Chapter 4
Hope
“I’ve seen these creatures before,” Jake whispered.
Ciaran swallowed. “So have I.”
Lenna cocked an eyebrow at both males. She faked clearing her throat, and since they didn’t even look at her or notice her cue, she added, “Care to share?”
“You won’t like it,” Jake muttered so quietly it was barely audible. Lenna’s eyes widened, her mouth shut as if she had been taken aback by something unexpected.
“Where have you seen them?” Hope asked.
“In ancient tomes shelved in the dark sections of the libraries in the West and East Houses, when I was researching the Fifth power,” Jake said, crossing his arms in front of his chest as his silver eyes narrowed, examining the approaching creatures with dissecting-intent.
Ciaran nodded. “They are called sangins. And as far as I remember, none had been spotted in centuries. They can only be born of the Cardinal Queen’s blood. With one drop of her black blood, one creature is born with her direct magic. They obey only her.”
The corners of Hope’s lips tugged upwards, a low chuckle escaping her lips without her consent. A sudden slap of realization fueled the rushing blood in her veins. She hadn't received any better news in a long time than this.
One of the red-haired twins stepped right in front of her, holding Hope’s shoulders with slightly sweaty hands.
Hope met Lenna’s golden eyes, glowing under a furrowed brow.
From the firm grip on her skin, the transparent worry of her friend was not only towards the flying army behind her but likewise towards Hope’s mental health.
“Erm, Hope—what part of having a thousand-odd black-feathered winged creatures with talons heading towards us, creatures product of the blood of the Queen who just stole your throne, is causing you to…smile?”
“It’s interesting,” Hope pursed her lips.
“Interesting how, to be precise? I think they aren’t the friendly kind to come have tea with us. I think they are coming to make us their tea.”
“Interesting that there are so many of them.” Hope’s nostrils flared as she tilted her chin, looking at Lenna and then at the sangins closing in. “They are born from the Queen’s blood, you said?”
Jake’s silver stare was fixed on the black flying mass, but Ciaran’s dark blue eyes observed Hope with a twinkling glint. Both of them replied in unison: “Yes.”
Hope nodded, her knuckles whitened at how strongly she held the hilt of her favorite daggers.
“The Cardinal Queen might sit on my throne, but she can’t be in full force or spirits. She bled a lot, possibly over the centuries of her curse, to birth this many sangins. And a bleeding, harmed or still-recovering Queen might be less unbeatable than a full-strength one.”
What Hope didn’t admit out loud was that she knew beating the Cardinal Queen was still virtually impossible. Even her five red-Cardinal sisters hadn’t beaten her. They had only succeeded in restraining her. Temporarily.
But whereas before Hope had been willing to go on a suicide mission with a zero percent chance of kicking such a powerful goddess out of the Organ House, she now held a minuscule possibility of pulling this off.
Especially if the Cardinal Queen had indeed been as hurt as Hope calculated, based on the number of sangins floating above the Radel Sea.
Many questions needed to be answered, but those would have to wait.
With a sharp inhale, she unsheathed one of her sharpest, thinnest daggers from the belt on her right thigh and caressed the blade with her other hand.
“If these sangins are our most imminent enemies, we might as well go greet them,” Hope said.
She left the room without another glance back, fully aware of the night scent and the steps of the others following her to battle on the upper platform of the navia.
The pale sun rose gradually as if it weren’t the brightest witness of this encounter between beings and blood-born creatures.
The moment Hope and Ciaran stepped onto the platform of the navia, the pressure of time was obvious.
There wasn’t a second to lose. Not as the sangins would reach them in approximately less than five minutes, and the navia was still in the middle of the sea.
Being in contained floating vehicles that functioned better at night put the passengers—all courtrades, panom, and human—of the fifteen navias at a great disadvantage.
Hope walked towards the rail of the metallic platform, the cool bars welcoming under her fingers as she peered over. They were too far from the shore of the East Petal to reach it before the sangins reached them.
Ciaran followed, his hands finishing an array of complex movements, dozens of swirls of pure black shadows heading towards every courtrade under his command.
