Chapter 11 Evira #4
Urgh. A shudder went through me at his words.
Zayn made an overexaggerated gagging sound. “Bullshit.”
Ruxnoth flashed him a smug grin, then ignored us, and focused back on his fallen soldiers.
As he swept his magic over them, he looked out at my dad. “Regarding my comment about perceiving most of your kind and those under your charge as little more than mindless beasts, these will be precisely that.”
He suddenly thrust his free hand out at us.
In seconds, we were all choking as an awful, unsettling pulling sensation besieged us.
Zayn looked all around, freaked, and wrapped his arm around me.
It stopped after a moment or two, then we looked to see whatever Ruxnoth had done had taken the form of hovering multicolored sparks.
He thrust it toward his soldiers and those sparks rained down all over them, melding with the midnight-blue magic he was covering them with.
And then they started to rise.
To reform.
Into the shape of dragons.
Fuck, he’d drawn on the essence of our animal natures within, and melded it with his magic.
Dad let out a curse alongside Grandma.
“Fuck,” I heard Flame utter.
They kept rising and rising, reforming, until there stood a thousand of them again, shimmering blue constructs all in animal dragon form, faceless like before.
“You and your people won’t be leaving here,” Ruxnoth told my dad. “I will only call them off when you submit and hand over your people to my rule. I wonder, how many of your beloved own will you allow to perish until you give me what I desire?”
“You are a true madman,” Dad seethed.
“On the contrary, I am an innovator. I stand apart. Lessers cannot comprehend greatness of that magnitude, nor those who see beyond the conventional and arbitrary boundaries asserted by ill-equipped fools.”
Oh, shut the fuck up. What a load of manipulative distorted rhetoric.
“Now, while you contend with the instruments of my will, I will mark my territory in a way the animals you lead here will understand all too well.”
Mark his—
He fired a bolt of his power straight through our ranks, blowing dragons out of formation, into the air, tearing right through others, blood spurting everywhere as his straight-run of power tore through the ordered ranks, driving holes of his magic through the dragon hide of the first dragon it hit, the one behind, on and on.
The blast hit the four-pointed star at the centerpoint of Magnor City just behind us and drove down into the reinforced stone, shattering it.
A reverberating rumbling shook the ground beneath our feet.
I felt what had become familiar to me because of Winter—death magic.
The tremors intensified.
And then cobbles snapped all over the plaza, the foundations of so many buildings started fracturing, the ground cracked, fissures forming all over the place and spreading so fucking quickly.
We couldn’t react to any of it as the new forms of Ruxnoth’s constructs rushed toward us.
I snatched Zayn up and spun, my back to the assault and covering Zayn, just as they hit, driving into us, all one thousand of them.
The force of it and the fact that striking them caused us blunt force damage shoved the entire formation back.
Roars and growls filled my ears as the hostiles shattered bone, battered us to pieces, and I grimaced at the sharp pain of my arm fracturing in several places at the impact like it didn’t even matter that I had dragon hide at all.
No, it still did. The fact Zayn didn’t, if he’d been hit head-on like this, it would have shattered his body to pieces.
We were being crushed.
Zayn and I had to try to perform the Convergence again. But doing it so close to the last time… it was unlikely we’d be able to summon the same power, have the same impact. But anything would be a mercy right now.
I tried to search out my dad and Grandma, but it was absolute chaos.
The ground was starting to not only reverberate, but break beneath our feet now, too, with what Ruxnoth was doing, while he had his minions crushing us to pieces.
I went to ease Zayn off the battlefield with me, but shocked exclamations jolted me, and I followed the source of the chaos to see a twisted black spire shooting up through the ground.
Another followed.
Another.
They rose and rose.
So many of them, so fast, tearing into our own structures.
A shimmering blue and swirling gray opening formed, a magical door, a portal, then whole dark stone buildings were rising too, it all coming in both materially and magically.
