Chapter 26
LYKOR
Some vengeance demanded solitude.
Lykor set two squads of wraith on Jassyn’s heels while the magus joined him in tending to the remaining wounded. Only then did Lykor slip away, opening a portal into a chamber blacker than the space between stars.
The stench struck first—urine, dried blood, and the sour reek of flesh kept two days in filth. A chill leeched from the stone, biting through his leathers.
Lykor closed the rift behind him, his breath cutting white through the dark. He flared his sight, clawing the nearest shapes from the gloom.
Red eyes burned from the base of the wall. The general of Alari crouched there, reduced to the beast he’d always claimed wraith were.
Once, it had been Lykor and his people buried where the mountain ground every hour to dust, Elashor smirking from the far side of freedom. Now the walls caged Elashor alone with Lykor, stone thick enough to devour every scream.
“Thirsty?” Lykor asked, hauling on Rimeclaw’s gift.
Frost armored his knuckles. He flicked his wrist and water coiled through the air between them, snaking past Elashor’s cracked lips.
Elashor’s throat worked, and Lykor ripped it back.
He snapped his fingers for the insult of it. The water froze before it struck the floor and burst into shards. “Shame.”
The general still carried troop movements, Galaeryn’s plans, and the names of everyone who’d touched Jassyn inside his skull. Lykor intended to break Elashor open until nothing remained to bleed from his bones.
Essence detonated through his veins, bleaching the cell in starlight.
A cord of force snared Elashor’s torso and wrenched him upright.
Lykor drove him to the chamber’s center.
Rending cinched around the general’s wrists and speared into opposite walls, two more coils locking his ankles to the floor.
Lykor cranked the bindings taut, the shadows denting Elashor’s skin without flaying.
He prowled around Elashor, boots knocking echoes from the stone. Jassyn had managed only fragments when he spoke of the estate. What he couldn’t say supplied the rest.
Lykor had spent every sleepless hour since deciding how to dismantle Elashor.
“You’re going to die choking on the obedience you forced down his throat.”
No need to name Jassyn. Elashor would understand who every cut avenged.
Rending writhed in Lykor’s palm. He crushed his fist, dispelling the shadows for now. Elashor didn’t deserve a quick death. Farine had fallen to a single strike before Lykor could make her answer for what she’d done. Elashor would suffer what she’d escaped.
He continued his circuit, frost cracking across the rock with every step. Elashor tracked him, defiance still burning in eyes the elves had called cursed.
Lykor stopped before him. “A lifetime devoted to the king’s vision. Do you know what Galaeryn called you? A blunt instrument.”
Elashor bared his fangs. “You think I’m powerless here? You have no idea what waits beyond.”
Lykor tightened his shadows around Elashor’s wrists until the joints creaked.
“Your precious Aelfyn?” He scoffed. “What will they think of you now, wearing a wraith’s skin?”
“Galaeryn has seen what you cannot fathom.” Elashor leaned into the restraints. “The Aelfyn were wraith before they bent the power of the stars to their will.”
Lykor sneered. “Stories. That’s what you’re clinging to?”
He turned his back on Elashor. Ancient history could rot.
Veyrix still lay entombed in Aelfyn crystal, and five of their hatchlings remained in enemy hands.
The human army he and Kal had glimpsed weeks ago in the Wastes could already be tearing through these realms—tens of thousands carving a road toward Veyrix and the alliance buried beneath the stone.
“Where are they?” He kept his back to Elashor. “Galaeryn’s forces. That human army.”
Elashor’s laugh scraped across the stone. “If you think I’ll give you anything—”
Lykor pivoted and struck.
Shadows scythed Elashor’s first finger. Talon. Knuckle. Sheared in a wet burst. Flesh erupted into mist, striping the walls.
Elashor snarled and wrenched against the bindings.
Lykor cast a filament of mending to cinch the vessels shut, leaving the stump raw. Elashor didn’t get to bleed out before he was finished.
“I’ll take a knuckle for every deflection.” Lykor held up his own claw, spreading his fingers. “Then we’ll move to your feet.” He stepped closer. “Want to try again, General?”
Elashor flashed his fangs, greasy black hair sliding across his eyes.
Defiance still lived in him. Lykor would carve that out first.
Left to right, he moved from finger to finger, severing the first knuckle and counting every loss aloud. After each, he asked where Galaeryn had sent the army.
Elashor answered with silence.
And so the sequence went—question, shadow, crack. Flesh burst. Bone disintegrated. A hiss scraped past Elashor’s teeth. Mending strangled the flow before the next number.
