Chapter 43
LYKOR
The temperature dropped so suddenly it stole the air from Lykor’s lungs.
His exhale smoked white between him and Jassyn. Frost that wasn’t his raced across the island’s table, silvering the rock under Jassyn’s illusion map as warmth bled from the sky.
A roar tore from the southern cloudbank, deep enough to rattle his ribs, and rolled across the Aetherveil like thunder given voice.
Rimeclaw.
Lykor reached for the dragon’s mind in the distance, his wing claws curling toward the sky.
Silence answered. Vast. Glacial. A frozen dark where Rimeclaw’s ancient grief should’ve stirred.
The dragon broke through the cloudwall, his wings darkening the horizon. Each beat came slow and ruinous, dragging winter in his wake.
“Galaeryn.” Lykor’s voice scraped around the name.
Aesar went rigid in the back of his skull, the way he did whenever the king’s shadow crossed a threshold.
The chains around Rimeclaw’s mind rose through the silence, cinched tight as a garrote. The king rode between those wings. Lykor couldn’t see him, but he knew.
“He’s coming for Veyrix.”
Jassyn extinguished the illusion map with a sweep of his hands. Amber eyes flicked to Lykor’s face, reading what was already written there. “How long?”
High above, sunfire pulsed from the crown island’s peak, prismatic against the storm. Fenn, Vesryn, and Serenna were still freeing Veyrix while their forces hung exposed across the lower islands.
“If Galaeryn reaches the crown island,” Aesar said, “he’ll seize the dragon and butcher our forces.”
Lykor ground his fangs. Once Galaeryn claimed the Zephyrfang, he’d possess every elemental dragon he intended to offer the Aelfyn. Even free, Cinderax, Skylash, and a handful of hatchlings couldn’t stand against that might.
Their meager force would break against the king in open battle. Every plan had depended on Galaeryn remaining beyond reach, too certain of his supremacy to descend into the fighting himself.
Now they had minutes.
Lykor’s words tore out rough. “Let me take a Heart of Stars.”
“And what would you do with that?”
Lykor ignored him. Convenient that Aesar had found his voice only when there was something left to forbid.
“You can’t wield sunfire,” Jassyn said. The same words as before, but softer now, which made them worse.
Lykor exhaled through his teeth, his wings twitching behind him. Galaeryn was descending on their forces while he stood here asking.
Jassyn’s mouth tightened. A portal split open beside him, no wider than his forearm, and he reached through to draw out a Heart. Colors flashed between his knuckles before he secured the relic in his leathers.
“We’ll carry it to someone who can wield it.” Without looking away from Lykor, he shifted into wings and scales. “Together.”
Lykor’s jaw locked against every instinct rising in protest. This was his dragon. His debt. His death, if death was the only door left. Jassyn had no place flying toward a king who could gut the rebellion with its leader’s blood.
Resolve steeled behind Jassyn’s eyes, and Lykor recognized that look. The promise he’d made in the crater pinned the argument behind his teeth. Next time, I won’t go alone.
“We get our forces out,” Jassyn said. The words came fast, driven by a healer’s refusal to lose those still within reach. “If there’s an opening for Rimeclaw…”
He didn’t finish. There was nothing to finish. No plan survived what was coming.
Lykor nodded. He flared his dragonsight and ripped open a portal as high as his vision could reach.
Jassyn took his hand. Lykor closed his fingers around that warmth, steady where his own had gone numb.
They crossed into the void together.
The rift flung them into war.
Wind struck first, a gale that nearly buckled Lykor’s wings before he caught the current and wrenched himself upright. Jassyn’s hand tore from his grip as they angled apart, both banking hard into a sky already breaking.
Whatever shape the shamans had beaten into the wind had unraveled. Ancient currents thrashed free, paths splitting open and slamming shut around wings and bones.
Dracovae shrieked as they clawed beneath the falling fliers, riders hooking tumbling bodies with lashes of force and hauling them out of the snow-choked air. Starshard circles flared across the island chain and died.
Lykor flew higher beside Jassyn. Frost sawed across his wings, grinding into every joint. He sank his will into the cold and ripped it from Jassyn’s path, forcing winter to splinter around them.
Ice wreathed the crown island before them, white sheets spilling over its edges.
And above it all, Rimeclaw circled.
Lykor’s chest caved at the sight of him while he and Jassyn fought their way upward toward the peak.
Ice plated Rimeclaw’s obsidian hide, crusting every scale. His ragged wings struck the air in steady strokes. Too measured.
Nearer now, Galaeryn resolved on top of the dragon’s shoulders, silver hair still despite the wind.
