Chapter 45 #4
The next wave came through wearing the dead.
Fresh dead.
A candidate near the musicians’ platform moved. At first I thought she was alive. Then she stood with her neck still bent sideways where it had broken, one ear nearly touching her shoulder. Blood covered the front of her gown.
A boy nearby sobbed her name. She turned toward him. Her smile was wrong.
“Don’t!”
He froze. The dead candidate opened her mouth, and blackness spilled between her teeth.
Lidia burned her before she reached him.
The boy screamed.
So did Lidia.
She hadn’t meant to. The sound escaped when the corpse caught fire, skin blistering and splitting while the Shadowkin inside tried to force its way free through the body it wore. Lidia kept burning until the corpse collapsed.
The boy stared at what remained.
Lidia’s face broke. “I’m sorry.” Another corpse moved. She burned that one too.
Dax had to kill a candidate he had protected minutes earlier. The dead boy seized his ankle, and Dax looked down.
Black eyes stared back. The hesitation lasted too long. The corpse’s jaw split.
“Dax.” Emrin drove a spike of Earth through its skull. Blood and black matter sprayed over Dax’s boots. He jerked backward.
Emrin stepped between him and the body “Look at me.” He did. “You can hate this later.”
His face twisted. She caught the front of his coat. “Later.” Dax swallowed and nodded. She released him.
A Shadowkin came toward three wounded candidates behind them, and Dax turned.
Whatever had been on his face disappeared.
Earth slammed upward beneath the creature hard enough to throw it into the ceiling.
Emrin caught it when it fell, stone closing around its torso, and Dax closed both hands until the prison crushed inward.
Black matter squeezed between the cracks.
Lidia burned it.
No one asked her to.
That was how they fought now. Not as separate people scrambling through the same disaster, but as a system.
Rhovan controlled the hall around them, keeping the mountain from burying everyone alive.
Kaiz and the Fire wielders destroyed anything that might reform.
Calis moved among the injured with Damon, their Light serving as shields, weapons and whatever healing aid they could manage while the ward-masters fought to regain control of the Sanctum.
Emrin protected whatever couldn’t move. Dax destroyed whatever reached her. Lidia made sure the dead stayed dead. Raiden entered openings everyone else was too frightened to touch. Eiryx removed threats before most people knew they existed. Vareena kept Lyra standing.
And Lyra was the reason all of this existed.
I hated the thought because my father knew it too.
Eiryx found me near what remained of the musicians’ platform. Blood covered one sleeve, none of it his. “Eastern maintenance room,” he said. “Four attendants dead. Control lattice cut from inside.”
“Operatives?”
“Two escaped into the lower tunnels.”
“The anchor?”
“Outside the hall. I can feel the pull. Can’t find the other end.” A tremor rolled through the ceiling and dust rained over us. Rhovan barked orders to the Earth wielders on the western side, and another support rose beneath the gallery. Eiryx looked up. “They’re destabilizing the upper wards.”
“They don’t need the room intact.”
“They need her isolated.” We both looked toward Lyra. She stood near the remains of the banquet tables with Vareena and Emrin. Her Starlight came in shorter bursts now.
She was tiring.
Nobody else would have noticed. But I did.
Still no Shadow.
Thank the gods. Hate the gods. I didn’t know which. A new breach ripped open above the musicians. The first Shadowkin dropped directly among the survivors trapped beneath the broken platform. Raiden ran.
Vareena saw him. “Raiden!” He didn’t stop.
Three musicians were pinned beneath collapsed timber and stone. Raiden reached the first and dragged him free with his good arm while Fire struck the creature coming from his left. A second Shadowkin climbed over the wreckage behind him.
Vareena moved. Lyra reached for her and missed. “Vareena!”
Gold burst from her hands as she ran. Three constructs formed almost simultaneously. One wrapped the creature behind Raiden. Another curved over the trapped musicians. The third slammed into place along Raiden’s injured side just as a black limb came down.
The impact cracked the shield. Vareena stumbled but held it.
Raiden turned. “Get back!”
“Get them out!” A Shadowkin struck the first barrier while the gold restraint around the other began to buckle.
“Vareena!”
“RAIDEN!” The command left no room for argument.
He dragged the next musician free while Vareena held all three spells.
Her control was extraordinary. One barrier fractured, and she repaired it before the creature could force an arm through.
The restraint around the second Shadowkin started failing, so Vareena turned the damaged section into a cutting band and severed one of its arms without dropping either shield.