By the tenth, Elashor sagged between his restraints, breath stuttering. Blood spattered the stone beneath him, pooling around his bound feet. Ten ruined stubs jerked whenever Lykor spoke.
“The army,” Lykor snapped, his ice plating the walls around him. “Where. Is. It.”
Rending loomed above the next row of knuckles. Elashor’s gaze dropped to the shadows.
“It’s marching through a rainforest,” he spat.
Lykor’s claw locked at his side. Jassyn had spoken of such a place after his capture at sea, his account hacked apart by missing memories.
Elashor’s answer bought him nothing. Lykor flicked his shadows through another joint.
Elashor choked on a curse. But he kept talking—faster now, hurling each word ahead of the next strike.
“That’s where we found the earthen dragon,” he hissed. “The troops are marching north.”
Toward the Aetherveil, then. Toward Veyrix.
“How are they organized?” Lykor demanded. “Elven overseers?”
“Half-breeds.” Elashor’s lip curled around the slur. “One for every five hundred humans.”
A thin spine of command. Easy to sever.
“And the shamans?” Lykor pressed. “Have they marched?”
Elashor fell silent, nostrils flaring.
Lykor stopped counting.
Rending forked in numerous bursts. The row of knuckles ruptured together, blood lashing the wall.
Elashor convulsed in the bindings. At last, a scream tore free.
Time unraveled as Lykor drove questions through him.
How many razorwings they had in the sky. What Centarya had been ordered to do next. Whether the king would take the field himself. Which arch elves might rise from their estates, and which would continue to fester in luxury while the world burned.
Where Rimeclaw was. Whether Galaeryn always carried the Heart.
Who had touched Jassyn.
Their names.
Answers bled out from Elashor as snow scoured the chamber around Lykor.
He couldn’t have said when he ripped out the general’s tongue. The last answer that mattered had already been spoken. What followed was just noise, and Lykor had finished listening.
He circled the ruin that had once commanded Alari’s armies beside the king, his boots scraping over frozen stone, blood steaming underfoot.
Elashor’s breathing gurgled, each inhale snagging on ribs Lykor had cracked inward, their splinters sawing him from within.
One of Elashor’s legs ended above the knee, ropes of torn muscle dangling. The other hung twisted backward, jagged bone punched through frost-bitten flesh. Strands of mending knotted through the wreckage, clamping only the largest vessels shut. Enough to keep him conscious.
Elashor had surrendered every useful truth. Every name Lykor needed to hunt.
He watched the last of the general’s defiance burn out in his eyes before rupturing them. Swollen sockets wept black tracks down his face.
A pulse of Essence split the chamber.
Lykor wheeled, fangs bared, as a portal tore open.
Vesryn stepped through, igniting orbs of illumination overhead. Lykor blinked against the sudden glare, scowling.
Vesryn’s gaze found Lykor first, then cut to Elashor. He went rigid.
Blood sheeted from the ruin between the general’s legs. He convulsed in the bindings, gagging around the severed flesh Lykor had rammed down his throat. Rending stitched his toothless mouth shut, leaving him only enough air to choke around the final disgrace.
“How the fuck did you portal here?” Lykor demanded.
Vesryn forced his gaze back to Lykor. “Blossom showed Jassyn this chamber. Jassyn showed me. I knew this was the only place you’d be.”
“Reckless bastard,” Lykor muttered. “You could’ve walked straight into stone.”
Vesryn ignored him. “I take it the interrogation is over?”
Elashor’s flayed chest hitched. A slick lobe of lung inflated between his broken ribs, then collapsed with a wet rattle.
Lykor tilted his head. “Does that answer your question?”
Vesryn’s shadows struck before Lykor could stop them. What remained of Elashor detonated across the chamber, gore slapping the rock.
“I wasn’t finished with him,” Lykor snarled, slamming both palms into Vesryn’s chest. “He didn’t deserve mercy.”
Vesryn shoved him back. “I didn’t do it for him.”
Denied even Elashor’s last scream, Lykor shook his head and ripped open a portal.
Vesryn stepped in front of it.
“Move.”
“He earned what you did to him.” A muscle ticked in Vesryn’s jaw as Lykor’s frost whitened the air between them. “But you went on long after he had nothing left to tell you.”
“Then you already know answers aren’t why I stayed.”
Lykor shouldered past him and crossed the void in search of Jassyn.
Elashor had been the first, but scores more still breathed. They were already corpses. They just didn’t know it yet.