming of the rain in my ears. Stronger, louder—cries from wyverns that weren’t injured and beaten down after hours of combat. I lifted my head, scoured the ground and what I could see of the sky. Above us was all-out chaos as wyverns clashed with wyverns.
But there, flying in from the west, were ten legions.
Morysen legions? I thought all the riders who wanted to fight had already answered the call, but this was undeniably a new wave of legions, and they were ours.
Not marked by a white band, but by the flame they unleashed on the outer edges of the Zalaam wyverns.
And where magic had failed to drop the bigger creatures, fire succeeded.
“Hit them with fire,” I yelled, hating how weak, how ragged my voice was. But someone heard, what felt like miles above where we hung like easy prey, or else they noticed the new legions too, because they bellowed the order and it spread from rider to rider.
Hope swelled like a lump in my throat.
That wyvern, the lightning soul said. We know that rider.
I located her just as the wall of magic that stopped our fatal fall wrapped around us like a bubble.
It carried us off the battlefield and into the copse of trees just off the road where we’d set up a medical tent.
Emmahin—that was Emmahin, leading a legion to hammer the right flank of the Zalaam wyverns.
I wanted to see how many of the enemy scattered, how many fell to the new flame, but the magic carried us under the treeline. It didn’t feel suffocating or harsh. Rather, the magic felt like the caring hand of a mother when it deposited us at the end of a line of injured wyverns.
“Will he live?” I demanded the moment I slid off Mak’s back. I landed on my ass on the hard-packed ground with enough of a jolt to send pain up my spine. “Tell me he’ll live.”
“We’ll do everything we can,” a steel-eyed healer in her fifties said as she stalked up to us, her sleeves rolled up and expression impossible to read. “Go see one of the medics in the end tent, get out of our way.”
“I’m not leaving him,” I growled, trying to take a calming breath and failing. We were alive, bones whole instead of shattered, but that wound in Mak’s side had bled so much it coated his scales and darkened the woods floor even now.
The back of the healer’s hand collided with my shoulder, stunning me enough that I moved back automatically. “You’ll only get in the way. Go wait over there with the other riders if you must.”
A glance at where she pointed showed battered, bloody people of various ages slumped on the grass.
“Save him,” I implored her, clearing my throat when it emerged thick, strangled.
“That’s my job,” the healer replied, bustling me a few steps further.
Resigned, I collapsed in the grass next to the other riders waiting to hear the fate of their mounts.
The noise was the hardest part of sitting, waiting.
The whimpers and yelps from the injured wyverns were bad enough, let alone screams from within the tents where medics worked on injured riders.
But the wall of sound from the battlefield just beyond the treeline cut through my blood like a shot of lightning.
I tried not to flinch as the shouts grew louder, more frequent, as if the Zalaam forces had pushed us back further.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I strode across the trampled grass to where Mak slumped, unconscious, while three healers worked on him.
I couldn’t feel him through our link, but he was out cold so that wasn’t surprising.
That didn’t stop the fear that gripped my chest with ice cold fingers when I saw the extent of the wound.
His blood had been cleared away, revealing a slice that went from under his wing all the way to where his leg began.
It was a wonder his organs had stayed inside his body all those hours in the sky.
Guilt twisted my stomach until I tasted vomit. I should have brought him here hours ago. Would he be conscious now if the first wound had been treated?
“Don’t even think about getting in the way,” the no-nonsense healer warned me, eyeing me like she expected I’d force my way through to Mak.
“How is he?” I asked, and didn’t recognise the emptiness of my voice.
“Alive, and going to stay that way,” she replied gruffly, her brown hands flat to the wound. “He won’t be able to fly for weeks, though.”
I swallowed. Breathed through the ringing in my head. Forced myself to nod, to thank the woman, and walked away. Numb legs carried me all the way through the trees onto the hill that overlooked the battlefield.
Worse—it was so much worse than I’d dreaded, even with the Torn Isle legions arriving to help. Too many enemy wyverns remained in the air, and too few of ours pushed them back. Still hundreds, but how long until those mounts fell like Makrukh?
More Zalaam commanders had arrived in the time I’d been slumped in the dirt, awaiting Mak’s fate.
I picked out twenty of them in the storm-dark sky, then thirty, and gave up at fifty.
But the roaring screams hadn’t come from the aerial legions; they came from the ground warriors, and why became clear instantly.
In the mindless chaos of battle, I’d forgotten that the dark army that covered the ground like a shadow wasn’t simply armed, ruthless, and twisted by a magic so dark it was forbidden.
They were winged. Now those soldiers flew through our neat rows of fighters, ripping into faces and throats and tearing limbs clean off.
And whatever warriors survived, those Zalaam soldiers left to the next wave—a third wave I’d been absent for.
Tigers. Those stolen tigers from Kalder finally revealed, and unleashed on our brave warriors.
There wasn’t a front line anymore; there was only screaming and running. Desperate pulses of magic. Swords turned slick by the rain.
So here it was—the full might of the Zalaam army—and it was crushing us.
Too many gaps lay above, in what had once been a flawless formation.
Too many warriors had fallen on the ground, their bodies trampled as Zalaam soldiers ripped into those still alive.
So many. My throat closed up. So many people who had answered our desperate plea for help, who’d come to fulfil a promise that our home would not be conquered by evil.
Defeat was so close, it was inevitable. We were disorganised and fear ate through our allies like a poison. All while the Zalaam army remained focused and unfaltering.
What hope I’d clung to that we’d win this, that bravery and courage and good would triumph died when a horn blew.
Retreat, it called. It’s over. Retreat, or we die here.