Chapter 54
JASSYN
Jassyn’s boots struck the ridge above the shore as Lykor landed. The world lurched sideways, and he caught Lykor’s shoulder before his knees chose betrayal. Beside him, Lykor remained taut, wings vanishing as he angled toward the next threat. Jassyn steadied himself and straightened.
Barely.
He dragged his palm under his nose, wiping away the blood left from forcing his way through Blossom’s mind. His hands still trembled, the strain of that mental breach lingering in every movement.
Above, Skylash struck Veyrix in a violet blast. He reeled, scales smoking, but Rimeclaw’s jaws split wide in pursuit, unleashing shards of ice across Skylash’s exposed flank. Her roar sundered the clouds, lightning flashing ragged from her fangs.
Thunder rattled Jassyn’s teeth as Skylash climbed, but one wing faltered. Veyrix and Rimeclaw closed on her through the haze and smoke, their crystalline eyes vacant.
Below the dragons, Blossom charged from the platform across the fractured span of Rimeclaw’s ice. Her talons punched through the thinning shelf, water and frost shearing up around her legs. Her mind vibrated against his with rage older than the realms as she struck the shore under him.
Soldiers nearest Blossom broke first, stumbling over one another as she towered over the front ranks.
The panic spread behind them faster than any officer could contain, each line collapsing when the one before it fled.
Formations twisted against themselves as mortals remembered, all at once, that some things in the world had never belonged to kings.
Blossom let the fleeing soldiers spill around her. Through smoke and thrown mud, her head lifted toward the ridge until her viridian gaze found Jassyn.
He’d hunted Galaeryn’s control through her awareness and found it anchored in damage far older than the king.
The Aelfyn had broken her mind first, severing thought from language and leaving fractures Galaeryn had pried wider.
Jassyn had torn the king’s hold from those wounds piece by piece until Blossom stirred beneath the wreckage, changed beyond his power to mend.
She reached for him through the earth, a tremor moving under his boots.
Images followed—chains breaking inside her skull, Galaeryn’s hand closing around a Heart, Skylash trapped between Veyrix and Rimeclaw.
Roots spread beneath all of it, branching once, twice, again.
Then they stilled, every buried tip turning toward him.
Jassyn understood.
She wanted a direction.
“We need to get her out,” Lykor said as she climbed toward the ridge, mud surging around her claws with each step.
“I know.”
Prismatic light wheeled overhead as Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn swept through a rising storm of arrows.
Serenna banked sharply, lightning lashing from her palms. Vesryn ripped open a portal across the volley’s path that swallowed the iron rain before it could puncture their wings.
Fenn plunged beside them through the smoke, fire braided in his wake as he drove a broken knot of soldiers toward a rift gaping across the ground.
Vasharax streaked ahead, embers scattering from her jaws.
Blossom’s head rose level with the ridge. She stood close enough that her exhaled chuff rolled hot across Jassyn’s face, stirring the curls away from his eyes.
Her power pulsed. A vine shouldered through the churned earth and forked between them. One tendril wound around Jassyn’s wrist, the other wrapping around Lykor’s as green light seeped through the connection.
The tremor stilled in Jassyn’s fingers first, strength returning to his limbs. Then the bruised pressure behind his eyes dissolved until the battlefield sharpened around him with familiar clarity.
Beside him, tension eased from Lykor’s shoulders as the green glow tunneled under his armor. Blood welled from the punctures torn through his leathers, slowed, then ceased.
When the vines released them, they slipped back into the ground, leaving a dark ring of loam around Jassyn’s wrist.
He lifted his hand to Blossom’s snout.
She lowered her massive head until his palm met the rough slope above her nostril. Moss clung cool and wet, thorns rising from her scales in cruel little crowns.
Through the place where their minds still touched, Jassyn offered her horizon after horizon, each one farther from Galaeryn’s reach.
The hidden dark of the Everfrost Caverns.
Then Asharyn’s sun-warmed stone. A jungle canopy gleaming after rain.
An island alone in turquoise water, salt wind combing through empty reeds.
Blossom’s head lowered until viridian eyes filled Jassyn’s sight.
Her answer shuddered through the earth with the slow weight of settling bedrock.
Impressions followed, crushing in their certainty—her roots driving deep below the shore, gripping the bones of the world.
Her claws sinking into this battlefield.
In her mind, Jassyn’s portal opened. Her roots seized its edges and choked it shut.
