Chapter 53
LYKOR
Five of Kyansari’s soldiers rushed Lykor in formation, wards flaring, Essence blazing at their fingertips.
Lykor warped before the nearest finished raising her shield, Aesar still sharing control of their limbs. They reappeared at her side, and Lykor drove a spike of ice through her spine. Darkness swallowed them again as her body struck the crystal.
The second soldier wheeled toward the frost streaming in their wake.
Aesar struck first, knocking the soldier’s blade wide with one glaive. Lykor whipped shadows through the opening. Rending shredded the attacker’s ribs before his torso detonated, a scream blown apart with blood and teeth.
Aesar already had the glaive turning when Lykor warped again.
They materialized behind the third soldier in a rush of frost and steel. Lykor speared ice through his knees as Aesar’s glaive flashed in a silver arc. Steel sheared through the collarbone, chest, and heart.
The remaining two broke formation as blood struck the ground in a steaming sheet.
One lunged for their left side, rending writhing in both fists.
Aesar spun inside the strike, letting the soldier’s own momentum drag his neck across the glaive.
Steel bit to the spine. Blood fanned free.
Lykor seized it midair, froze the spray into crimson needles, and launched them through the fifth soldier’s eyes.
Five bodies fell around them before the first had finished dying.
Jassyn stood exactly where Lykor had left him, face tilted toward Blossom, every muscle locked, the Heart blazing in his fist. At his boots, moss crept across the crystal, reaching toward the dragon.
A portal tore open behind him.
Too close to Jassyn.
Lykor warped.
They reappeared between Jassyn and the rift as Centarya’s wielders surged through, steel raised and rending coiled around their fists. Aesar trapped the first strike between crossed glaives. Lykor skewered the soldier’s throat with a shard of ice.
The next threw himself sideways.
Lykor’s shadows crashed outward, punching through his skull.
Aesar reversed a glaive and ripped it upward through another soldier, splitting him from hip to sternum, gore slapping the crystal beside Jassyn’s boots.
Lykor bared his fangs and hurled a tide of darkness into the portal’s mouth. Shadow crushed inward from every edge until the rift buckled, convulsed, and imploded.
A bolt of force struck the flat edge of a glaive, the impact jolting through their arms. Aesar yielded to the blow, twisting their body with it. The glaive whipped around and ripped across the nearest soldier’s gut.
“Another portal,” Aesar warned as a new rift opened across the platform.
Fifty paces. Jassyn remained at the edge of Lykor’s vision. Near enough to guard. Lykor cast a shield around Jassyn. Violet Essence locked into place, frost branching across its surface until the shield glinted like the crystal underfoot.
Spread across the platform, Centarya’s wielders focused on Jassyn. Force and rending struck the ward in scattered bursts, light flashing with every blow. Lykor kept Essence flowing into the shield, sealing each fracture before it could spread, every impact drawing from his Well.
It had to hold.
They warped to the portal, before another wave of soldiers could spill though. Anyone crossing it would have to survive them.
The first wielder appeared and Aesar took his head. Lykor froze the second’s lungs before her boots cleared the rift. The third managed half a scream before shadows knifed beneath his jaw and flung him backward into the soldiers crowding behind.
More poured through. Too many angles. Too many hands channeling Essence, every attack reaching past him for the still figure fifty paces away.
Crossing the rift to butcher them at the source would leave Jassyn undefended.
Fine.
Lykor cast a web of shadows in front of the opening, every writhing tendril waiting for whatever came through.
The next wielder crossed the threshold at a run and made it one stride before he struck the wall of darkness. Flesh and armor burst, his feet stumbling through one last step as the rest of him erupted.
The soldiers kept coming. One after another, they hit the waiting trap and died. Blood slicked the crystal while pieces of armor and flesh piled across the mouth of the rift, the dead beginning to dam the opening.