“Would your courtrades be able to create blocks of shadows around each navia? Impenetrable, massive bubbles of solid darkness?” Hope asked. They had little time, and the options, despite the magic aboard, were more limited than she would have wished for.
The corners of his lips tugged upwards. “Precisely what I instructed them to do five seconds ago.”
Hope looked at the navias behind their leading one, and indeed, blocks of shadows were fast rising around the vehicles, building gigantic spheres around the moon-shaped navias, protecting them—shielding them.
She had seen those blocks before, in the underwater net of vessels that balanced Thyrian territories, and she knew they didn’t last forever.
If the creatures attacked it repeatedly, with enough force, they would end up perforating the solid shadows.
Hopefully, they would last long enough for the courtrades to reach safety.
“No shadow block on our navia?” She lifted an eyebrow, trying to contain a smile as she said, “Feeling tired, Ciaran?”
“Me? Always.” He chuckled lowly, biting the metal ring on his lower lip as his metallic hand stroked her forearm. “I was hoping the panoms aboard, along with you and I, we can make this thing reach the shore before they reach us. Unless you are too lazy?”
Hope grinned, despite the close army of sangins flying towards them. “I’m such a lazy woman.” She glanced around one last time. “Fifteen small targets are more difficult to chase than one big one, Ciaran. We need to split your fleet.”
“Good point, my beauty. On it.” His hands sent swirls of darkness towards the other navias, and the now shielded vehicles allowed his messages before dispersing in different directions.
“Is this the greatest, most altruistic plan of the Darkness Commander and the Organ Mandor? Ensuring a memorable death for themselves and their closest friends, yet allowing the rest of the courtrade army to be safe and sound? Because fuck that, assholes,” Lenna spat, her arms on her hips as she demanded answers.
“We must reach the shore as soon as we can, so we can jump out of the navia and moure somewhere far from here.” The Llunal-driven magic of the navias didn’t allow transporting themselves using panom methods, so they would only be able to moure to travel across space once they were on land.
“Somewhere safe and sangins-free, please,” Sasha added. Her black curls were a mess in the wind, and Brendon pushed a strand behind her ear.
Lenna tapped her foot. “Is there much more to debate, or can we get the hell out of here?”
Hope lifted her closed fists to the air, ready to open them and Give as much wind as she could gather to propel the navia to the land of Thyria.
Jake, who kept avoiding eye contact, Ayla, who couldn’t make eye contact, and Lenna, who made particularly pissed-off and impatient eye contact, also had their hands ready to wield.
“We have around one minute and twenty seconds until the sangins reach us, based on their current speed and our current speed. We can do this,” Hope said. She didn’t miss the way Lenna’s eyebrows shot to the sky or how Ayla gasped.
Jake, however, looked impassable, but his hands didn’t wait to slice the air in front of him in vertical lines, his silver gaze fixed on the flying creatures in the sky.
One by one, flying creatures started falling, their winged bodies cut in half as his hands Harmed, Harmed, Harmed.
It wouldn’t be enough to stop all the sangins in time, and Hope wasn’t sure Jake was not simply Harming out of self-satisfaction, nevertheless, it was helpful.
Without further ado, Hope opened her own hands, concentrating on using the Giving power of the North Petal, as if she was pulling the petal from the panom mark at the back of her neck.
On another occasion, she had Given for over thirty hours with minimal stops to reach a desired destination that was far away.
This time though, what she needed to do was the opposite.
She needed speed to reach a short distance.
A lot of speed. It was a sprint, not a marathon.
So, Hope intensified her magic, concentrating it on that single Giving petal, until it pulsated strongly on the Cardinal-red mark of her skin, until the wind emanating from her hands was as strong as a small tornado, pushing the navia closer and closer.
She couldn’t take her focus away from her target—the land. Yet, not being aware of the movements and actions of the sangins could be a fatal mistake. Had they separated into fifteen small groups? Had they, too, increased speed?
Ayla stood silently next to Hope, her hands opened as she Gave the force of nature they needed to move the huge metal vehicle.
