Chapter 40 #2
Alyssa was there. I could feel her through our connection, blazing like a sun at the centre of the battle, the magic of five courts pouring through her in a river of power that made the air around her shimmer.
She’d recovered from the dark moment. I’d felt that too, felt the paralysis and the fear and then the agonizing climb back.
We had pulled her out. All of us, together, our bonds the rope she’d used to haul herself from the well.
But she wasn’t just recovered. She was transformed.
Something had hardened in her during the fall and the gruelling climb back.
The woman I moved toward now was not the woman who had stood on the massacre grounds the night before, afraid of tomorrow.
This woman had looked at the worst thing Arik could do and had decided that it wasn’t enough to stop her.
I reached her position at the same time as Damon.
His shadows had been working the field independently, dark tendrils that scouted and reported and occasionally wrapped around a dark creature’s legs and dragged it into the earth.
The wolf was a constant presence at the edge of his consciousness.
I could feel it through the bond. Young but fierce, learning its strength through combat the way young wolves always did.
When he finally shifted he’d be glorious.
“Maddox.” Alyssa’s voice was hoarse. There was blood on her face, someone else’s, and her eyes held the steady burn of someone who had moved past fear into the territory beyond it. “I need you on the western flank. The creatures are pushing hardest there.”
“What about the Endless?” I looked at the lines of controlled humans still advancing from the east. Every one of them was someone’s family. Every one of them was a person screaming behind their own eyes the way Damon had screamed. “We can’t keep fighting around them forever.”
“We won’t have to. Not for much longer.” She looked at Damon, and something passed between them through the bond that I felt as a pulse of dark and light intertwining. “But I need more time. And I need the western flank to hold.”
I nodded. The fire settled in my hands, ready.
Before I turned, I looked at Damon. He stood in his cocoon of shadow, the wolf’s silver gleaming in his eyes, and I thought about what he had done at the Fifth Court.
The sacrifice he’d made. He could have been free.
Could have had the nightmare ripped from his mind forever.
Instead he’d turned to Nymeria and said, “Bring back Rhidian.”
For me. Because Damon had watched through his own eyes as the nightmare destroyed lives, and when he finally had the chance to fix one thing, he’d chosen to fix the thing that was breaking me.
Rhidian was alive because of this man. Fighting somewhere on this field, sword in hand, no magic and no fear, because Damon had decided that his brother’s guilt was a heavier burden than his own imprisonment.
“Thank you,” I said. I’d said it before. I’d say it again. I’d keep saying it until the words wore smooth but never lost their meaning.
Damon’s shadows shifted. The barest flicker of a smile crossed his face. “Go burn something.”
The western flank was worse than Alyssa had described.
The dark creatures had concentrated their assault here, drawn by something in the landscape that I couldn’t identify.
The terrain dipped into a shallow valley where a stream cut through the Spring Court grounds, and the creatures had used the low ground as a highway, pouring through the depression in numbers that overwhelmed the fighters holding the line.
Ezra was there. The former Endless commander had pulled his people into a defensive crescent around the valley’s mouth, but they were being pushed back step by step.
I could see the strain in their faces. These were men and women who had been freed from Arik’s control months ago.
They knew what it felt like to be puppets.
They knew what the Endless advancing from the east were suffering.
And they were fighting anyway, for the chance that no one would ever be enslaved like that again.
“What do you need?” I asked Ezra as I reached the line.
He looked at me. Then at the fire in my hands. “Can you close the valley?”
I looked at the stream, the depression, the steady flow of creatures using it as an approach route. Close the valley. Seal the highway. Cut off the reinforcements.
“I can do better than close it,” I said.
I walked to the edge of the depression and planted my feet.
The fire built in my chest, not the panicked eruption of Ice Falls but a slow, deliberate gathering.
The Summer Court magic drew from the sun that was struggling to break through Arik’s poisoned sky.
I breathed out and the valley was consumed by flames.
Not a wave of destruction. A wall of growth.
The flames hit the ground and the ground responded, the Spring magic recognizing the Summer heat and answering with everything it had.
The stream boiled and the banks erupted.
Grass became bramble and thorns. A living barrier of intertwined plants, each one burning with a fire that didn’t consume them but strengthened them.
A wall of burning thorns, ten feet high, sealing the valley from end to end.
The dark creatures hit the wall and recoiled. The thorns burned them. The fire burned them. But the wall itself didn’t break, didn’t blacken, didn’t char. It burned and grew and burned and grew, feeding on itself in an endless cycle of Summer fire and Spring growth.
Ezra stared. His fighters stared. I stared too, if I was being honest, because I hadn’t known I could do that.
Fire and earth, working together. The wall pulsed with a warmth that I could feel even from where I stood, and through the Spring Court bond I sensed Tank’s reaction. A flicker of surprise, then approval, then something that felt like the earth itself leaning into the fire and asking for more.
Behind me, the fighters regrouped. Without the constant pressure of creatures pouring through the valley, they could breathe.
Could reorganize. Could tend to the wounded and redistribute weapons and remember that they were fighting for something worth bleeding for.
I watched a former Endless help another Fae to her feet, the two of them exchanging a look that held no words but spoke volumes.
Survivor to survivor. Fighter to fighter.
This was what the fire was for. Not the battlefield alone, but the spaces between the violence. The moments of protection and repair and hope that made the fighting worth enduring.
I felt the tears before I understood why they were there. Not grief. Not anymore. Something that had been sitting in my chest since the moment I’d watched Rhidian die, something heavy and sharp and corrosive, shifted. Loosened. Let go.
Not completely. It would never leave completely.
I would carry the memory of that moment for the rest of my life, the way you carry any scar that goes deep enough to mark the bone.
But the guilt that had been wrapped around it, the conviction that I didn’t deserve his magic because I hadn’t been able to save him, was dissolving in the heat of what I’d just built.
Rhidian hadn’t given me this fire as punishment. He’d given it to me as trust. Trust that I would protect it. That I would learn from it.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The fire flickered in my palm, warm and patient.
“Hold the line,” I told Ezra. “Nothing’s getting through that wall.”
He nodded. Something in his expression had shifted too. Not awe. Respect. The kind you gave to someone who’d earned it in front of you.
I turned back toward the heart of the battle, where Alyssa burned like a star and the bonds hummed with the promise of what was coming next. The fire went with me, settled and sure, and for the first time since Rhidian had died, I felt like I deserved to carry it.