Lykor left his shadows and tore his attention from the slaughter. The soldiers he’d left across the platform had closed the distance while he held the rift, Essence burning in their hands.
A tightening circle. Jassyn at its center.
Roots burst through cracks around the closing ring, snaring limbs and necks before wrenching bodies flat. Vines cinched around them, crushing armor against flesh, snapping bones as screams collapsed into strangled sounds.
Blossom’s doing or Jassyn’s, Lykor had no way to know.
Beyond the frost-veiled shield, Jassyn remained locked in place, facing the dragon. Blood streamed from his nose as a tremor worked through the arm holding the Heart.
The blood held Lykor’s attention too long.
He didn’t notice the shadow blotting out the stars.
Rimeclaw swept overhead, close enough that the downdraft slammed Lykor flat against the platform. Frost tore from the Tidecrasher’s wings in jagged sheets, slicing through the air as he banked after Skylash.
Their storm descended on the platform.
Lykor warped, reappearing at the outer edge of Jassyn’s shield. Lykor forced the ward outward around them both, armoring the violet shell with ice.
Rimeclaw’s frost crashed against the shield and exploded into white shards. Another wave struck before the vibration faded, then another, each impact hammering through their skull. Their reinforced ward shuddered under Rimeclaw’s barrage but held.
Beyond it, Centarya’s channelers scattered. Not all raised a shield or moved fast enough. Rimeclaw’s sweeps tore through their defenses and bodies alike, ice pinning soldiers to the crystal in twitching rows.
Above them, Skylash twisted between Rimeclaw’s mass and Veyrix’s speed, lightning tearing wild from her jaws. One bolt struck the lake, detonating water upward in a column of steam.
Without warning, their leg buckled. Their knee slammed into the crystal beside Jassyn, and Aesar arrested the fall with one glaive, its blade biting into the platform as their weight dropped against the hilt.
Then pain arrived all at once—a hot split along their ribs, blood slicking under their armor, and a deeper gouge high in their thigh that left the muscle trembling. Somewhere amid the portals and warps, blows had gotten through. Rending. Steel. Neither Lykor nor Aesar could remember which.
As their body faltered, Lykor’s hold on the shield went with it. Violet light fractured around them and vanished, its armor of ice crashing to the ground in shards.
A vine slid across the crystal toward them, thin as a vein under skin.
It climbed their boot, leaves unfurling along the stem.
Warmth traveled as it wound up their calf, sinking into the gouge high in their thigh until the muscle steadied.
Higher, torn flesh along their ribs drew shut, blood welling along the seam before the flow stopped.
Jassyn stood facing Blossom, eyes open and sightless. His brow tightened, deepening the crease Lykor had memorized without ever deciding to. Buried somewhere inside the dragon’s mind, Jassyn had still found him. Healed him.
The vine shriveled against their boot as its last warmth sank through the leather. What pain remained receded to a distant throb.
The platform shuddered.
Crystal exploded.
A root thick as a tree trunk rammed upward, forcing them back from Jassyn as smaller vines whipped free around it. One tendril punched through their shoulder. Aesar hacked it off with a glaive before a second vine cracked across their ribs and flung them across the platform.
New portals tore open, Centarya’s wielders pouring through and fanning wide. Blossom’s roots hammered through the crystal in a cascade of eruptions, remaking the ground faster than Lykor could read it. Every route back to Jassyn closed before they could take it.
Lykor warped anyway.
Darkness swallowed them. Aroot slammed into their gut before the platform had fully returned.
The collision ripped them sideways and hurled them across the crystal. Through a fleeting break in the thrashing roots, Jassyn flashed into view—still facing Blossom, blood streaking from his nose.
Another root stabbed for their spine. Aesar rolled them clear, and rose to one knee with both glaives ready.
Lykor threw a shield around Jassyn before Aesar had fully risen. Violet Essence locked around him, ice racing to harden over the ward. Rending caught them before Lykor could turn, ripping through armor and opening their side.
