Chapter 50
JASSYN
The lake surrounding the Drowned Spires was larger than Jassyn remembered.
He flattened his chest to the grassy ridge where the forest gave way to the shore, exposed stone digging into his ribs.
Damp cold seeped through his leathers, broken only by the narrow line of heat where Lykor’s shoulder pressed warm against his own.
Lykor hadn’t moved in minutes, every brutal inch held in the stillness of a drawn bow, patient and already aimed.
Galaeryn would open his portal tonight. By the time he stepped into the open, every piece of their trap had to be waiting.
At Jassyn’s left, Vesryn and Serenna laid low on the outcropping, murmuring over the placement of their Starshard circles in the empty sky above the lake.
Fenn spread his cloaking shadows over them all, erasing five bodies from the ridge.
Any soldier who glanced uphill would find only another stretch of dark.
Jassyn flared his dragonsight, stripping the distance from the lake.
Glass towers speared through the broad crystal platform suspended over the sunken palace.
The first stars pierced the bruised horizon, sharpening across the lake until water and sky became twin depths.
For one disorienting instant, Jassyn couldn’t tell which waited above him and which below, only that both carried the same promise of drowning.
The sight tightened his throat around the memory of this place—crystal chambers underwater, Farine’s fingers settled in the crook of his elbow, his hand locked flat beside a knife before the urge to reach could become a thought.
At the platform’s center, a vast shape dwarfed the glass spires.
Rimeclaw.
The Tidecrasher’s head hung low, ice creeping from his claws in sluggish veins, melting over the platform’s edge.
Blossom crouched beside him, her knotted tail of root-fused bone wrapped around her haunches, a bludgeon with nothing to shatter. Jassyn’s fingers dug into the earth until grit packed under his nails.
Veyrix lay coiled on Rimeclaw’s other side, his serpentine length wound so tightly that each breath rippled through the scales along his ribs, his eyes staring blank at the open sky.
Behind the Wardens, five hatchlings huddled in a ring, lashed by harnesses of force. Too small to justify the expense of a Heart. Too valuable to leave unchained.
Kyansari soldiers stood at even intervals along the platform, their white plated armor glinting in the starlight.
But no king.
Not yet.
Stone scraped Jassyn’s leathers as he edged toward the lip of the ridge. Between him and the lake, the human army stretched in a vast ring.
He’d expected columns or formations, the disciplined geometry of elven command imposed over mortal numbers. What sprawled in every direction was closer to a city.
Cookfire smoke drifted into the dusk, supply wagons choking the lanes between tents. Packhorses stood picketed in muddy clearings where the forest had been hacked back to stumps.
Fifty thousand soldiers settled into the night, noise rising from the shore in one ceaseless murmur—laughter tangled with orders, a shouted wager, iron striking iron.
Lykor’s voice came rough and low at Jassyn’s side. “Wraith go first. They can cloak and slip in before the sentries know the perimeter’s been breached. They’ll warp to the command tents, cut down the elven officers. Torch the tents, the wagons, whatever catches. Let the panic do the rest.”
“But the wraith won’t reach every Essence-wielder,” Serenna pointed out.
“Or the shamans,” Jassyn added.
Lykor’s attention never left the lake. “We’ll deal with the shamans when they start channeling the earth.”
“And Centarya?” Fenn asked. “What if their forces are down there too?”
No one answered.
Jassyn searched the firelit ranks. At this distance, faces blurred and bodies collapsed into numbers. The humans below had been caught in Galaeryn’s designs long before Jassyn decided where the first blow would fall.
Wind rushed over the ridge, stirring up the shore’s stink of cookfires, churned mud, and horse sweat.
“The fires are a distraction,” Jassyn said, studying the broken tree line.
The sky above the water had already arranged itself in his mind, distances measured, altitudes fixed, the Starshard circles hopefully suspended beyond the reach of any magic.
“Kaedryn’s forces will follow the wraith.
They’ll harry the outer perimeter with wings and fire, force the army to face outward while the city goes unwatched. ”
“And when the king steps onto the platform,” Vesryn said, seeing where it led, “the Starshard wielders strike.”
Jassyn straightened the edge of his bracer, though the leather already sat flush against his wrist. “Hold the circles dark until we have a clear target.”
