Chapter 54 #2
Lightning carved across the Zephyrfang’s chest in a blinding fork. Veyrix spiraled, wings flaring wide as he plunged through smoke and drifting ash.
Jassyn sensed the earth shudder, a foreign pull lurching through the flooded ground. He followed it outward and found the same wrongness everywhere.
Lake spray arrested midair. Instead of falling, droplets gathered, froze, and sharpened into spears that launched toward the fliers overhead. A druid cast fire across the shore, but halfway to its mark, the flames veered off course and streaked toward a passing dracovae.
Skylash discharged another bolt. Violet light split the clouds, then sheared toward their ridge.
Lykor blurred at Jassyn’s side, clamping a hand around his arm.
The world ripped sideways.
Pressure crushed Jassyn’s ribs. Smoke, mud, lightning, and sky collapsed into nothing. Then the world slammed back around him, his boots striking the ground hard enough to jar his knees.
Jassyn staggered into Lykor behind a slab of broken earth. Fewer than a hundred paces away, Blossom stood in the shallows, shoulders bunched against the strain of wrestling Rimeclaw.
The stolen lightning struck the ridge they’d abandoned. Stone exploded in a violet flash, hurling splintered rocks along the slope.
“The shamans are close,” Jassyn breathed.
“I noticed,” Lykor muttered.
Fire swept toward them in a low volley. Lykor snapped one arm up. Frost raced over his talons and sheeted outward, rising into a jagged wall as the flames struck.
Heat and ice collided with a shriek, scalding steam bursting around them.
Jassyn traced the pull through the earth to the stretch of shore the humans had abandoned. Twenty shamans held the ground between them and Blossom, their attention divided between the sky and the fighting along the shore.
At their center stood Bhreena.
Lykor went wraith-still.
Jassyn snatched his wrist before that stillness turned into violence.
“She sold Blossom to the king,” Lykor growled. “For all we know, she slit Daeryn’s throat herself.”
Daeryn.
A son Jassyn had never claimed or dared to call his own because the breeding contracts had made sire into a sentence before it could become a gift.
His grip tightened around Lykor’s wrist. “I know what she did.”
Lykor’s voice went flat. “Then she dies.”
Jassyn hated how quickly his mind could justify it. The battlefield gave him every argument he needed. They’d avenge Daeryn, make Bhreena answer for what she’d done to Blossom, and leave the shamans without their leader.
Static needled across Jassyn’s skin.
He reached for the current too late. Lightning fell.
The charge erased the shore, lashing heat across his face.
Lykor’s arm locked around him and the world tore sideways, smoke and water vanishing.
The battlefield slammed back around Jassyn as they emerged from the warp. His boots struck flooded earth, pitching him behind the gutted remains of a supply wagon while Lykor planted himself between him and the shamans.
A scythe of ice arced over the splintered frame and shattered into needles aimed at their cover.
Frost erupted from Lykor’s claw and tore upward into a wall of ice. Before the shield finished forming, Jassyn felt the shamans fighting to seize control. Fractures raced across its surface as the shards began twisting inward toward them.
Lykor snarled and destroyed the barrier himself. It burst apart overhead, fragments hissing into the mud before the shamans could turn his own defense against them.
Shadows boiled off Lykor’s skin. “I’m ending this now.”
Beyond the shamans, the lake thrashed with Rimeclaw’s struggle. Frost pulsed through the water in violent waves, locking mud solid and splitting stone as Blossom’s roots strained around his submerged body.
Above, the battle churned along the shore and through the sky. Skylash and Veyrix ripped across the clouds, lightning flashing between them as she dove at him again and again, the Zephyrfang twisting clear on savage bursts of wind.
Below them, dracovae screamed through the smoke, veering from bolts the enemy shamans ripped from Skylash and turned against them.
Wraith tore gaps through the human ranks and vanished as arrows hissed into the spaces they’d occupied.
Druid fire streaked across the sky, then twisted into the shamans’ control and flew back toward those who’d cast it.
Everywhere Jassyn looked, the same twenty shamans were turning the battle’s advantages back against them.
“Get me to Bhreena.”
Lykor’s attention snapped to him. “And then what?”
“Those shamans with her,” Jassyn said. “We don’t know if they chose the king.”
Lykor’s eyes flared crimson. “They could be the same shamans who helped her kill Daeryn. When exactly do you plan to ask them? Before or after they kill you?”
“Before,” Jassyn gritted out. Captivity had taught him too well that obedience was no proof of loyalty. “If possible.”
