Linn felt her chest go tight. How were they to survive it going off once it spun out of control? When one Sage faltered—whichever it was—surely the blast would ignite.
“There!” Jenk yelled over the crackling storm of power.
Linn looked beyond the clash and beyond the shattered waves that separated the glass fields before the crystal palace from the icy plateau on which the Sages fought. She saw tails of fire, whips of burning ash and plumes of smoke lit with flashing yellow motes. Misha spun in the midst of the chaos, her spear forming a wheel of flame as she warded off the charged bolts Linn recognized as the stranger Myriel’s own body as she hurled herself at the Ember headlong.
Misha’s spear was knocked wide by one charge, and as the glowing blue warrior came in from the opposite side, she hit an impenetrable wall formed by Baas’s shield, the sound of the clash traveling up even to their considerable height and continuing on behind them.
Linn spared a look below as she took them high up and over the powerful clash. She could hear the Sages screaming at one another over the breach, their voices augmented by will made mighty. An errant claw of shadowfire screamed up toward them, and Linn only just managed to push them westward so that they felt the shivering heat against their backs as the limb broke upon the clouds above, the vapors charged with dark energy.
She had to go beyond the Sages. She had to go where they could make a difference.
They began to fall on the western side of the split, and now Linn did not complain as she felt Jenk’s skin begin to warm again. Shifa growled and Linn would have smiled at the hound’s dauntless disposition in other circumstances.
“Now!” Linn shouted when they were close enough, and Jenk let go, falling the short distance to the ice below as she continued on a bit longer.
She saw the flash below as the Ember ignited his sword and charged into the drifting ash and smoke, the burnt salt smelling sour as Linn broke the barrier that rose to meet her. She saw Misha’s spear glowing and saw a hulking shadow beside it that must be Baas. Beyond them, flashing like death, was a blue light that was very small but growing larger.
“Baas!” Linn yelled as she skimmed the ground with the tips of her boots, brushing the ash and melted salt away from the pitted ice. “Move! Misha!”
The great shadow darted to the side with surprising speed, while Misha stayed rooted. She put her glowing spear into a spin, raising it over her head, and the wind and fire of its passing parted the smoke around her.
Linn landed with speed, bending her knees as the drake’s tail of wind she had gathered to lift her, Jenk and Shifa buffeted her back. “West!”
Misha responded, spinning away from Linn and angling the wheel of fire in front of her chest, facing the distant palace. The blue light sent out jagged webs of light as Myriel sprinted toward them, fast as a shooting star. She must have run to the base of the Nevermelt walls to have gathered such speed. Linn did not have time to worry over Misha. The Ember of Hearth would stand her ground, and Linn would give her a reason to.
She waited until the last moment. The moment between Myriel’s deadly strike and the moment when she couldn’t hold the surge at bay any longer. She fell onto one knee and shot her arms forward, her torso shaking with pain that nearly made her heart stop as the force of the blast jarred her bruised bones and stung her bloody arms.
The torrent hit Misha in full, but while the Ember slid, she did not lose her grip on her spear. The Everwood stopped spinning as Misha was forced to hold it, but the fire she had spun ignited like oil, roaring to life and making the ice shine like molten gold as it issued forth. Linn was forced to turn away, losing Myriel in the bright.
The heat was unbearable. Linn couldn’t breathe. She felt Jenk grab her by one arm, but it would be too late. She looked over her shielding forearm and watched in horror as the fiery storm raged out of control. A great part of it became the guiding god’s arrow that blazed a trail west, while the burning fletchings shot back in toward her. In her weariness, Linn had neglected to release her hold on the air around her, and the fire was far from sated.
She heard Jenk screaming, and just before the expanding wall of flame reached her, a shadow fell over her, coating her in welcome cool. She felt a weight against her chest as Baas pressed her against the underside of his shield and hunkered down with her as the raging inferno died around them for an aching moment that felt like eternity.
