Chapter 50 #2
A tremor crossed the surface, slight enough to pass for wind, before the shallows began to withdraw.
Water peeled away from the shore in long silver lashes, rearing above the encampment before crashing down hard enough to flatten whole lines of burning tents.
Steam erupted in white plumes, sweeping over soldiers, horses, wagons, and flames until the shoreline disappeared behind a roiling wall.
The vapor was still rising when power gathered behind the trees.
Portals tore open around the lake, some splitting the ground along the perimeter, others suspended high above the shore.
Wings poured through in a flood of scales and shadows, fliers dropping from the torn sky before leveling above the camp.
Wraith emerged from the lower rifts and disappeared again, warping straight into the chaos.
The druids descended. Fire swept beneath their wings as they circled over the encampment, long arcs of flame racing across canvas and supply lines.
The eastern perimeter buckled first. Soldiers surged toward the new threat while elven officers bellowed commands into a camp already turning three ways at once—toward fire, shadow, and wings descending from the dark.
Human lines formed to meet the fliers, spearpoints rising while archers behind them wrenched their bows skyward. The wraith slipped between the gaps in formations before the soldiers could close them.
Arrows hissed into the smoke, glancing from scales and punching through wings. The misses rained back into the encampment, burying themselves in burning tent walls and the soldiers trapped between them.
The ground carried the violence back through Jassyn’s boots—ranks pounding mud, impacts shivering through trampled grass, bodies striking earth. The battlefield beat in broken rhythms, thousands of lives losing time at once.
All because Jassyn had given a single nod.
Beside him, Lykor watched in silence. Frost rimed the stone around his feet and crept outward through the grass.
Jassyn caught Zaeryn’s gaze across the gathered force. “Bring the rangers through.”
Zaeryn tore a portal open and vanished.
Saundyl reached the rift behind her but stopped before entering. He glanced over his shoulder, finding Serenna in the dark. They held each other’s eyes, but neither spoke.
Serenna looked away first, and Saundyl disappeared through the void.
Minutes later, the sky split above the lake’s shore, the rupture opening so high that firelight barely touched its rim.
Dracovae streaked through in a blazing sweep, each flight feather illuminated with starlight. Dozens filled the open air—channelers mounted behind the rangers, their hands already whirling with Essence.
Bows that had tracked druids and wraith aimed higher.
Arrows rose in black swarms. Essence followed in bursts, tearing at the undersides of wings. One dracovae shrieked as shadows shredded through its feathers, dropping hard enough to wrench its riders sideways before the beast fought level again.
Their brightness drew the heaviest violence upward.
Druids and wraith flew low, cutting through the camp in scattered hunting packs. They fell on the elves whose Essence had betrayed their positions, hammering them until formations broke and the water held aloft by the shamans collapsed in sheets across the mud.
For a few dangerous seconds, Jassyn watched the lake’s center slip from the army’s attention. If Galaeryn wanted command of the field, he’d have to step onto the platform and become the target they’d built the sky to strike.
Jassyn turned to Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn. Yesterday flashed behind his eyes—the blistered scales, skin splitting around wounds he’d only just closed. He saw how far their bodies had already been pushed. Tonight, they would have to hold longer.
“Take your place over the lake. Wait until you see the king.”
The three shifted into wings. Fenn’s cloaking wrapped around them before they left the ridge, shadows erasing the last edges of their forms.
Then they were gone. Jassyn searched the dark above the lake and found no trace of where Fenn had warped.
Frost glazed Lykor’s clenched fists as he stared at Rimeclaw. Jassyn had learned every version of his stillness, and this was the one that came just before violence.
“Bring the dragons.”
Lykor tore a portal open above the tree line, vast enough for Skylash’s wings.
Cinderax emerged first, soaring unhurried, molten gaze finding the Drowned Spires. The hatchlings streamed after him on wings still learning the sky—Emberharts trailing flame, Stormstrikes crackling with sparks, Tidecrashers shedding mist that fell as snow.
Skylash cleared the rift in a single beat of amethyst wings, lightning snapping across her scales. For an instant, she hovered above the battlefield while smoke and steam rolled below her.
Her eyes flashed as she found Veyrix across the lake, coiled motionless on the platform. Chained under the open sky.
A violet charge kindled across her scales, rippling the air with heat. Then the sky detonated white.
Lightning burst from her in a single pulse and struck the shore below, branching through the camp in jagged veins that leapt from spearpoints to shield rims, from breastplates to drawn blades, from soaked canvas to bodies already running.
Whole tent lines vanished. Wagons burst apart. Horses screamed as the soaked ground flashed into scalding vapor.
The thunderclap struck a moment later, the concussion rattling Jassyn’s ribs and wrenching the air from his lungs. Violet glare consumed the shore until thousands of soldiers disappeared inside it.
For one impossible heartbeat, she erased the battlefield below her.
If she kept striking, their people might survive the night.
Skylash folded her wings and dove, a streak of lightning aimed straight at the Drowned Spires.
“SKYLASH!”
Cinderax’s voice tore through Jassyn’s mind with enough force to drive pain behind his eyes.
Skylash didn’t slow.
Shields flared across the platform as Essence blazed from the Kyansari ranks closing around the captive dragons. Lightning reached them first, crystal flashing beneath the strike as bodies flew outward.
The quiet opening they’d spent the night building was gone before Galaeryn ever stepped onto the platform.
Skylash had promised to kill Veyrix rather than leave him bound.
She’d never promised to wait.