Raiden hauled the last musician clear.
“Vareena!” She looked toward him. He was safe.
Relief softened her face. Only for a second.
I saw the creature behind the collapsed table. It hadn’t attacked. It had flattened itself against the floor while she fought. It was waiting.
A Shadowwraith would have lunged the moment it saw exposed flesh. The Shadowkin had watched, learned, and waited until Vareena was maintaining three constructs, until Raiden shouted her name, until she looked at him.
“Vareena!” She turned at my voice.
Gold slammed into place between her and the creature, a fourth shield forming just before the Shadowkin hit it. The barrier cracked. Vareena planted both feet and poured Light into the fracture, gold spreading through the break even as black claws pushed against the other side.
For one impossible moment, she stopped it.
Then the creature changed.
Its shoulder collapsed inward. The arm narrowed as bone—or whatever passed for bone inside it—folded and compressed until the limb became a black point thin enough to fit through the damaged seam.
Vareena saw what it was doing.
Too late.
The limb punched through the shield and through her side. The sound was small, wet, almost nothing beneath the screaming around us.
Vareena looked down.
The black point had entered beneath her ribs and emerged through her back. Blood bloomed across the cream fabric, swallowing the gold embroidery.
Raiden screamed, but it wasn’t her name. It was only sound—raw and broken enough to cut through everything else in the hall.
The Shadowkin lifted her until her feet left the floor. For one terrible second she hung there, hands still glowing, her body trembling around the thing driven through it.
The pale gold ribbon remained tied in her hair.
Lyra turned to them. She didn’t understand how bad it was.
Then pure Starlight tore across the hall. Silver-blue power hit the Shadowkin hard enough to erase half of it. The remaining body exploded against the wall in a spray of black flesh and blood.
Vareena fell.
Raiden reached her. He caught her badly, one arm beneath her shoulders, and went down hard enough that both of them slid through blood and broken glass.
Lyra reached them first and dropped to her knees. “Vareena?” Her voice was wrong. Too ordinary. Like Vareena had fallen during training and would swear about the bruise tomorrow.
Raiden dragged her into his lap. Blood poured through the wound, soaking his hands as soon as he pressed them beneath her ribs. “No. No, no, no. Healer!”
Calis turned at his shout. Damon was already moving. So was I. I reached them before either and saw the wound clearly. The angle of it. It went beneath the ribs and upward. Too deep. Blood pulsed between Raiden’s fingers with every failing beat of her heart.
I knew.
I wished I didn’t.
Lyra looked at me.
I had spent my entire life learning how to identify wounds quickly—which ones could be bound, which needed magic, which demanded speed, and which demanded mercy.
My face betrayed me before I could lie.
Lyra’s changed. “No. You’re wrong.”
Mistress Calis dropped beside Vareena. Damon landed on his knees opposite her, white Council clothes dragging through blood. Calis put one glowing hand over the wound.
Gold flared. Vareena convulsed and Calis stopped. Her face went white.
“Again,” Raiden said. Calis looked at him. “Do it again.”
“Raiden—”
“Do it!”
Damon put both hands over Calis’s.
Their Light joined. Gold poured into Vareena’s body. For half a heartbeat, hope did something cruel to all of us. Then the Light came back out through the wound mixed with blood.
Damon closed his eyes.
Raiden stared at him. “No.”
Vareena coughed, and blood touched her lips.
Raiden bent over her. “No, no. Stay with me. Vareena, look at me.”
Her eyes moved toward him. The gold in Calis’s hands faded. Vareena’s Light did not answer it. Dax reached us and stopped so abruptly Emrin collided with his back. His face emptied. “No.”
Emrin came around him. All night she had known what to do—where to put her hands, which wall to hold, who needed saving first. Now she stared at Vareena and had nothing. Lidia arrived with blood streaking her red hair and Fire around one hand. Then she saw Vareena.
The flame went out.
Eiryx reached us and stopped, gaze dropping to the wound.
He knew too. His face didn’t change. He simply turned and buried both knives into the Shadowkin trying to reach us.
Because the battle hadn’t stopped. That was the obscenity of it.
A scream rose nearby. Kaiz’s Fire roared across the western breach.
Rhovan shouted for support. Halos held the northern arch with Light blazing from both hands.
Bodies covered the floor, the musicians’ platform burned, and the air stank of blood, ash, wine, and the sick sweetness of Shadowkin feeding.The world had not stopped because Vareena was dying.
Neseryn joined Eiryx without a word. Together, they kept the monsters away.