When the fire ran its course, Baas lifted his shield, and the bright light of the crystal palace stung Linn’s eyes as it drank in the light of the departing sun. All around them, the surface of the plateau was beset by shimmering pools that shook under the quaking of the Sages’ tumult and burning pits of gum as the salt and frost melted and congealed.
Misha stood, unbowed. The green and yellow tassels on her elbows had burned up halfway, but were no less vibrant. Her hair was caked in ash. Her Everwood spear glowed as the wind rushed back in to kiss it. Before her, the frozen waves that remained separating the palace from the wild, frozen sea had either melted or broken apart.
The Ember turned around, her green eyes finding Linn’s. “We really need to come up with a new trick.”
Linn smiled and stood as Misha walked over to her and reached out to clasp her wrist.
“If it works, why change it?”
Misha nodded. She looked up at Baas, who shadowed them both.
“This one’s shield always seems to come in handy, even when there’s no dirt around for him to move,” Misha said. She released Linn and gave the Riverman a punch on the arm. He only grunted, his eyes scanning the edges of the firestorm. White smoke rose from a hundred vents, steam escaping from the ice that was cracking beneath them.
“She’s gone,” Misha said. “Burned up.”
“No,” Linn said, her heart sinking.
She pointed to the northwest and the others followed. There, between the twisting trails of smoke, a blue light flickered. There were pops in the air, and a sound like the buzzing of a hive working itself into a frenzy.
Baas took a step in that direction and planted his shield firmly against his chest, and Misha and Jenk moved to shadow him. They did not light their blades, but the air grew milky around them as they prepared to. Linn felt the wind teasing the nape of her neck. Her whole body felt numb, her heart shocked by the amount of power she had been forced to use, or borrow.
That was the difference between her and them. Where Misha and Jenk held blades that drew upon their very essence, the fire in their blood having nearly run its course, Linn felt as if she were merely a vessel—a conduit through which the skies passed their judgment upon her enemies. Still, how much more could she take? If she called another blast of lightning down, would it shatter her bones? If she birthed another hurricane, would it strip her skin from the flesh beneath?
The smoke began to clear, revealing the state of their enemy, and Linn released the long breath she had held.
Myriel stood facing them. She no longer glowed, though blue sparks still danced along her skin and raced over the bones that made up the natural armor that covered her chest, abdomen and shoulders. She shuddered when the brighter bolts passed between the ridges of her brow, as if she could not control it. As if her power, too, took its toll.
Half of her looked clean, her blue skin standing out stark against the burnt orange and lavender of the western sky. Her right side was another story. It wasn’t so much melted as scorched, a black crust having formed along the exposed bone, melting the skin beside it. Her arm hung, twitching. She worked it into a fist just to see if she could, grimacing against the pain. Her eyes had lost their white glow and now returned to the red they had been before.
“What’ll it be, then?” Misha taunted. “Another go?”
Myriel bared her teeth. She looked from them to the east, and Linn felt another tremor in the ice.
She felt a shock and heard Misha cu
rse, and when she looked back to the spot Myriel had been, she saw nothing but fading motes of blue static trailing in the steam.
“Now, then,” Jenk said. “How do you suppose we deal with that?”
They turned back to the east, and Linn was surprised at the lack of horror the image of the roiling black, blue and orange star called up in her.
Was this what despair felt like?
Elanil stood, lit in terrible white. Her hair whipped so violently it looked as if it might tear free of her scalp. They could not see the Eastern Dark, but Linn imagined that he was in a similar state. She blinked as she saw something else—another figure between them and the Frostfire Sage.
“Oh, Shifa,” Linn whispered, and Jenk looked around them, wild.
The hound was not running. She didn’t have the strength for that. Instead, she merely walked, limping toward certain annihilation because there wasn’t anything else to be done. She had to find Kole, and she had to stop the world ending in order to do it. Facing down the last two titans at the edge of it all must have seemed like the best course to her. The only course.
Linn had to agree.
