Chapter 20
SERENNA
Wind sheared past Serenna’s ears, the city blurring in a smear of smoke and flame as they flew north. Vesryn locked into place at her left, scales rippling into armored plates along his jaw and throat. Fenn cut into the descent on her right, indigo skin glinting in the firelight.
Below, a squadron of Kaedryn’s druids swept over the lower streets, fire coiling from their wing claws. Each gripped a staff crowned with a Starshard, and Serenna tensed each time the gems shrieked their power loose.
Her own gem pulsed against her ribs where it sat buried in her leathers, bound with her blood. Anyone with the knowledge could seize it—lock her wings, force her to her knees, aim her magic at those she loved.
Serenna’s hand twitched toward the shard, wanting to tear it free. Fenn could open a rift to the volcano at the wraith fortress. She could throw the gem through and never feel its weight again.
But a battle was no place to disarm herself, no matter how much the risk made her skin crawl. And Kaedryn’s druids…
Serenna couldn’t warn an army already scattered through the battle, and even warned, how many would cast aside what their people had carried for generations? Without the gems, they had no Essence to fight.
The streets below Serenna resolved through the smoke into bodies packed shoulder to shoulder and wagons jammed wheel to wheel.
Families clogged the alleyways, spilling from doorways.
A druid hauled a cart forward with a single hand while the other arm cradled an infant too small to fly.
Behind them, an elder stumbled over rubble and went down, wings crumpling under the blind press of the crowd.
Centarya’s forces owned the rooftops, hurling Essence into the evacuation line. Bolts of force cratered the cobblestones, close enough to spray rock into the crowd. A child screamed when a shard lodged above her brow, blood washing over an eye.
Kaedryn’s warriors flew over the magus and reavers in diving runs, fire and Starshard volleys hammering the casters’ positions. But Centarya struck back from behind shields and broken cover, force and rending raking upward through the smoke.
A net of force snapped across a druid’s legs and ripped her from the sky. She hit the side of a building hard enough to shake dust from the stone, wings buckling around her before she dropped in a heap among the bodies below.
Serenna flared her wings into a hover, smoke billowing under her. “We need more portals,” she said as Fenn and Vesryn drew close. “Where are they evacuating to?”
“Caverns in the north,” Vesryn said. “I’ve been there with the rangers.”
“Then you can open portals directly there.”
Mara and Thalaesyn’s rifts swallowed bodies too slowly, the streets leading toward them filling faster than the portals could empty them.
Serenna’s gaze lifted to the rooftops, where Centarya’s casters still turned fleeing civilians into targets.
Her wing claws flexed, sparks lashing between the talons.
She had a debt to settle with the magus.
“I’ll keep the casters off you.”
Vesryn’s jaw tightened, a protest gathering behind his teeth, but Fenn flashed his fangs and spoke first. “I’ll get you closer, princeling. Try to survive the indignity.”
He snatched Vesryn’s arm and warped before the prince could object.
They reappeared lower over the district, and Vesryn tore a rift open above the cobblestones. A cluster of families stumbled into the void before Centarya’s wielders could adjust their aim.
Another portal opened at the mouth of an alley. Then another beside an overturned cart. Then three more ripped through the smoke along the crowd’s edges, drawing bodies away from the desperate rush toward the market.
Serenna veered for the nearest rooftop. The haze thinned over the building, revealing a magus with shadows writhing between his hands, his focus riveted on a druid defending the corridor below.
Serenna seized Skylash’s spark, and lightning cracked awake between her palms.
She hurled it at the rooftop.
The bolt struck the magus square in the chest, violet light bursting through armor. He flew backward off the edge and slammed into the street below, blood splashing across the ground.
Serenna skimmed lower, hunting for the next caster.
From another rooftop, a reaver launched a net of force around a passing druid and yanked her from the air.
She slammed down at his feet, bones cracking as her wings splayed across shattered tiles.
He was on her before she could rise, wrenching the Starshard staff from her hands and driving the gem to her throat.
His head whipped toward Serenna as she cut through the smoke.
The druid’s body jerked. Her claws snapped open, and fire poured from them, stolen and streaking straight toward Serenna.
Serenna’s stomach lurched. She knew that violation, the horror of being forced to deliver the blow.