Another strike of lightning screamed toward their cover.
Ready this time, Jassyn seized the current and snapped it off course. The bolt carved a violet scar through the air and detonated against an abandoned stretch of shoreline, blasting mud and lake water into the smoke.
Lykor didn’t look away from him. “No.”
“But—”
“No.” He leaned forward, close enough that the shadows writhing around him curled against Jassyn’s throat. “They’re trying to kill you.”
“I want to give them a choice.”
Lykor’s lip curled. “Bhreena had a choice.”
“She chose what she thought would keep her sister alive.”
“The same sister Galaeryn threw in a prison in the first place,” Lykor hissed. “This isn’t up for discussion.”
Jassyn held his gaze. “I would’ve done worse for you.”
Lykor locked his fist in Jassyn’s armor and hauled him close, ice cracking over his knuckles. Jassyn met his crimson glare as the ruined camp burned around them, smoke and heat tangling in the narrow space between their mouths.
“You’re gambling your life on a traitor’s conscience.”
Before Jassyn could answer, Lykor kissed him.
It landed like a blow, tasting of fury and frost. Brief enough to be a wound. Jassyn’s fingers rose to Lykor’s face, but Lykor pulled away before they touched.
Lykor released his armor and drew both glaives. “Stay behind me until we’re close. Then do whatever reckless thing you’ve already decided I can’t stop.”
Jassyn’s jaw tightened, but he nodded.
Lykor launched from behind the wagon, shadows lashing around his shoulders.
A shaman spotted him instantly, tearing fire from a druid’s strike and hurling it at his chest. Lykor swept a glaive through the air. Ice surged from the sodden shore and crashed into the flames, scalding steam swallowing the space between them.
Glaives low, he stalked through the mist toward the formation, murder leashed to every step, all that violence straining against the limits of his control because Jassyn had asked for mercy in the middle of a war.
With empty hands, Jassyn followed in his wake, the earth humming with every step.
Stolen ice shrieked toward them in a fan of serrated spears.
Jassyn flung both hands forward.
Roots ripped from the flooded ground, knotting into a wall of living wood as the spears struck. Ice punched into bark and vine with a crack that split the air. Jassyn released the growth, and the roots plunged back into the mud around his boots before a shaman could claim them.
A human soldier burst through the steam at Lykor. He reversed one glaive and smashed the haft across the man’s temple, sending him sprawling into the mud without breaking stride.
Thirty paces.
Coercion stirred in Jassyn’s veins, his stomach clenching at how little effort it would take. The shamans’ minds crowded the edge of his awareness, each distinct and vulnerable, a flame he could seize or smother.
But he refused to use it to twist their compliance.
Bhreena’s eyes locked with his at twenty paces.
He could see her clearly now, auburn braid streaked with blood and soot. Her nostrils flared as her attention swept his empty hands, the distance to Lykor, the shamans at her back. The calm on her face fractured just enough for him to read the calculation. Alive, he was worth a king’s ransom.
Jassyn opened his mouth.
The ground erupted.
A vine punched through the mud by Bhreena’s feet and speared through her side. Her scream broke across the shore as the root ripped her off the ground.
The earth swung her toward Blossom’s lifted head, jaws opening wide.
The vine flung Bhreena between the waiting fangs.
Blossom crushed through armor and bones. Essence flared once against her teeth, then vanished behind a stream of blood.
Blossom swallowed.
Bhreena’s scream ended inside her.
Jassyn stood with his lips parted, the words he’d crossed the battlefield to offer withering on his tongue.
Blossom didn’t stop.
The earth under the shamans split open, roots bursting through the flooded mud. One shaman plunged into the fissure, and the ground closed over him, smothering his howl. Another staggered as bark burst through her chest. The rest broke formation, portals flaring open across the shore.
Blossom’s vines snatched those who’d opened rifts.
Jassyn could only watch as she took the vengeance he had no right to deny.
Two strides brought Lykor back to his side. “We need to get to Rimeclaw.”
Blossom thundered along the shore after the fleeing shamans, each stride carrying her farther from the roots still cinched around the Tidecrasher. Frost raced through the loosened vines. One snapped. Then another. Water swelled over his buried body as he heaved against the failing earth.
Before they could move, power erupted from the Drowned Spires. The water thrashed, the shore shuddering as a crushing weight swept across the lake.
Every glass tower blazed at once. Essence speared upward, turning the platform into the brightest thing on the battlefield.