Aesar flinched, and Lykor’s muscles locked. Terror shuddered awake where he’d buried it deep enough to believe it dead.
Centuries of hoarded power sat motionless on Rimeclaw’s back. No army darkened the sky behind the king. He never lifted a hand, and still the world strained against his grip.
He wheeled the dragon through the sky, and Lykor’s gut clenched.
Stiff. Exact. Obscene. Rimeclaw’s neck wrenched first, then his shoulders, then his wings, obedience passing through him joint by joint.
Violet lightning split the storm clouds. Skylash plunged through the breach, a spear of thunder aimed at the king.
Galaeryn rolled Rimeclaw beneath her, turning the dragon’s chest into the strike.
Skylash crashed into him hard enough to hurl both dragons sideways. Her talons scraped against the scales at Rimeclaw’s throat and locked between the plates. Lightning gouged trenches through his hide as she clawed over the armored slope of his body toward the king, wingbeat by savage wingbeat.
As the dragons reeled, Galaeryn sat untouched.
Lykor braced for Rimeclaw’s bellow, but his jaws never parted. Frost detonated from his scales, smashing Skylash across the ribs and tearing her loose. She tumbled through the storm, lightning snapping between her fangs.
Jassyn’s voice cut through the wind beside him. “We need to get to Veyrix!”
Lykor sliced hard through the current and locked into formation at Jassyn’s wing as they ascended the crown island. Below, the alliance broke itself against the king.
Kaedryn’s druids battered upward in staggered ranks, buying height by inches. Fire burned channels through the frost streaming from Rimeclaw’s wings, bursts of steam erupting into vapor.
A drone cut through the battle’s roar, and Aesar groaned in Lykor’s mind.
The vibration struck Lykor’s teeth, boring into his skull. Translucent wings flashed through the haze as razorwings poured from the clouds, six-limbed bodies twisting through turns no spine should survive.
They broke direction. Folded. Vanished sideways. Reappeared in the blind seams between wingbeats, striking from angles the eye caught too late.
Their riders lay harnessed flat along chitin, bodies pressed low as loosed arrows. Essence crackled around them, scoring the sky with violent color.
The swarm locked around the king until every path to him closed.
The alliance hacked into them.
Fire burned razorwings to ash. Circles of Essence blazed in prismatic clusters, bolts of darkness shearing through glassy wings and thoraxes, scattering the creatures in glinting fragments.
Dracovae carved broad arcs through the sky, ripping riders from their harnesses and flinging them screaming into the drop.
But razorwings infested every unclaimed space, folding under feathered wings and snatching fliers out of the sky. They forced the alliance wide, keeping Rimeclaw’s shadow beyond reach.
And for every razorwing that fell burning toward the islands below, two more surged into place.
Lykor plunged through the white churn of fire and frost, rime streaming from his wings.
Aesar’s awareness snapped through his. A flicker under one wing sharpened into a hooked shape climbing for their ribs. “Below!”
Lykor twisted.
A razorwing shrieked out of the haze, mandibles closing on empty air.
Vines lashed from Jassyn’s hands and cinched around its thorax. He ripped it sideways from its flight path. Glass wings shrilled through the violent turn as the rider bucked against the harness.
Lykor tore a volley of ice spears from the storm and hurled them before either could recover. One punched through the rider. The rest shattered across chitin, cracking the creature’s carapace and sending it corkscrewing out of the sky.
The plateau broke into view as Lykor and Jassyn swept over the crown island’s rim.
Rimeclaw’s breath had drowned the island in white, frost deep enough to bury the crystal formations whole. The Aelfyn architecture that caged Veyrix glittered beneath a second prison, and at the center, the dragon thrashed against both.
Serenna and Fenn flanked Vesryn, sunfire blazing from the Heart between his hands into the crystal like dawn forcing its way through the lid of a sealed tomb.
Fenn poured everything he had through his claws, flame roaring out in a wild, unbroken torrent. Serenna caught the stream between both hands, narrowed it to a white-hot point, and lanced it through the ice until frost shrieked into steam.
Veyrix writhed against the prison still trapping him, one wing beating hard while his fangs gnashed at empty air. Wind burst from his jaws and sent ice skittering across the island. Crystal clamped the other wing to his side, fissures racing through the casing as sunfire burned deeper.
Freedom lay close enough to hurt.
Lykor hit the crown island hard, frost cracking under his boots. Jassyn landed beside him, wings snapping shut.
Rimeclaw’s shadow engulfed them. Frost thundered from his throat in a white tide.
Lykor thrust both palms into the descending blast and ripped it sideways. The torrent arced over him and Jassyn, locking into a jagged vault.
Too narrow. Too slow.