9. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
T he Fire Fae marched forward, and I rushed to the front where my father was.
“Pada!” I yelled as I pushed through until Ace wrapped an arm around my waist and launched us over the remaining crowd of soldiers to get to my father and Hallan.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” His voice was ragged as I tried to explain.
“They ambushed us. They took down the healers with hemlock and Ima…” My voice fell and my father’s eyes went dark, as if I had just extinguished the last of his light and hope.
He nodded, looking into the distance. I thought I had confirmed what he already knew.
He cocked his head toward Valla and she grinned at us, a knowing expression on her face as we put together her plan all along.
She never intended for a fair battle. Valla had snaked her way into our land and placed her men strategically like a game of cat and mouse.
She aligned her Tile pieces carefully, right under our noses.
“You poisoned them.” My father spoke up to Valla. She unsheathed her sword, revealing the glinting light-brown, straw-colored liquid dripping from it.
“I don’t play by rules, Orion. I make my own.”
My father snapped. He lunged forward, blade drawn in one hand, water whipping from the other, with Hallan by his side.
Everyone moved at a breakneck speed before flames, water, and wind clashed like a tidal wave of power.
Flames licked up the trees, and the forceful winds blew down the weak ones, turning them into nothing but ash.
Shouts and booming orders echoed from all directions as my father yelled, “Watch the blades! Try to disarm them!”
“Turn their weapons on them!” Hallan shouted from the sky.
I didn’t even see him take flight. Flames barreled at the winged men soaring above the battlefield.
Some fell, the smell of burning hair and flesh tainting the air.
Swords clanked, arrows surged through the winds, missing their original targets.
The elves used their powerful winds to shoot the arrows back at the Fire Fae, making them lurch before falling to the ground.
After a few moments, they started convulsing and puking from the poison in their veins before one of our people finished them off.
Valla, Hallan, and my father battled, their movements full of grace and power.
How Valla was managing to take on both of them was unbelievable.
She blocked their blows with raging fire and poisoned metal.
Her movements were full of complete control.
She blocked and weaved and fought with a precise lethal venom.
It took years to master a skill of that level, something she had to have obsessively trained herself to do over the years.
Maybe she trained with her father, too. The thought made me realize how different things could be when you had a loving role model compared to one full of hatred.
A part of me pitied her, but only for a moment.
Ace and I were back-to-back on the ground as we fought the Fire Fae who charged us.
I sunk my battle axe into a man’s shoulder.
His flames fizzled out, and he toppled to my feet.
I shifted, withdrawing my blade as I readied for the next attack, when a searing, hot pain shot through my side.
The man on the ground tried to attack me with his flames again in the last moments of his life.
I kicked him away, finishing the job I had started, before moving on.
Rain poured down from the sky. I wasn’t sure if it was from the gods, mother nature, or from the power of my people.
Fire sizzled and hissed against the cold water.
Wind gusted around me, making my dripping hair plaster to my face.
I tasted the salt from sweat and iron from blood with every swing of my arm as it painted the wind and water.
I glanced over my shoulder back to my father and Hallan, but something was wrong. My vision grew hazy, time seemed to slow, and sounds were distorting. At the same time my eyes found my father’s, it was as if he knew something was amiss. He hesitated, and Valla took advantage of her opportunity.
“Orion!” Hallan’s voice boomed across the land as he soared through the air, pushing my father out of the way, taking Valla’s sword through his heart.
I watched as it played out in front of me so slowly, as if time had stood still.
I felt my legs go weak. My father yelled for me as a bright white light stretched across the land in front of me.
Was this the end? The light was erratic and crazed as it moved in every direction before it shot through my father from Valla’s hand.
Lightning. She had mastered beyond her fire.
I screamed as my father’s body fell to the ground.
I moved toward him but my legs failed me as I collapsed into the mud.
Everything was on fire, but no flames caressed my skin.
Every ragged breath made my side flare in pain.
Ace’s dirty face came into view. I felt him cradle my head as he tried to sign to me.
“Where are you hurt?” he signed, but my limbs felt too heavy to sign anything back. I tried to speak, but it came out more like a murmur.
“Side,” was all I could manage. Without hesitation, Ace ripped apart my burnt leather vest and found a leaking wound. The man from before didn’t just burn me, he had stabbed me. Ace growled under his breath.
“Stay with me, Eme,” he signed to me, but his hand grew foggier by the minute.
Ace grunted as he tried to stand, and I thought it was from trying to lift me until he dropped me to the ground and turned toward an enemy.
A dagger’s hilt protruded out of his back, directly between his wings.
The fae man ignited his arms in flames. He looked as if he were staggering, already injured, but that could have been my vision playing tricks on me, making the world feel like it was shifting around me.
A burst of air blasted from Ace, but it didn’t harm me. The icy wind made my skin pebble against my soaked clothes. The fae that attacked barreled away like a leaf falling away from the trees in autumn.
I watched as Ace created a dome of wind around us. He turned back, cradling me quickly against his chest, before he launched us into the raging elements around us.
Fire, wind, and water came from all directions. Pouring rain pelted against my skin like shards of glass as I felt my body drift in and out. Ace roared across the land, and as if his people knew the call, they took flight, but it was too late to retreat.
Bright light, red flames, and darkness consumed the sky as Ace’s wings carried us through the devastation of Valla’s wrath. Suddenly, we weren’t in the storm of chaos anymore. The surrounding air stilled. The world had gone quiet, as if Ace had become an island of calm amid stormy seas.
We had made it out. Ace’s flying staggered as he glided through the empty skies.
Dark spots clouded my vision. Unconsciousness was calling to me.
I did everything I could to keep my eyes open as Ace swayed toward the ground below.
His breathing grew ragged and uneven as my head lay limp against his chest. His flying faltered.
I felt weightless before I met the cold earth below, and then nothing.