Jassyn’s throat tightened. “She doesn’t want to leave.”
Lykor grunted. “Should’ve known. Neither did you.”
Jassyn let his hand fall from Blossom’s snout and scanned the battle—druids and wraith cutting through the sky, the army still massed below in ranks built to overwhelm them.
“The humans,” he said. “We could open portals along the shore and have Blossom drive them through, clear enough of the field to give our fliers room.”
“It won’t matter.” Lykor stared where Skylash’s lightning flickered thin through smoke and falling ice.
“Galaeryn can wait until the end of time. Rimeclaw and Veyrix will wear Skylash down. The army will wear us down. Then he’ll take Skylash when she falls, break Blossom open again, and claim every dragon that remains. ”
He was right. Every second their forces spent tearing through a human army built to absorb slaughter cost them strength Galaeryn never had to spend. Twenty Starshard circles still hung dark over the water, their sunfire banked, waiting on a king who had no reason to rush.
Lightning flashed overhead. A gust slammed into Jassyn hard enough to send his boots skidding across the earth.
He staggered as the dragons swept above them, Lykor’s hand snapping around his arm before he could fall.
Over the lake, Veyrix rammed into Skylash’s side, the gale crushing one of her wings inward and hurling her toward the water.
Rimeclaw followed through their wake, frost streaming from his jaws as he descended after her.
Skylash caught herself three spans above the surface and clawed her way back into the sky on fury alone.
But her lightning flickered where it had blazed earlier. Jassyn knew the same losing pattern from mending wounds—blood leaving faster than he could staunch it, each intervention buying less time than the one before.
A healer knew when a body had lost too much.
A commander knew when a battle had.
Beside him, Lykor’s focus narrowed on Rimeclaw. “Blossom tore islands out of the sky. Can she ground him?”
Blossom’s head swung toward the Tidecrasher. A rumble built low in her chest, dry as grinding stone.
“If she holds him down,” Lykor said, voice roughening, “could you free him?” His gaze dropped to the dried blood smeared across Jassyn’s hands. “Could you survive it?”
Jassyn’s fingers curled. Forcing his way through Blossom’s ruined mind had nearly buckled his own, yet Galaeryn’s control had yielded under his magic with horrifying ease.
Once inside, Jassyn had known exactly where to cut, and that certainty frightened him more than the blood it had wrung from his body.
Jassyn nodded. “We have to try.”
Blossom chuffed and turned before the words finished leaving him. She descended back toward the shore, each footfall burying her claws until mud heaved around her legs. Roots unfurled from her talons and plunged into the water, their passage roiling the shallows as they spread beneath the lake.
Rimeclaw wheeled above the water, turning for another strike at Skylash.
The shore erupted.
Roots burst from the mud and shallows, thick as anchor chains, slick with lake weeds and silt. They speared through the sky and cinched around one of Rimeclaw’s hind legs.
The Tidecrasher bellowed.
He kicked hard enough to rip the first tangle free. Ice flashed down the rest, shattering the bark.
More roots ripped from the mud at the water’s edge and seized his other leg, the fin of his tail, the base of one wing. Blossom wrenched, and Rimeclaw’s weight betrayed him.
He dropped from the sky, striking the lake in an explosion of spray and fractured ice. Water surged outward in a wave that swallowed the nearest shore. Horses screamed and soldiers disappeared, burning tents extinguishing under the wash.
Rimeclaw vanished under the water, colliding with the lakebed like a mountain falling. His head burst back through the surface, jaws wide, frilled spines streaming frost, the rest of him trapped in Blossom’s hold.
On the shore, Blossom crouched low, her massive head sunk between bunched shoulders, claws buried until the flooded earth swallowed her talons.
Her scales shuddered with each thrash of Rimeclaw’s body.
Roots heaved from the mud around her legs, thickening and knotting over one another as she anchored herself against his strength.
Jassyn tracked her roots boring through silt and stone, cinching around Rimeclaw’s limbs as the lakebed entombed him. Mud packed across his tail, his wings, the massive ridge of his spine, grounding the dragon with the weight of water and earth.
Frost detonated from his body in violent pulses, whitening the waves. Ice sheathed the roots and hardened the mud around them.
Fresh growth forced into the frozen seams, tangling earth around ice until Rimeclaw’s own defense braced the prison holding him.
Frost against root. Tide against earth.
Above, Skylash turned on Veyrix with everything she had left.