Behind them, Essence tightened the air with pressure. Aesar began to turn them clear.
But the bolstered shield hadn’t closed around Jassyn yet. So Lykor ripped control back, giving the next heartbeat to him.
A bolt of force struck Lykor’s shoulders and launched him face-first into the crystal. His teeth snapped together on his tongue, blood flooding his mouth.
“You can’t protect him if you get us killed,” Aesar snarled.
Lykor warped again. Back to Jassyn. Always back to Jassyn.
A vine snared his wrist. Another wrapped his ankle. Lykor yielded his hands to Aesar, who severed both before either could wrench them down.
Lykor locked the roots in ice and split them apart, frozen sap bursting through broken bark. New growth thrust through the fissures before he could carve a path.
Then all the earth around Blossom went still.
Vines stopped mid-strike, leaves quivering before settling. Across the platform, Centarya’s wielders hesitated, blades suspended while Essence wavered around their fingers.
Blossom’s massive head lowered toward Jassyn.
Her eyes flickered, crystalline glass fracturing from within, the false gleam breaking apart until viridian burned through. Her pupils narrowed to draconic slits, awareness sharpening behind them.
Blossom blinked through her own eyes again. Then she roared.
The sound struck the lake, sending the surface shivering outward in rings. Soldiers dropped to their knees, hands clamped over their ears.
The Heart shattered in Jassyn’s fist, starlit shards sifting through his fingers like sand. His knees buckled.
“Take him,” Aesar said, already relinquishing control.
Lykor unraveled the shield and caught Jassyn before he struck the crystal, one arm locking around his ribs. He warped them off the platform and into the air, beyond the Starshard circles still waiting for the king.
He shifted, wings snapping wide to catch the churning air, Jassyn held tight against his chest. The first downdraft shoved them sideways. Lykor beat hard against it, tightening his arm around Jassyn as he flew clear of the lake.
Rimeclaw and Veyrix had driven Skylash toward the shore, hemming her between ice and wind.
Veyrix flashed ahead of every ascent, his speed cutting her off before she could reach open sky.
Lightning still cracked from Skylash’s jaws, but longer silences opened between each strike, every burst further from the fury that had split the night open at the start.
Dracovae wheeled in staggered formations while druids and wraith fought in splintered pockets above the shore. Prismatic light flared through the fighting as Serenna opened rifts, Fenn and Vesryn flying at her side.
Below, Blossom stampeded through Centarya’s forces.
The roots that had hunted Lykor moments ago now ripped through the king’s ranks instead.
Soldiers fled through portals as vines speared through those too slow to escape.
One body vanished between Blossom’s jaws.
Another screamed as a tendril dragged him across the crystal toward her fangs.
Lykor banked through an opening between two strike groups. Jassyn’s weight shifted against his chest with the turn, and Lykor hauled him tighter. The air detonated behind them—a shaman’s strike or one of Skylash’s stray bolts. He didn’t turn to see which.
Jassyn stirred against him as Lykor reached for a portal. “The ridge,” he rasped. “Take us down. Blossom will follow.”
Lykor tightened his hold. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“No.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.” Jassyn caught a fistful of Lykor’s armor, his hand shaking hard. “It wasn’t like with the razorwings.”
Lykor hunted his face for the lie. The last time coercion had pushed Jassyn that far, blood had flooded the whites of his eyes. Now the bleeding from his nose had stopped, his gaze clear amber.
“The ridge,” Jassyn gritted out again. “We’re not leaving until this is over.”
The caverns were a portal away. Lykor could throw Jassyn through a rift before another protest left his mouth, just as he had the hatchlings.
“He’ll come back,” Aesar said.
Lykor ground his fangs. Of course he would. To keep Jassyn safe, Lykor would have to make him stay.
Jassyn’s gaze held his, clear and steady despite the tremor in his hand.
“Fine,” Lykor snarled.
And dove back into the fray.