She began to run. Her legs ached and her ribs hurt, sending jolts of pain that made her vision blur. She expected to hear the others calling out to her, shouting her down. Instead, she felt warmth on either side.
The Embers outstripped her quickly enough, racing toward the hound and soon overtaking her. They flared their Everwood blades to life, and Linn didn’t know if they meant to cut down one Sage or the other, so long as it stopped. She didn’t mean to stop them.
The ground shook as Baas pounded the ice beside her. She looked up at him and saw his ash-streaked face hard set on their path, and on its futility. They hadn’t thought to ask where Kole was, but Linn thought they could guess.
The way things were going, she supposed it didn’t matter much.
Just before Misha and Jenk reached the Frostfire Sage, they were blown back by a force that had nothing to do with the stormy skies. The Sage screamed, her voice seeming to come from all around. She poured all her fury into the beam, changing it from blue with flecks of black to moon white.
“This isn’t about us any more, Valour!” she screamed over the blast. “You went searching, and the World Apart saw you back! But I can do what you could not! I will survive it, as will all who follow me! A shame, that you will not live to see it. Maybe you can find some of the redemption in death you couldn’t come close to in life.”
Linn and Baas reached the Embers, and lifted them. There was a scraping sound close by, and Linn saw Shifa struggling in vain to continue on, her mangy appearance doing nothing to quell the pride that flooded Linn’s breast at seeing her.
Bits of the land began to rip free. Great rocks of ice held in bondage for longer than any of them had lived tore loose and went crashing across the surface of the frozen sea, making sharp, toothy craters where they landed. Water sprayed their faces and coated their travel-worn clothes and leather and metal armor. Linn could see foam sloshing in the pit, pulsing as it was drawn upward by the thrumming black, orange and blue-white star that hung above it.
But it was the sound that worried her most. In the place of a roar of an Ember’s fire or the grinding of ice, salt and stone underfoot, the Sages’ beams made an orb that seemed to defy the world. It was as if the power could not be contained in the bounds they understood, that even plunging it into the depths of the sea would rock the land to its foundations. It was a faint, keening wail, like the buzzing of a thousand angry wasps and the screaming of a legion of eagles. Linn was reminded of the battle with the winged metal warriors at the red citadel in the northern peaks of the Valley.
Misha and Jenk could go no farther as Queen Elanil put all her might into the blast. The west-facing half of the sphere began to overtake the shadowfire that came from the east. Linn tried to redirect the storm the blast sent back at her, gliding through the chaotic currents rather than opposing them. But soon she, too, was held unmoving. This was magic of the World Apart, she knew. Dark magic, and she did not think all of it was coming from the Eastern Dark.
Baas Taldis made it farthest. He held his great stone shield up in front of his chest and face, placing one thudding boot unerringly before the other. The ice beneath him protested, and as he approached Queen Elanil’s back, Linn had the worrying image of him falling into the violent breach. It was a fall that none of them could survive.
“Die, Ray Valour,” the Frostfire Sage said. She had retaken some measure of calm. It was the calm one exuded in the face of certain victory. Linn did not feel joy at hearing it, only relief.
It seemed all the sound the world had been unable to make sense of before came suddenly to life, as the Frostfire Sage poured her full might into the beam. Where before it had been a steady ray, like thick moonlight streaked with blue and black, now it was a torrent, like a rapid crashing and careening over jagged stones.
Tails of blue-and-white energy leapt out from the Sage’s fingers and gashed trails into the breaking ice. One nearly struck Baas down, but he accepted the blow on his shield, the streak leaving a smoking white trail of frosted spikes that glowed with latent energy.
Linn had heard stories of the northern drakes, those that had flown in the red-blasted skies beyond the deserts of their ancestors. They had been titanic beasts, and it was said that their voices carried from one horizon to the next, fast as the day’s sun that arced across the sky. They had been too great and too few to last, and they had never involved themselves in the affairs of men.