Rage snapped at her heels as her wings beat harder. She snatched the fire midair and wrenched it around, hurling it back into the reaver’s face.
He staggered backward, flames pouring into his mouth, his scream scorched out. His boot caught the roof’s lip, and he went over, burning all the way down.
The Starshard staff clattered across the tiles where he’d stood.
Serenna landed hard, boots skidding. Her ankle threatened to buckle, Vesryn’s mending wearing thin against the jolt.
She dropped beside the druid. One wing bent wrong, its clawed tip clenched tight. Her eyes stared through Serenna without finding her, each breath rattling shallow.
Serenna pressed her palms to the ruined membrane and hauled mending from her Well. Crimson lattices sank into the wing, hooking shattered bones and drawing them back into place. Too fast. Too imprecise. Enough to hold, but nowhere near enough to fly.
A lash of shadow hissed past her ear.
Serenna threw a shield over them both. From the adjacent rooftop, another caster was already gathering Essence for a second volley.
Shadows struck, but her barrier held. The lattice wavered under her palms as she split Essence between mending and survival. Every thread she forced into the shield stole from the magic knitting the wing together.
Another wave of shadows slammed into her shield. Serenna gritted her teeth and poured more Essence into the barrier.
The shield would fail before she healed the wing. If the druid was going to survive, Serenna had to get her off the roof.
Against her chest, her Starshard pulsed, steady as a second heart. Its facets scraped at her awareness, hungry and familiar, waiting to be used. Serenna reached for the portaling talent locked inside.
The power that answered wasn’t hers alone.
Essence hit like a wave breaking. Vesryn’s magic surged through first, then Fenn’s crashed in. The two streams collided, too violent to merge. Serenna gasped as her Starshard seized the impact, prismatic light spilling through the seams of her armor.
The portal detonated open—wider than she’d meant, its edges braided with fractured radiance. The currents wound together, fighting her grip until she forced the wild rift smaller, the market waiting beyond it.
She shoved the Starshard staff into the druid’s arms and helped her limp through the opening, but Serenna stayed behind, sealing the void shut.
Across the gap between the buildings, the magus who’d been battering her shield lifted his hands for yet another barrage.
Serenna dropped the ward and snapped rending across the divide.
Shadows ripped from her with borrowed brutality, bolstered by Vesryn’s and Fenn’s magic, woven through her own. The caster ruptured where he stood, leaving only an afterimage of Essence burning in his place.
Serenna collapsed on the empty rooftop, palms flat against the broken tiles, her whole body shaking. Fractured light arced from her chest, ribbons of color stretching through the smoke in two directions.
One strand plunged toward the streets, where Fenn burned through the fleeing chaos, fire clearing a path around families. The other climbed into the haze, where Vesryn raced through the sky, portals tearing open in front of druids in flight.
With every heartbeat, the light connecting them pulsed. She hadn’t reached for their Wells through the bond. The Starshards had connected on their own.
Serenna launched from the rooftop, but she barely caught the air before Vesryn’s alarm cut into her mind.
He slammed into her before she cleared the smoke—arms locking around her, wings beating hard as he hauled her sideways.
“What did you do?” An array of light leaked through his armor where his Starshard lay hidden. “I felt you pull Essence straight through my gem.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Serenna said, too fast. “It just happened.”
Her Starshard glowed under her leathers with Vesryn’s and Fenn’s magic still flowing through it. She’d reached through her gem before, but never with all three shards reunited since the accidental bond had fused them into something none of them understood.
Vesryn’s grip on her arms loosened. His gaze dropped to the light between them, stretching down toward Fenn.
He yanked the bond in summons.
Fenn warped beside them in a rush of displaced air, tracking the magic, fangs bared in something that wasn’t quite a grin.
“Well,” he said. “That’s new.”
“Our Starshards linked again somehow,” Serenna said. The pressure of their magic still crowded her chest, too much power straining the cage of her ribs. “Like the gems are pulling all three of our Wells into the same current.”
“Can you hold that much?” Vesryn asked, gaze flicking from her to Fenn and back.
Serenna flexed her fingers, her Starshard humming for more. “For now.”