Fuck. This had to be Sanctus.
And it wasn’t just one structure. A whole slice of another realm was muscling its way into ours.
Ruxnoth was trying to latch Sanctus onto the Dracoryn Realm!
And we couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop it, to even try, while his creepy fake-dragon forms tore into us.
I tried to call my power through it, but instead of mine sparking, familiar vermillion magic caught my eye.
It shot out in pulses over the entire battlefield.
The pressure went away.
The assault just… stopped.
“Return to your creator!” Torvek’s voice boomed.
The hostiles began moving like automatons then, slow and steady steps away from us.
As soon as there was room, I was able to turn around, and loosen my hold on Zayn to check he was okay. He was smiling up at me, but concern soon took its place when he saw my left arm hanging limp—the fractured one. “It will heal quickly,” I assured him.
And then all attention went to Torvek.
Holy. Fuck.
There he was levitating off the ground, his vermillion magic swirling around him, as it also enveloped every single one of Ruxnoth’s constructs.
He was using his Command of Beasts ability.
Right out in public.
In a very visible way at that.
Shock infiltrated the troops. Flame stared out in confusion at Fanor who was smiling so very proudly at Torvek.
Grandma was nodding her head in approval at his bravery of doing this, risking this.
For us all.
She was healing Dad who’d taken a massive brunt of that blunt force attack and was down on one knee as she swept her magic over him. There were several dragons flanking them in protective formation. I saw him give a chin lift to T.
And T looked equal parts freaked out and deeply relieved.
“I’ve got this!” he called out. “Stop that monstrosity from rising!”
He commanded Ruxnoth’s soldiers to speed up toward him, basically intending to force them to absorb themselves back into him and stay there.
Ruxnoth had made a mistake with not knowing about T’s Command of Beasts ability, because in using our animal essence to create those dragon-like entities, it had enabled T to use it on them—a loophole to driving them back.
It had Ruxnoth trying to take them out with shots of his power, disintegrating scores of them as they rushed toward him, threatening to inundate him.
Either way they were being defeated, and it came with a whole lot of satisfaction that some of that was coming by his own hand now.
It left us finally able to deal with the rising part of Sanctus forcing its way onto our realm, trying to latch on, feed from its lifeforce, and give that fucker an entrenched foothold here.
The troops started firing at the structures that had pushed through, more that still were. Zayn, Fanor, and me worked to heal the cracks and fissures that were widening all too quickly, fusing his Ifrit flame, her dragon fire, and my ice and frost to create a sealant.
But it didn’t work. Our magic just bounced off it.
The same happened with the troops trying to force back the carnage.
“It’s the necromantic protections. The shields are all over the place!” Zayn called out.
Dad rose to his feet and I heard him ordering two of the dozen dragons safeguarding him, “Get me Sylas Morgrave,” my dad barked. “Now.”
Dad didn’t know that Sylas had died, just that he’d been injured severely in that battle with Ruxnoth on Loxley Academy campus grounds just before Winter had been taken from us, snatched away by this fucking maniac. I guess knowing Sylas’ fortitude, he’d figured he’d healed up by now.
Ruxnoth was too busy, thanks to Torvek turning his own assets against him, to pay attention to that.
I sent my voice across to him quietly with a spark of my magic, “Sylas isn’t coming. He’s not combat-ready.”
He jolted and eyed me incredulously, securing his response inside my magic, because this wasn’t exactly a conversation to be having in front of everyone.
And if Ruxnoth did catch any of it, I couldn’t risk him coming to know that Sylas was actually alive.
It was an advantage to us that he thought he was dead.
And he could even try to kill him again if he knew.
“You’re telling me that there is no functional necromancer, while a necromantically-protected construct is decimating our Realm? ”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
If people hadn’t reacted the way they had to Winter, there would be. Winter would be here. Instead they’d come at him, and Ruxnoth had used that as an opening to drive him into Sanctus, stealing him away.