Linn did not know if the stories were true. None lived who had ever seen a drake. None lived who remembered one who had. But as she heard the sound the Sages’ final clash made, Linn believed that things like that had lived. She felt foolish for ever doubting it.
And then the world went white. White that shifted to black. Linn felt the cold ground beneath her. The roaring went away, to be replaced by the howl of the eastern wind and the long, low complaints of the frozen sea. She tried to calm herself as she blinked. She saw her hands first, planted beneath her. She saw the ice between her fingers, cracked but no longer cracking.
When she looked up, she expected to see an explosion of power that would break the land into a thousand pieces, and her into a thousand thousand. Instead, she saw Queen Elanil standing just a few strides ahead of Baas, shoulders heaving. Her hands hung at her sides, trailing white smoke. Across from her, the Eastern Dark stood with one hand at his side, the other extended, palm open and fingers curled, stretching out over the breach.
The hand was black. Not burned, nor seeming dyed in ink. It was a hand made of night, and it reminded Linn of the Shadow girl with violet eyes. It thrummed and blurred, shaking all the way up to the shoulder, and Linn saw that the Sage’s face was tight with what seemed to be pain.
“He absorbed the blast,” Misha breathed from behind. Linn looked to her, and saw her helping Jenk to rise. They looked at the Eastern Dark like he was something out of legend.
Linn hadn’t seen him do it, but as she looked back at the dark Sage, she thought Misha must be right. The blackness around his hand began to throb, the light around his entire form contorting sharply and sickly. He grimaced and bared his teeth, though Linn thought he looked to be fighting some private battle.
“There is some left of you, after all,” the queen breathed as she regarded her adversary.
Elanil tried to raise her palms toward him once more, but the Eastern Dark’s other hand shot up and ignited molten red. He sent a jet of shadowfire forward that did not seem to burn so much as push. It struck the Frostfire Sage hard enough for her to make a harsh gasping sound as she landed hard, the back of her head cracking off the hard ice. She went tumbling, and Linn ran to her.
The queen twitched, her eyes looking up into the stormy skies. The ice began to turn red beneath her, her hair staining and going dark. Linn thought her s
urely dead, but those golden eyes twitched toward her as she stood over her. She reached one quivering hand, the silver half glove falling away to strike the ice like a bell, and Linn bent to gather her up.
She lifted her with ease, though her chest and side rebelled at the effort, and Linn was reminded how small and slender the queen truly was. She felt like a child in her arms, and Linn cradled her. Jenk sheathed his Everwood sword and moved over to take the queen from Linn as she swept her gaze across the ice, searching for her discarded silver bow.
Much good it would do them.
The land was broken. But then, it should not have been still for so long.
The waves had shattered for a league all around, coming down like broken mountains. Tumbles of jagged stones of ice littered the plains, and the salt had been swept away, making the land translucent. The sky had gone purple in the dying of the sun and the presence of the storm clouds, and the effect made the frozen lands look like a portal to another world, all dark blue and black. There was a groaning sound as the plates and plateaus of ice and water moved beneath them, and Linn thought it would be a long time before it ceased.
Linn looked to the trench. There, the living ocean had quelled its fury, sinking back down into depths that yearned to see the sun once more, to have ships part its living waves and to reflect images of the white wings of the gulls wheeling overhead.
“He is gone, Elanil.”
The Eastern Dark’s voice quivered. It had a strange echo, and as he spoke, Linn saw the darkness around his right arm throbbing.
“The man you love is not coming back.”
He looked beyond them—past Baas, Linn, the Embers and the hound, and Queen Elanil herself. His eyes—one purple fire and the other orange and red—found the crystal palace. Linn followed his gaze.
The palace had a red tint to it in the strange light of dusk. It reminded her of blood. On its walls, she could see glinting spears, and in the gaps between the parapets made of Nevermelt, she saw caches of fire burning. Tundra and Gwenithil must be back by now. They would have mustered the defenses alongside Captain Fennick, who would have pulled his reserves from the mountain’s heart.
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