The silver metal of the twin’s eyes shone against the rising sun, and Hope couldn’t help but remember how Ayla used to suffer pain in her eyes whenever the inner scale of her magic was unbalanced.
Now, not only would Ayla not go through blinding pain ever again, but she also could use as much magic as she wanted without worrying about the magical scale tilting inside of her.
Ayla had access to every panom power except Taking, since she had donated the South Petal of her mark to Lenna to help her recover her panom powers.
What Ayla had instead, though, as well as only Hope and Jake in the whole of Terrha, was the Fifth Power.
A power so strong and devastating, literature considered a curse and a blessing. A power they had given everything for, even though they hadn’t yet put it to use. A power that surely would be required in whatever the future brought them.
The metal of the navia crashed violently against the shore, sand flying in every direction as many of the crew lost their balance. It took Hope one second to glance backwards to assess the situation.
The situation was that they were fucked.
The sangins had further sped up, and they were not half as far as Hope had expected them to be. No—they were too close, and that meant they had less time to get out of there. She momentarily crossed stares with Ciaran and saw a reflection of her growing, unusual fear on his clenched jaw.
“Everyone please disembark,” Hope shouted while her hands copied Jake’s incessant ones and started Harming sangins. “Panoms, moure two people to the Crystal Clear Safehouse in Corentre, then return to moure more until everyone is safe.”
Ayla nodded, holding Nina’s hand and calling Indianna as she started disembarking.
The instructions were simple, and Hope had no doubt that the moment they were on the beach, Ayla’s hands would touch the back of the other’s necks, and they would be gone, landing straight on Ciaran’s guarded safehouse in the middle of the island.
The sangins had finally reached them, and they were huge. The bodies of the black-feathered creatures were approximately as tall as Ciaran’s waist, with sharp talons on their front and back claws and piercing, wholly black eyes that didn’t falter.
These beasts were programmed to eat, destroy, kill.
Jake continued Harming, cutting the beasts in half, their black blood pooling around their feet.
Ciaran choked the sangins with shadows around their necks and wings, immobilizing them before cracking their bones.
Hope Harmed with one hand and sliced the closest sangins with a dagger in the other, decapitating them with the metal of her blades.
Even as bodies of sangins piled up quickly on the platform on the navia, black blood splashing their faces and leathers, it was more obvious than ever—the dark cloud of beasts approaching in the sky was never-ending.
They wouldn’t be able to kill all of them.
They had to escape. Retreat. And they were running out of time.
“Lenna, take them with you. You have to moure away now,” Hope begged.
Lenna swallowed, looking at Jake as she bit her lip so hard it bled.
“Sasha, Brendon!” she called, taking her golden, tearful eyes from the man with black hair swirling as he Harmed.
Lenna disappeared from Hope’s sight when she started climbing down the navia.
Brendon aimed to follow Lenna, pulling the hand of a panicked Sasha as she covered her black-curled head to keep the sangins at bay.
It wasn’t enough.
One moment, Sasha was letting Brendon lead her.
The next, five sangins were approaching her at the same time from different angles.
Hope roared as she threw two daggers with one hand, one after the other, straight into the right eyes of two sangins.
With her other hand, she drew consecutive, vertical slices as she Harmed, wishing for the bodies of the creatures to break in different ways.
The first slice cut a sangin in half. The second decapitated another. By the time she finished the third slicing movement, though, the talons of the fifth sangin were coming out the other side of Sasha’s chest. If it could even be called a chest any longer.
It was a tangle of destroyed organs, bloody skin, and torn clothes.
Hope Harmed the winged creature, but by then, there was nothing left of Sasha’s chest that could be remotely repaired.
The world seemed to freeze around Hope as she stepped closer, shaking her head slowly.
The sliced head of the murdering sangin lay still on the platform, unmoving.
The shining blackness of his eyes seemed to see the broken, destroyed body of the woman they had killed.
The absolute terror in Sasha’s eyes was more painful to see than her ripped-apart body.
Hope kneeled down, her hands shaking as she closed Sasha’s eyelids.