He left the rest unspoken. They had no second plan, no hidden reserve. Everything depended on Galaeryn appearing to open the portal. If he didn’t, three thousand lives would be spent on a strike that never came.
The previous day, Jassyn had watched their Starshard wielders test the circles over the Aetherveil, driving sunfire higher to learn how much their bodies could contain before the formation broke. He’d spent hours afterward mending skin split by heat and scales blistered loose.
They’d trained for a day.
The king had prepared for centuries.
Jassyn’s mind still snagged on a dozen pressure points—the timing of the fires, the heights the circles had to hold, the exposed seconds before sunfire burned. He could adjust the pieces again, but every correction only moved the danger somewhere else.
There was nothing left to refine.
Around him, the others had gone quiet. Lykor held still beside him. Vesryn’s fingers drummed against the ground until Serenna covered his hand. Fenn’s shadows remained steady over them all.
They were waiting for him.
He’d never wanted command. He’d spent most of his life bearing the consequences of other people’s choices. Now thousands would carry his.
Jassyn pushed off his elbows and rose, blood needling back into his arms. Fenn’s shadows dissipated as they withdrew together into the tree line, where moss and wet bark crowded close. Leaves and distance thinned the army’s murmur to water washing over stone.
Jassyn met Lykor’s eyes and nodded.
Lykor tore a rift open between two ancient trunks, and the Aetherveil’s wind spilled through, thin and sharp from the heights of the islands.
Kaedryn emerged first, wings tucked tight. Her gaze swept the ground, trees, and sky in one pass before she cleared the rift without breaking stride.
Warriors followed in disciplined silence, leather wraps bound over their scales to keep starlight from flashing off them.
Koln strode through with the wraith, striking his talons once against his vambrace as he passed Lykor. His eye found Fenn and flared bright. Whatever passed between them lasted less than a heartbeat.
Zaeryn stepped through next with Saundyl beside her.
He’d already sided with them once with Galaeryn’s army waiting across the river.
Tonight, that choice earned him a place in their line, riding double with Zaeryn among the channelers who’d carry Essence and earth into a sky they had no wings to reach.
The space between the trees filled with the vanguard—wraith and druids, then the magus who’d open the portals for the army waiting in the Aetherveil. Under the canopy, they packed shoulder to shoulder, so quiet the leaves whispered louder than they did.
Koln drew up to Jassyn’s side. “We’re ready.”
Jassyn inhaled an unsteady breath. “Stay alive.”
Koln turned for the tree line leading to the ridge. The wraith followed, cloaking as they went, until the night swallowed them one by one. Their final stand had begun, and it started without a sound.
Jassyn crossed back to the overlook with Lykor and the others, halting at the outcropping.
Above the lake, stars scattered across a sky gone black and bottomless.
Each glance toward the platform returned the same inventory—dragons, white-armored guards, bare crystal where Galaeryn would stand.
Along the shore, cookfires guttered lower one by one as fifty thousand soldiers settled toward sleep.
Then light erupted from a tent.
Canvas caught fire in a rush, billowing upward in a column high enough to throw the nearest soldiers into lurching silhouettes.
A second flared near the supply wagons. A third farther along the perimeter. Four. Six. Ten.
The evening murmur fractured into the first alarms. Flames spread from tent to tent, smoke rolling above the camp as soldiers spilled into the lanes between them.
The wraith would never find every elf buried among fifty thousand humans. But they only needed enough officers dead, enough Essence-wielders silenced, enough commands severed that when their alliance took the sky, the army would have fewer ways to cut them down.
Galaeryn’s absence still held the entire plan hostage.
Behind Jassyn, the magus waited beneath the trees, ready to open the portals.
He reached back with a telepathic link and touched Kaedryn’s mind.
“Send the Starshard circles into position.”
The wielders shifted into wings and launched, each of the twenty circles accompanied by a wraith. Cloaking spread over the formations almost immediately, leaving only brief distortions against the stars before even those vanished.
Beside Jassyn, Vesryn’s eyes had gone unfocused, his telepathy passing from circle to circle as each adjusted their height and spacing around the Drowned Spires.
Below, the camp writhed. Soldiers scattered around burning tents while shouted commands rose over one another. Jassyn sensed the moment the king’s shamans turned their power toward the lake.