But I was sure that was coming through now as it was.
To everyone.
Big time.
As more spires shot through the earth, one close to me and Zayn, it looked like, after all of that, we’d have to retreat after all.
The only comfort was Ruxnoth’s screams as his constructs slammed into him, forcing him to dissolve them rapidly once after the other, over and over, as Torvek offered no mercy, overwhelming him, hurting him, punishing him.
Fanor was with him now and grabbed him and darted him out of the way every now and then when Ruxnoth sent out a blast at him to try to knock him out. Her doing that meant T didn’t have to break his control on the constructs.
I saw my dad and Flame conferring and overheard them strategizing a full evacuation plan, using the army to mass evacuate clusters of civilians through the Realm. We had a standard plan in place obviously, but this situation was beyond, so they needed to… tweak it.
Zayn was cursing and looking all around, his arm wrapped around me, as he stroked a glowing hand up and down my fractured one, healing it for me.
Something caught my eye through it all.
The shimmering opening… sparks started infusing it.
No… attacking it.
Amber sparks.
They filled up the opening, ran along the outside, then it dissipated entirely.
“Win,” Zayn breathed, squeezing my good arm excitedly.
As we looked on, the shocks kept on coming, stilling not just us, but everyone, as amber sparks touched upon every Sanctus structure, all its matter invading our realm.
They spread quickly, morphing to sweeping semi-transparent shimmering blankets of amber, dematerializing them, bit by bit, clearly pulling them magically back into Sanctus itself, and breaking the connection to our realm, forcing it all back.
“No! Winter, cease!” Ruxnoth roared. “Cease at once!”
It didn’t stop, though.
In fact, it sped up with a sudden surge.
And within moments even the cracks and fissures were healing. Every mark of one of those things coming through disappeared as if they’d never been here.
Well, the carnage and destruction to the city remained, but the immediate threat… gone.
Screaming from Ruxnoth had Zayn and I swinging to see amber binds rising from the ground and snaking all over his body. A burst of amber shot out and disintegrated the remaining soldiers that psycho had formed. Not liquid. Not ash. Nothing remained at all.
And then amber smoke took Ruxnoth, force-teleporting him away.
It took a moment to move past the shock, and then cheers and elated shouts roared all over the place.
I jolted as something snagged my ankle.
Zayn was doing the same in the next second.
We both looked to see an amber thread running up our bodies.
Zayn jolted, then pulled the holoscreen from his pocket. We both looked to see another amber thread circling it. It sparked briefly and Vaxan’s citrine magic made itself known.
“Win’s connecting with us,” Zayn breathed.
I nodded. “He must be using the holoscreen to do the same with Vaxan.” To ensure it specifically had eyes on someone, you needed a part of that person imbued in it—magic, blood, essence, that sort of thing.
The threads that had been traveling along us reached the holoscreen, joining together. And then with a little burst, it magically forged an amber gemstone.
Zayn gazed at it in wonder. “Shit, is that—”
“A conduit to him? I think so.”
We smiled out at each other.
Winter had found a way to communicate between realms, outside of that fucking hellhole.
We sank into each other, and I looked out at our surroundings.
I saw Dad, Grandma, and Flame coordinating their fallout plan and cleanup, and giving orders for those who’d been struck by Ruxnoth’s magic directly when he’d sent out that brutal blast to be taken to the Guardian Compound where they would arrange for a Celestial being to heal said Celestial-inflicted wounds.
Torvek was holding Fanor to him, the two of them talking intently.
What he’d done here today had put him on the path from dangerous secret to indispensable asset.
And for Winter?
After what he’d done here today—from destroyer to savior.
Ruxnoth had unknowingly poisoned his own well.
And there was no antidote to that.
He’d failed here.
Failed to unmake us.
Failed to break us.
He thought himself a god.
But he’d unwittingly proven something here today.
Even gods could bleed.