“Then keep tapping into it,” Vesryn said. “We’ll finish clearing this district.”
She nodded and they wheeled through the sky, a cord of fractured light haloing their flight through the wreckage of Asharyn.
Vesryn’s scattered portals still held—safe for now, each one funneling civilians out.
They followed the pull of Essence through the northern district, drawn from one flare of power to the next. Each pulse led them to another rooftop, another alley, another reaver or magus turning escape into slaughter.
Fenn warped through the streets, fire billowing from his claws. Around him, magus broke from positions they’d held all night as his flames engulfed them.
Serenna cracked lightning across the district in forking arcs that left stone scorched and smoking.
She hauled force from her Starshard to bleed the overload of Essence, and the burst punched through a rooftop and the floor beneath it.
The recoil rang through her teeth, her Starshard still ravenous after the strike.
She gasped as the current of power rushed out of her and surged through Vesryn instead. His shadows ripped through another building, and the entire structure crumbled to dust. He stared at his own hands but kept flying.
One pocket of resistance crumpled. Then another.
A reaver tore open a portal and lunged to flee. Serenna snapped a coil of force around his ankle and yanked him back from the rift. Vesryn’s shadows punched through the portal’s edge. It collapsed around the reaver’s waist, leaving only his legs to strike the cobblestones on their side.
A druid pinned under rubble reached for Serenna as she swept low over the street, one wing severed, her cry buried beneath the city’s breaking stone. Serenna banked hard, but Fenn was faster. He warped to the ground beside the druid, one claw already outstretched.
A magus on an adjacent roof struck first.
Shadows hammered into the rocks before Fenn could free her.
The druid’s arm burst apart in a spray of bone and blood, rending obliterating the rest of her.
Fenn’s fingers closed on empty air.
With a snarl, he whirled and vanished. He reappeared on the roof behind the magus, fire spilling from his wing claws. The magus barely turned before Fenn wrenched his head hard to the side, breaking his neck.
Fenn warped again before the magus fell against the tiles.
Time blurred as they drove Centarya’s forces from the city, the stars crawling across the sky.
Serenna’s wings shook with every beat—the tremor spreading to her hands, her jaw, deep behind her eyes. Exhaustion should’ve wrung her dry. Instead, the linked current kept surging through her, bright and relentless, too much power for a body running out of places to hold it.
The city grew quieter with every strike. She stopped counting the dead somewhere over the canal and just kept flying.
No reinforcements came from the capital. Centarya’s lines were breaking—wielders fleeing through their own portals, formations scattering without anyone left to rally them. Asharyn’s defenders slowly began to outnumber what remained of the enemy.
When the druids thinned from the sky and Essence no longer thundered through the streets, Serenna circled back to the market district with Vesryn and Fenn.
Near the far edge of the courtyard, Lykor held the final evacuation portal open while the defenders withdrew, hauling their wounded through. When the last wraith vanished, he let it collapse.
Only then did the city go quiet, save for the low crackle of fires still feeding on Asharyn’s bones.
Serenna landed next to a shattered spire, where a guildmaster’s estate had burned to the ground.
Shifting, she dispelled her aching wings, scales receding from skin that felt too thin without them.
She forced Essence down and the magic writhed—the current clinging to her veins, the Starshard humming in protest—as she smothered the power.
Prismatic light flickered through her leathers, dimmed, and finally guttered out.
Fenn touched down beside her while Vesryn hovered a moment longer, scanning the sky before lowering to the stone.
For a moment, none of them spoke. Ash drifted between them while the city burned on.
Footsteps echoed behind them.
Lykor approached, blood-soaked and silent, one wing sagging lower with every step. His glaives were still sheathed, appearing unused, and soot streaked across his jaw. His gaze swept over them, then turned to the empty sky.
They’d driven Centarya out, broken its formations, but Galaeryn’s armies would return. Asharyn would never be a haven again. Not with its walls shattered, its location known.
They’d held the line, but the city had paid too much to call it victory.
Lykor’s eyes found them, flat with what he already knew. His voice, when it came, was hoarse. “We’re done here.”
He opened a portal, but Serenna couldn’t walk through it. Not with the truth still buried between them. She faced him, spine bracing for his wrath.
“I know where Jassyn is.”